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Patrick Brittenden, "Algerian and Christian: Christian Theological Formation, Identity and Mission in Contemporary Algeria" (Regnum Books, 2025)
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A
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B
Hello, I'm Dave Broczek, one of the hosts of New Books in World Christianity. In this episode, I'm talking with Dr. Patrick Brittenden about his book Algerian and Christian Theological Formation, Identity and Mission in Contemporary Algeria. It's published by Bregden Books International in 2025 and Regnum is the imprint of the Oxford center for Mission Studies. The book is the fruit of his doctoral dissertation at Regent Park College, Oxford, written and edited now for a wider readership than just the Academy. Dr. Brittenden is a teacher in a range of seminaries and is based in Cambridge in the uk, where he directs the Hikma Partnership. I'm very pleased to talk with you today, Pat. Thanks for coming on the podcast to talk about your book. Welcome to New Books Network.
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C
Thank you very much, Dave. It's great to be with you.
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B
Well, we do want to know what's in the book, but first of all, we want to know about you. You describe yourself as a, quote, an adopted son of Algeria. That's intriguing. Please, just go ahead, tell us about yourself. What led to the writing of this book? It's all yours.
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C
Thanks, Dave. Yeah. My sort of amusing quip when I introduce myself is to say that I was made in New Zealand, I was delivered in England, and I was assembled in Alger area. And then. And then I was upgraded through a lifelong union with a Scot. So my wife Kitty is Scottish. So all that to say that I'm a tck, if you're not familiar with that term, that's like a missionary kid. So my parents were missionaries. I'm originally from New Zealand. So they left New Zealand in the very early 1970s and I was a bit of a surprise. They hadn't planned for me to come along. I was. I'm the fourth child. And on their route to North Africa, they were really heading for Algeria, but didn't have a kind of clear roadmap to get there. And so they stopped off in the uk. My father at the time was going to be doing some study with Jim Packer, who was at Trinity Bristol at the time, and that plan didn't quite work out. So he ended up doing a curacy in an Anglican church there for about 18 months. So I was born there. And then his very good friend, Bishop Derek Eaton, who was the vicar of St. George's Church in Tunis, had a period of interregnum when he was going to be away, and an opening came up to go to Tunisia. So we spent a year there. And then finally the opening came up for him to take on the role as vicar of Holy Trinity church, Algiers, in 1974. So basically I grew up in Algeria. And yes, in the book I describe myself as an adopted son of Algeria because that's really part of my, my identity. I'm not Algerian and I can't claim that, but I guess growing up in Algeria very much had a big impact on my life. And, and, and probably the first church that I knew was, was this young Algerian church. And so I kind of grew up on the shoulders of some of these pioneering believers in the late 1970s and early 80s, a very fledgling small movement. But that was really that. That had a big impact on me and it, it also shaped my choice of what to study at university. I chose to study Arabic and Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, did my undergrad at Durham University in the uk in the Northeast. And that's where I met my wife. And then we were Center's mission partners with what used to be called Arab World Ministries, now part of Pioneers, a kind of mission family committed to church planting across the world. But Arab World Ministries was obviously focused on, well, originally North Africa and then the Middle east and the Arabian Peninsula. And we spent six years in Tunisia and then I had a year out and we went back to New Zealand, where for the first Time I studied theology formally, and then our journey carried on, not based back in North Africa, but based in the uk, but still working quite closely with the North African church. So that's kind of my. I guess, the journey for me. It's quite a personal book, and the reason for doing the doctoral study was very much linked to my own story. And this church, which had an impact on me and which subsequently grew quite rapidly into quite a significant movement through the late 1990s and early noughties. And that's really what I chart, I guess, in some ways, in the book.
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B
Yeah. It's intriguing to me that you're saying that your early formation as a Christian believer took place in North Africa, really, with the churches there. Many times people from outside are shaped outside and then they go to another culture. But you're part of that culture, is what I'm hearing.
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C
Yeah, I guess I'm a hybrid, you'd say. I say sometimes people use that word negatively, I see as a very positive thing. Later on, we can talk about this concept of liminality, but I do find myself to be somebody who. Who is kind of like, influenced by different cultures. So when people would ask me the question, where are you from? I would say, I'm from New Zealand. But that was a kind of funny answer given that I had never lived for any length of time in New Zealand, so it was part of my heritage. But. So I couldn't say I was Algerian. I didn't want to say I was English, although I went to boarding school in England, and that's where I was educated and where I ended up living. And I'm happy with the title British, but I would never describe myself as being English.
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B
So that gives you a flavor of.
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C
The kind of mishmash. But, you know, I'm comfortable with that now. It's not something that's awkward for me. It's something that just is part of my story.
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B
Yes. Well, it feels like you can describe yourself as both an insider and an outsider, which gives you a rather unique perspective.
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C
Yeah, that's right. And I think that's how Algerians have described me. They, you know, when I say that I'm, you know, an outsider, they don't like me saying that. They say, no, no, you're kind of one of us. But then it's. It's clear that I'm not really totally one of them in. In many senses. So I. I'm. I'm happy to occupy this kind of. Yeah, this hybrid kind of insider, outsider combination, I guess. Yeah. And it Helps that, you know, when you know the language and you're familiar with nuances of the culture and you know all these kind of things. All of that gives you, I guess, the ability to be understood more quickly and for people to be open with you, I think, as well, and not feel like, oh, how do I explain this to this outside or foreigner who may not understand the nuances. I guess you can, you can go a lot further and a lot deeper more quickly when people feel like, oh, yeah, you get, you get these, these issues. You know, you live through certain periods of our recent history, so you understand those issues. So that helps.
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B
Well, I'm a total outsider myself when it comes to North Africa, not been there. And I would say that reading your book, you talked about explaining it to others, and it was very helpful to me. I felt you explained and clarified a whole range of things. In fact, let's get into the content of the book. You know, the title says Algerian and Christian. Speaking of hybridity, many people don't put those two words together. Maybe you could unpack that a little bit for us.
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C
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's very deliberate, the title. You know, the book is actually about theological formation, theological formation in the context of a church from a Muslim background, a Muslim heritage church. Mythologists and historians of world Christianity like to use acronyms. We'll try and keep away from those. But, you know, sometimes you'll have heard the term mbb, which stands for Muslim Background Believer, or bmb, Believer of Muslim Background. But essentially we're talking about a church that is a convert church that is made up of converts from Islam. And this is part of a movement that's happening all over the majority Muslim world very substantially and numerically, significantly since roughly the late 1970s. We could go back as far as the Iranian Islamic revolution. And from that point on, there's been significant movements in a number of different places. And Algeria is one of those. It's widely recognized. It's not only reported by people who are interested in Christian mission, but it's reported by social scientists and anthropologists, by Muslims, by secularists, by all kinds of people. So it's a well recognized phenomenon. And my book essentially was the kind of pursuit for a framework or an approach to theological formation which would suit this kind of growing, rapidly growing church which was struggling to find ways of training its own leaders, which would fit with the context and be faithful theologically and consistent with the movement of the world church, and consistent with biblical values, but also really relevant to the context of Algeria. So there were Various kind of reasons why I was drawn into that, because I had been involved in teaching there myself. So the book is really the pursuit of that question. But as I began to study it, I realized that it wasn't just going to be a book about theological formation and if you like pedagogy and pedagogical questions, educational questions. But actually it ended up having to be quite kind of. Well, I had to really dive into culture. And so there were these three lenses that I ended up kind of approaching. The question with which the first lens was ethnographic was really to do with the kind of context in which the Algerian church is growing, which is primarily, although not exclusively, amongst Kabyls. So these are people sometimes described as Berbers. And although that word comes from the word barbarian, which is quite a negative word, actually, it's been self appropriated by the Kabils. And there are other terms that you can find like Amazigh and Tamazir. These are just words to describe the original inhabitants of North Africa before the arrival of the Arab Islamic armies in the sort of late 7th, 8th centuries, Etc. So these are people sometimes described by church historians as Libyans, when you're thinking about the division of the Roman Empire, and it was sometimes described in that way, or sometimes you'll see them described as Numidians, but essentially they're the original kind of inhabitants of North Africa. So one lens was looking at them, another lens was looking at the nature of Islam in Algeria, and then the third lens was looking at state education. And so that was kind of three cycles that I ended up going through. And then the thing that emerged was this concept of liminality which we might want to explore later on. And just the recognition that Algerian Christian identity was a sort of both, and in many ways, like Christian discipleship is. We can unpack that if you want later on. So liminality became a very important concept. And then what changed in the book is that I decided to put that chapter on liminality right towards the beginning. It's chapter two, after the introduction and the sort of presentation of some of the key findings and some of the important quotations that I thought readers might be interested in reading. I wrote this chapter on liminality to explain that concept because it became such an important concept as I was developing. What eventually chapter six was a kind of framework for how I was encouraging Algerians to think about theological formation. And then I finished with a chapter on Augustine, St. Augustine. He's known by historians and others as St. Augustine of Hippo. But I like to call him St. Augustine of Annaba because Annaba is the modern day name for the city of Hippo. So right there in eastern Algeria. And of course, he was original to that area. His father was Roman, but his mother Monica was Berber. So she was Berber. So Augustine himself was, you know, a hybrid. He was part Roman and part Berber. And again, we can come back to that later and you'll know. And I'm sure your listeners listening to this podcast will appreciate how significant an impact Augustine had. So my project wasn't about Augustine, but I ended up going to him and he was sort of like hovering over the project the whole way along and he's still there kind of overseeing. And I just think, you know, there's so much in his writing and in his ministry that the contemporary church of Algeria has yet to really properly plumb the depths of. And so my last chapter was just kind of hopefully going to introduce him and his significance, this whole question of how we do theological formation. So there's a bit of a long answer there, Dave.
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B
That was a good answer. Just to clarify, when you're talking about this particular church and the people you interviewed and so on, it's a more recent development, you're not talking about the kind of colonial church at the French Broad and so on. This would be different, right?
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C
Yeah, yeah, thanks for asking that. That's a really important clarification. Absolutely. This is a completely indigenous church, is not the church of the French colonials. Of course, the, the fabric of the, the legal status of the church in Algeria. And by the way, you know, your listeners might not be aware of this, that there are very few countries, majority Muslim countries in the world, where a convert church has a legal status. And in Algeria it has one. But it's, it's a fragile status according to association law. And the reason it was able to develop in the post independence context of Algeria was because there had been a colonial church that was set up by French or Italians or other European colonials and a very small number of converts, not very, very big in the pre independence period. So there were legal statutes that enabled the church. And then what happened was that post independence, at various stages, the Algerians began to kind of contextualize that and the government eventually forced them, said, look, if you want this, you know, to be a proper Algerian church, you have to register it. It has to be 100% self governed, self financed, and, and yeah, very much like the Three Self Church of China, if we're familiar with that. And so that's the direction they took. So there is a legal statute, it's called the epa, the Iglis Protestant Dalgierie, the Algerian Protestant Church of the Protestant Church of Algeria. And yeah, there are arguments for and against whether it's helpful to be registered with them. But there are many, many churches that are not registered officially with that body because they don't want government interference. They want to be able to operate and do things without being watched. And, you know, there's good reasons for that. But essentially there is a legal body which recognizes this indigenous 100% convert church. So we're not talking about Europeans or other foreigners, we're talking about indigenous Algerians.
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B
So you did survey research and interviews from a number of people from this particular church. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about your research and what you were trying to find out from them.
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C
Yeah, so there were two main phases of my research. The first phase was, as you say, a survey about 100, and it was exactly 102 believers. And actually this. It was just something providential that happened. As I, you know, started my PhD project, I was kind of wrestling with how I would get a broad enough perspective of what was going on in the country. And providentially, I was approached by an organization that were working closely with the Protestant Church of Algeria, who wanted a big piece of research conducted to look at the state of theological training in the country. So what kind of. Were there any schools? Were there any programs? What kind of programs? You know, very broadly, how do people grow in Christ? How are they formed? From the very first steps of discipleship through to more advanced training across the different churches. And so I worked with an Algerian pastor and I kind of designed the project and oversaw the whole thing and conducted a number of the interviews myself. We did a lot of focus groups, we did questionnaires, and we ended up engaging just over 100, you know, men and women leaders and people within schools or small churches, house churches. And that gave us a kind of first layer of kind of data which revealed, I mean, a whole kind of series of things that the church was looking for. They were looking for kind of training that was more contextualized. They were looking for training for practical areas of ministry. They were looking for, ideally, the opportunity to have Algerian teachers who could teach theology and Christian theological education at higher levels because they had observed over a number of years that gifted leaders would leave to go and study in Europe or in the US and in more than half the cases would never come home. This is quite a well known phenomenon and often for very Understandable reasons. If you go for three or four years to do higher level training and your family is somewhere and your kids get involved in education. And typically these people were very gifted. They were able, they were intelligent. And of course they'd get very quickly swept up by these churches in Europe who wanted people who understood about Islam and could help them with pastoring converts from Islam in European or in US cities. But the net result is that gifted leaders would leave the country and not return. And so there was this kind of recognition of this and a desire to say, okay, we have to do something about this issue of the exit of gifted leaders. So, yeah, so all of those were kind of findings. There were other findings. I kind of briefly list them in the book there in the first chapter. And then the second phase was then to come back and do much more in depth interviews. I interviewed 26 people, all of whom were, most of whom were leaders, a few students in courses. And this was a kind of semi structured, qualitative interview. So I had key themes that I was exploring, but I just kind of tried to see where the conversation would go. And yeah, I was using a kind of an adapted version of grounded theory, which is, rather than trying to impose a kind of framework onto what I thought was going on, I tried to listen and discern and then come back and explore those issues more fully. And I guess what you have in the book is the result of that whole process as well as with the book is subsequent reflection. So I tried to simplify how I was presenting the data and some of the book is updated to reflect the current situation of the church in Algeria, which is a lot more difficult than it was when I first conducted my research. There's a lot more hostility from the current regime.
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B
So, yeah, yeah, you spoke about the church being fragile now you just mentioned hostility. I believe I read about a certain number of churches having been closed actually the last five, six years and so on. So what is the state of the church now?
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C
Well, it's. How would I describe it? It's under a lot of pressure from a regime at the moment that for a variety of different reasons I think would like it not to exist and would like to see it disappear now, that's always been the case. I think the presence of a Muslim background church is something that, whilst there are some Algerians, secular or even Muslim Algerians, who would celebrate the genuine freedom of religious belief. And if you want to, we can talk a little bit more about some of the distinctives, if you like, of the tensions between Berbers and Arabs within the makeup of Algeria. So there are Berber, Kabil, Muslims who like the fact that there is a church there because it signals that the essence of what it is to be Algerian isn't limited to just being Muslim and just being Arab. And that's a key point. But the current regime, I mean, there's lots of different reasons for why it might be the case. But the bottom line is there's been a lot more. In the last seven years, there's been a lot more pressure on churches. In the book, I think when I published it, I said 52 or 51 churches had been forcibly closed. Now that figure is even higher. In the latest conversation I've had with leaders in Algeria, they say there's only three or four churches that are still properly physically open. So worshiping with public services, where people can come off the street. I mean, of course, there's many other churches that are meeting house churches in private all over the country, somewhat underground. But currently there's a lot of pressure, and it's to do with the application of a law which was introduced in 2006 that banned any unregistered Christian meetings and that banned the distribution of scriptures, Christian literature or Bibles. And it was a very poorly written piece of legislation which really provided opportunity for people who had a grudge against Christians, whether it's, you know, neighbors or work colleagues or indeed magistrates or people within the legal establishment, made it quite easy for them to convict people. But because Algeria does have due process in law, it also meant that not that many people were in prison. There were some, but not that many, because there were so many holes both in the legislation and of course, in the, you know, in the legal process. But anyway, the bottom line is that this church. There's been a lot of pressure on churches to close. And that's. That's really been a shock. It shouldn't have been a shock to the church because they knew this could happen at any point, but it has been, and it's tested their kind of understanding of what it means to meet with others. What church, the definition of church not being necessarily meeting in buildings, but in fellowships, how discipleship occurs. All of these things are being tested now in this new era. So, yeah, it's an era of. I mean, some people use the word persecution and it is, but it's not as bad as it is in some countries, but it's still very, very difficult.
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B
That's sobering. And it's interesting in the light of what I've been reading, that in spite of that, it seems that you see these churches actually have a role or a potential role of shaping Algerian ness. And you use a French word for that and you believe that they could actually have a positive influence in the country.
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C
Absolutely, yes, that's exactly right. I think that what, the existence of a church which is totally indigenous and 100% Algerian has the potential to address kind of anomalies and contradictions that are there in the, the so called makeup of what, what real Algeria or what real Algerians are. So to understand what we mean by that kind of, that makeup, we have to go back to the kind of founding of, of the, the, you know, the modern country about Algeria. And it was influenced by 20th century. We call them Salafi. The, the Salafi were basically a reform movement. So it comes the, from, from the Arabic word to reform. Sometimes that word is used synonymously with militants or fundamentalists or just, you know, people who are, you know, kind of terrorists. And, and that's a bit clumsy. I mean really it's, it's, it's to do with people who are trying to reform Islam and bring it back to like, like kind of fundamentalist, evangelical Christians might say we want to go back scriptures. So Salafists, a movement trying to do the same thing. I mean, that's a gross simplification. But there was a character, Abdul Hamid IBN Badis, who is a key figure who really developed this kind of idea that was influenced itself by a colonial ethnography of Algeria that tried to create a kind of very clear separation between Arabs and Berbers. So the colonials tried to present Kabyls or Berbers as being somehow more European and therefore more easily convertible to Christianity. Like noble savages, inverted commas or something like that. And of course, Ibn Bardis and the other people who are part of this movement, the Ulema movement, which is a movement for kind of, it was part of the independence movement to develop, you know, autonomy. And in, in that process they came up with this kind of formula for what authentic Algerian ness was. And the formula is, is basically in Arabic the phrase is al jazair watanuna Islam, dinuna wal arabi alu ratuna. So our nation is Algeria, our religion is Islam and our language is Arabic. And so you had this kind of irreducible essence of what it meant to be Algeria. Now the problem was there were a number of problems with that. Number one, it's simply not true because Algeria's history is much more multilingual than that. You know, Arab Arabic language only arrives in the late 7th century. What about what's happening before? So to do that, they had to kind of erase and kind of the whole history of Algeria and disregard what came before Islam. So it's a kind of triumphalist, kind of revisionist history of Algeria that would define it in this way. Of course, they were right to correct this kind of French ethnography, which created a sort of very artificial separation. Actually, Algeria's history was a lot more mixed. So Berbers did convert to Islam, but the Islam that developed wasn't necessarily like an Eastern Islam that was coming out of the Arabian Peninsula. And yes, they did Arabis and they learned Arabic, but they didn't stop speaking their mother tongue. And so the whole kind of independence process, you know, forced this kind of particular approach to what it means to be a modern nation state. And altura was defined in this irreducible way. So really, I guess what I'm doing in this book is saying the existence of the church is one authentic Algerian entity within the society. That's revealing an issue which is much wider than that. So there are lots of Algerians who are not Christians, and they could be Muslims, they could be secularists, they could be atheists who say, actually, we're not happy with that definition. And so the Berber movement, the movement to kind of recognize and revive the significance of Berber languages and Berber history, is part of the story, if you like, in the background of the evolution of this indigenous Algerian church. So I guess, yeah, you hit it on the head with your question. I'm saying that the church can have a role in bringing reconciliation between Arabs and Berbers if it avoids being identified only with a separatist Berber autonomy movement. And this, by the way, is an issue which goes right back to the history of Algeria. Right back to. And we can come to this later, if you're interested, to the Donatist affair. And in the context of Donatism, which was a kind of an indigenous puritanical movement which was local to the region, they went astray for a variety of reasons. But one of the reasons is because they identified with a circumcision, you know, this kind of radical, nationalist, anti Roman, anti imperial movement. And I think there's a temptation for the same thing to happen today where people get attracted to the church because they hate Arabs and they. And they. And they're really unhappy about these kind of minimization of Berber history and language and culture. But what I noticed in my research is that in every church I went to, in the conversations I had, this is not what I discovered. I discovered that, you know, when people came with that kind of intention, very quickly the church would realize it and they would say, we're one body in Christ. Christ reconciles those who are lost, reconciles them to God, reconciles them to each other. So at the point when you're comfortable praying in Arabic and singing in Arabic, and when we no longer hear this language, we'll know that God has begun to heal your heart and that your conversion is real. And so the church has this role to kind of, you know, say, yes, you know, we, we do recognize our Berber history. We're going to celebrate it, and in the church, we're going to have all aspects of what it, what, what authentic Algerian ness really looks like. So that means Berber languages, Arabic, it even means French, you know, the language of the, the colonizer, which they'll happily use because it's still an active language in the educational sector. Right. So, yeah, those are just some, some examples of how I see that playing out in the, in the kind of ministry and life of the church, if they consciously acknowledge it.
- [33:15]
B
Wow. Hearing you, it's like you're seeing a threshold of opportunity here. Well, actually, I think the word you used, and you've referred to it in our conversation already, maybe we should really get into that a bit. It's the keyword liminality. I mean, you speak of the liminal journey of the Algerian church. Liminality as a lens for theological formation. You distinguish between liberated and liberating theology. Well, what do you mean by this? Why is this concept so important?
- [33:51]
C
Yeah, well, yeah, you're very much at the heart of the book here. So, yeah, as you say, just a definition for your listeners. I mean, the term is used a lot in anthropology and sociology and it's become a bit of a buzzword and a buzz term. And there's a danger with that, that it ends up being. It means everything to everyone and therefore nothing to anyone. But the word comes from the Latin limen, which is the word for threshold. So it's the idea of, if you think about a threshold on a house between the outside and the inside, it's this kind of bit that's both in and out. It's this kind of in between space. And so the concept was developed in modern anthropology. The, the scholar that's really recognized as a kind of father figure in this concept was a guy called Arnold Van Genep, who was a French born German anthropologist. And interestingly, he did some of his early research. He was functioning in the 19th century at the time when Emil Durkheim, who is considered the father of modern sociology, was operating in France. Big, big figure. And they didn't agree. They had a very different view of what sociology was. And I think it's not wrong to say that probably Vanguepes, in the end, by the late 20th century, probably won the argument, although not in his lifetime. In his lifetime. His views and the way he understood this concept of liminality wasn't necessarily accepted, but it was taken up in the late 20th century by a British anthropologist called Harold Turner. And he popularized it in work that he did, like vanguennep, with tribal societies. So interestingly, Van Genep did his first research right at the turn of the century, beginning of the 20th century, end of the 19th century, amongst Kabils Berbers in Algeria. Now, he wasn't thinking theologically, obviously, in any way. He was looking at rites of passage within tribal societies. And so he developed this idea that there are these three stages. When you're looking at someone going from being, let's say, a child into being an adult or a full active member of a tribe. You have this period where they kind of disappear from being a child. They go into this kind of. He called it the limen, or the kind of middle stage where they were still a child, but somehow they were in transition. And then eventually they would be reintegrated back into mainstream society. And in that period, however long it lasted, they would have opportunities to reflect. Who am I? Who am I becoming? I'm no longer the old self, but I'm still the old self in some ways, but not in other ways. And I'm becoming this new self. And when I'm reintegrated, how will I be different? And of course, how will society see me differently? So you have this kind of, I guess, transitional period.
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B
Now.
- [36:50]
C
What I began to see was that this, this concept works in a whole range of contexts. Let's be honest. I. I felt that it was. And. And I'm not, you know, this isn't original to me. Carl Barth, in his Church Dogmatics, you know, the, The Swiss theologian, he wrote about discipleship as being liminal. And it makes sense, you know, if you think, you know, the sort of now and not, not yet, the, you know, this, this whole dimension of who we are as believers, you know, we are still part of the old self. We still struggle with sin, and yet, you know, we're pilgrims of this, you know, new identity moving towards heaven. So we, you know, we're indigenous to our context and we have the old life but we're on this kind of journey. So Christian discipleship is somehow liminal. And I began to see this concept as being really important, especially when charting the movement that Muslims have going from a Muslim family, Muslim culture, with all the support and what that means to encountering Christ and going through that period of transformation and then reintegrating back into either Muslim society or indeed this new Christian kind of context. And the reality is that that experience can be both positive and negative. So I looked at what I call dehumanizing liminality or destructive liminality, but also the possibility of liberating, as you say, liberating liminality. And really the difference between one and the other involves a whole number of different factors. But what I was trying to do was help readers understand the journey that Muslims have. Because the assumption is that when I come to Christ and I leave my mother and my father, as Jesus teaches us in the New Testament, that somehow I'll be received with these new mothers and fathers. Of course, the reality, sadly, is often not that great. And so you have a lot of Muslims who experience levels of rejection or they become second class citizens in traditional Christian churches. There are limitations to whether they can become leaders. Historically, Muslims have had to change their names to have less Muslim names. So you can't be called Ali or Muhammad or Latifah. You've got to take on some or inversed commas, Christian name. That's much less common now. But the experience therefore was difficult in that sense to integrate into this new Christian family. But also, of course, having then professed faith openly in Christ, there's rejection from your old Muslim family because you're a traitor, you're a renegade. You've disowned your family and your culture because religion, Islam isn't just a religion. It's not just a faith. It's a whole system, it's a whole worldview. It's law, it's culture, it's family. And those things are meshed together. So it's not that religion is part of your life, religion is your whole life. And so if you're a Muslim and you encounter Christ, then it becomes very difficult. And so a lot of believers of Muslim background or Christians of Muslim heritage struggle with what I call a kind of destructive or harmful liminality. And what I did with my research is, you know, I guess I encountered situations where that was the case, but I also encountered many, many situations where that wasn't the case. And so that's how this notion of liberated and liberating Liminality emerged.
- [40:21]
B
And you're writing about theological formation, leadership formation, Christian formation in this kind of in between state. You speak of liminal pedagogy then. So maybe you can segue into what does then theological formation look like? I'm asking because one of the things I read in the book was, was that Christian believers who have a Muslim heritage there in Algeria, in many ways have more things in common with their own cultural context than they do with the Western Christian church. Obviously they share a faith, but culturally, in other ways they don't. So what does liminal pedagogy that you're advocating there in Algeria and perhaps beyond, what does that look like?
- [41:24]
C
Yeah, I mean, I tried to simplify it by saying in the end, what it looks like is a process that engages with four main kind of phases. And I talked about it as the importance of context. So naming the context, understanding the context. So it's a profoundly contextual theology. And I know here we're in danger of perhaps getting worried about are you starting with context or are you starting with revealed Scripture? We can come back and you can ask me about that later if you want. But context and naming, whether it's a topic within the theological encyclopedia, whether it's a topic that's related to biblical theology, or whether it's a practical topic, understanding how do we know about this and how do we approach this particular question or issue from the context? And I make the case that this isn't about having a really good anthropology, although that's important. We need to interpret the culture well, and we can talk about that as well. But it's actually a theological principle. It's a principle that's related to the Incarnation, that our faith in the Christian faith is always incarnational. Even our own understanding of the Scriptures comes because Jesus spoke in a language that people understood, the prophets spoke, and ultimately our revelation of who God is and what it means to be in Christ and what it means to be a community of Christ is absolutely linked to the Incarnation. So that context is the first thing. But then I say the other important step in the process is understanding identity. And I suppose if you can ask me, well, what's distinctive about your particular framework? And I would say it's this question of identity. It's not unique to me. But I'm saying that who we are in Christ is foundational, but also who I am in my family, I need to engage with that question. And so as I'm thinking about a particular topic or theme within the curriculum, I want to be thinking about how does it. How does this relate to my identity in Christ, my collective identity as a member of the. Of the church, local, and then how does it relate to my identity as a member of the, you know, worldwide church? How do those things clash with each other? Why do they clash? So again, I'll be going back to looking at context again and saying, okay, why is it my brother in the UK sees this differently? To me, have I missed something in the Scriptures or in my understanding of this theological concept? Or have they? And, you know, how can we be in dialogue? So I call that identity in dialogue. So we're trying to understand this issue, you know, as part of this sort of global hermeneutic, if I can use that term, this, you know, this way of understanding theology and the Scriptures and. But in conversation with other streams of the church. And then the third kind of dimension is what I call Bible story. It's really rooting anything in the context of the kind of redemptive historical narrative that the Scripture presents for us, that our understanding and our engagement with the question is not about just reading old texts, but this is a story that we're living out. So firstly, we have to really understand what was the story. So it has to be profoundly biblical. We have to really do our homework, our exegesis. We have to. And then, of course, we need to. To, you know, spend time applying that to our context. And, you know, if we've done that in a way which is, you know, in conversation with these other streams of the church, that will also enrich what we're doing. And then the final stage is, of course, mission. So it. It needs to result in obedience. And so, I mean, many aspects of the framework that I'm presenting are not original. You could say they're. They're sort of linked with the. With the kind of pastoral cycle. You know, if you're familiar with, you know, Laurie Greene's book let's Do Theology, or even Thomas Groome, who developed this kind of shared Christian practice model of theological formation. There are similarities with that. I also engaged with other scholars. So I guess you would say my approach is very. It's very much a contextual way of. Of doing theological formation. It's also unapologetically kind of has a high view of Scripture. So it's very, you know, we have to engage with Scriptures teaching, and it gives rise to mission. And it's also influenced, I think, by a kind of a praxis kind of approach to theological formation. By praxis, I just mean reflection, which gives Rise to action, which gives rise to reflection, which gives rise to action. And that process just keeps on going. And that obviously has a number of ancient roots, that approach to education. And then in the 20th century. It's certainly an idea that's behind the movement of liberation theology that we identify with people like Gustavo Gutierrez and others sort of taking the context seriously, reflecting on scripture in light of what's happening in the world, and then acting faithfully on that. So. Yeah, I don't know if that answers the question, Dave.
- [47:02]
B
Well, it does, and it erases all kinds of other interests, maybe in the listeners as well. All I can say is go ahead and get this book, Alturian and Christian. It's very readable. Could I say that, Pat? It really is. For a doctoral dissertation, I mentioned that you've kind of rewritten it and for a more general audience. You even put cartoons in. What was that all about?
- [47:26]
C
Yeah, well, I'm really glad you said that it's readable because I'm so aware when you're doing postgraduate study, you just get stuck. You do a lot of reading and you can end up using terms which just become so unrelatable. And even my mother recently said to me, she's very well read, my mother, she was very highly educated. And I'll tell you something funny, Dave. I, I wasn't growing up. I was. I, I didn't read a book until I, I didn't read a book cover to cover until I was 16. So I was, my parents didn't think, they definitely didn't think I'd get to university. And I, I was a very late developer and, and I think. Yeah, yeah, I, I'm, I'm so glad for, for my mother because she, she always says to me, make it relatable and, and make it understandable. She said to me recently, there's like five or six words in your book that. Can you tell me what they are? Yeah, cartoons. I, I put those cartoons in there. Jamal Alilat is the cartoonist and he's actually not an, he's not a Christian. So he, he's somebody who's. I said to you earlier that there are Algerians who are Muslim, but who are excited that there is an indigenous church that has the freedom to operate. And he's, he really believes in the freedom of speech. He's worked with a number of Algerian newspapers as a caricaturist, you know, a satirist, looking at cultural issues and political issues. And I just thought, you know what? I'm going to see how this goes. I'M going to send him my manuscript and say, I'd love to have some illustrations at the beginning of each chapter which pick up on some aspect of what I'm trying to get at in this book. And he went ahead and did. He said, I'd be very happy to do it. And I think he did an amazing job. They are in French, obviously. I had to translate them. So when the readers come to that, they'll hopefully be able to understand that. But. Yeah, I don't know if there was any particular ones that struck you, Dave, that you were talking about.
- [49:26]
B
Well, I'm looking at one right now where somebody's walking on a tightrope and said, this is what it's like being a Christian in Algeria. They engage a different part of my brain when I see something like that, but they're definitely related to what you're saying in the text. I enjoyed that.
- [49:44]
C
Do you want me to. Can I read you a quote from. From one of the. He's actually passed away now. He was an elder in a church in west Algeria, who I interviewed. And that cartoon that you're describing with the guy, this Christian, walking on a tightrope with his hand, one hand is held in his very devout Muslim brother's hand and the other hand is in the hand of a Christian. And he. There were some very powerful quotations. And I know when we talked the other day, you were, you know, encouraging me to. To think about maybe sharing one or two of those, which I think your. Your listeners would appreciate. Because I think more than anything I can say, and in fact, definitely better than I can say, it will illustrate this kind of liberating liminality that I'm talking about or the difference at the heart of my book between a destructive kind of hybridity or liminality and one that is, you know, really gonna not just liberate the person, just not just be liberating for them, but also be the means for them to liberate others. So one of the cartoons, one of the other cartoons that. That are in there has a quotation from a guy called Jean Amourouche. Jean Amourouche was a very gifted poet, writer who lived in the period before Algeria's independence. So he grew up in the early 20th century, and then he lived after the Algerian independence as well. And he was unusual in that his parents had converted to Roman Catholicism. So they were Algerian converts in a period when there weren't that many Algerian converts. I don't know in evangelical terms whether you would describe him as a born again Christian, probably not from what he writes, but he self identified as Christian and was happy with that self identification. And because he was very, very gifted writer in the French language, of course, he spoke Arabic and knew he spoke Kabil as well, so he had all the three main languages. But because he was a French writer writing about this whole kind of transformation that was going on at the time of the Algerian autonomy movement, independence movement, he was very well recognized in France and respected. And this is what he said. This is a quote which for me illustrates what I would call a destructive or a, a kind of hopeless kind of liminality. He, he wrote this around the time of the independence. I am a cultural hybrid. Hybrids are monsters, very interesting monsters, but monsters without a future. I therefore consider myself condemned by history. So I listened to that and my heart just kind of like, ah, you know, your heart breaks when you hear that. And then I'll read you the quote from this brother who I told you has passed away, who's an elder in the church. And I was like, wow, here is someone who's tackling with the same kind of issue, but it has the signs of hope kind of in what he's saying. And he's describing the same kind of tension that was behind the cartoon that you described. This person stuck on this tightrope. He said, I have two faces. It's like two rooms, one opposite the other, which can be opposed one to the other. I have this natural connection, brother with brother, whatever his nationality. But I have another brother who I need to recover. The presence of the one makes the other uncomfortable. As an Algerian, I walk on a very narrow rope and I don't want it to break. I want the connection to be between the big one and the small connection. Locally at present I'm concerned with a big connection with my wider family of Christ, but I have a problem with my local home connection in my kitchen. It's the connection with my fellow citizens. And yeah, I mean there's some other quotes that you know, if your listeners have time to look up, where he talks about theologizing on the street. He said, we need pavement street dwelling theologians who can be agents for liberating Algerians. And even if they don't come to Christ, the church has a role in giving them a different vision about what it means to be Algerian. And he said to me before saying that we can be Algerian and Christian, we have to win the battle of saying you can be Algerian and not be a Muslim.
- [54:19]
B
So yeah, well, I take it, I mean, the book has only been Out a few months now, so maybe it's a little early to ask about feedback. And yet, I assume even in your interviews and so on, you're talking about all these concepts. What kind of things are you hearing from your research subjects and the leaders and others that you're talking to about these concepts?
- [54:46]
C
Well, you're right. It is very early days. And one of the challenges I have is that my book is in English, right? That's my mother tongue, and that's the language I did my doctoral studies in and I've written in, which is helpful for a universal audience. But actually, the audience that is most concerned is the Algerian audience. And so the next language that we're thinking about translating this into is French. And I'll have a much better idea when it gets published in French because there'll be a, you know, a much bigger response because people will be able to access the ideas. However, already in, in English, there's been a, a positive response, but they're people that I know very well. So it, you know, it didn't surprise me that they have responded. I guess the, the signal to me that the issues that I'm dealing with are very real and raw and potentially very powerful was in the willingness of some of these Algerian leaders to go public and say, the way you've handled these issues in this book. One of them said to us, this was in a recent interview. I was just at a conference last month where we had a mini book launch for this book. And I was interviewed along with two other Algerian pastors, one of whom has written the forward in the book. And he said, when, when you. He was talking to me, while he was talking to the audience, he said, when Pat said that he was going to construct the project in the way it is, I thought, there's no way that this is going to be something that will be able to be read publicly, because to handle those subjects of identity in Christ, the nature of what it is to be an Algerian Christian in this context, with the sensitivities both culturally and politically, but do it with respect, do it with a genuine love for Algeria, all Algerians, is almost impossible. And I was really humbled and encouraged that by the end of that, he said, the book has achieved that. And so he was happy to put his name to it. But as I say, I think it won't be until it's translated into French and then hopefully Arabic and maybe even in Kabul as well, that we'll get a bigger, fuller response.
- [56:59]
B
May I ask, then the translation, publishing and so on. Are those kinds of things to go back to the organization that you lead? Is that what Hikma Partnership promotes? I didn't ask you much about that.
- [57:13]
C
But yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm glad you asked about that. Yeah, good. Great. Yeah, great question. The Hikma Partnership has only been around for three years. We're quite young. But yeah, absolutely. To put it really simply, the vision of the Hikma Partnership is to amplify the voice of believers of Muslim background. And that's through research and it's through pathways to publishing. So we have a partnership with Regnum, as you mentioned earlier, the publishing arm of the Oxford center for Mission Studies. But we have conversations with other publishers like Langham and William Carey and others who are really interested in these themes with Regnum. We have a series with them which is called Global Voices of a Muslim Background, or Global Voices from Muslim Background. And my book is the third in the series. We've got two more books that are about to come out in that series. And what we try to do there is provide opportunities for believers, Muslim background to be heard. So primarily them writing themselves or else in like, in my case, kind of amplifying their voices and reflecting their sort of thinking and insights.
- [58:19]
B
Yeah, well, very good. That. That helps me understand that better and our listeners as well. Part of my responsibility as a host is kind of keep my eye on the clock here.
- [58:30]
C
You.
- [58:30]
B
You had mentioned earlier about Augustine going way back in history, and perhaps he's not as prominent in the thinking, if I heard you correctly and read correctly in your book in the current church as well. But you're advocating they kind of go back and reinstall him as a resource or whatever. Maybe you could say a word about that.
- [58:51]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I think I was careful in the book. So in the book I basically wrote a new chapter in my. In my doctoral thesis. I just had like a. It was part of my conclusion. You know, you have further thoughts. And I kind of came back to Augustine, but I decided in the book to devote a chapter to it and to try and relate some of the ideas that I had developed in the book to the ministry and teaching of Augustine himself. And apart from some. Some concerns I had and I think are really issues that need to be looked at to do with how Augustine understood what real unity meant, which was at the heart of the Donatist split. And of course, far be it from me to criticize a giant like Augustine, but there were some issues there to do with his kind of unbreakable assumption that unity meant the unity of The Holy Roman Catholica. And that was an alliance to. That was the only real way to ensure unity. And that was, of course, a problem for the early church. But leaving that aside, I mean, there's just so many ways in which Augustine kind of models and demonstrates the ideas of kind of liberating liminality. So, you know, he's an amazing combination of, you know, someone who's deeply spiritual. You know, his approach to, you know, theology and theologizing roots itself in the heart. He's one of the first theologians who really kind of situates that the heart as a key place, you know, kind of for theologizing. So he's deeply spiritual, but he's also always thinking about the place of the Church in the world. So he's very faithful. I mean, scripturally, very, very faithful. Everything is rooted in Scripture. But he's also intelligently executing the kind of intellectuals that are around him and drawing from them. So it's, you know, it's a good example of this. And then, you know, he himself is a kind of liminal character. Like I said to you earlier, you know, his father was Roman, his education, he was so Latinized. I mean, this is. You could say it's part of the problem, but it's also what enabled his writing and his work to be. To spread as far and as wide as it did. And, you know, he's influenced evangelicals, Roman Catholics, you know, all. All streams of the church. And, you know, I said to someone recently, you know, that he was a pastor first and foremost. You know, he was counseling married couples. He was sorting out divisions in the church. But all this writing that we know him for, he did in his evenings and his weekends, it's kind of like, you know, this was on the side. But, yeah, I think. I think if I. If I To. To. To answer it really succinctly, I think Augustine, the reason I want the Algerians to go back and look at him is that he saw that theological formation was both formative about the transformation of heart and character and also critical. It was about engaging with being faithful to the Word, but also engaging kind of prophetically in the society in which we lived. So very much a kind of praxis model of theological formation and training. And, yeah, I mean, there's lots more I could say about him, but what I was doing was encouraging the church to say, listen, consider him, and get over the issue that for some Algerian, contemporary Algerian Christians, the issue is that he's identified only with the Roman Catholic tradition. And some of them have reservations about that.
- [62:38]
B
So, yeah, thank you. Clearly, we could talk much more about that. Maybe we'll kind of wrap things up a little bit with a note of hope that I read in the first part of the book that the hope is that one day the North African church will once again play the central role it held in the early days of Christianity. It sounds like you think that may be possible.
- [63:07]
C
I do. I really do. And my hope comes from the Algerian brothers and sisters. I know we haven't spoken in this interview about the Algerian Christian Institute, which is an emerging theological formation college in Algeria that started in 2013. So one of the happy, wonderful outworkings of the research that I did back in started in 2011 was recommendations for a model of training. And that college started properly in 2013. And they have gone on teaching in an unbroken fashion through the pandemic right till today. And they now have all but I think, two of us. There's two of us who are not Algerians who are still teaching in that institution. All the other teachers are Algerians. They've got three of them who are just embarking on doctoral studies. People thought this was not possible. One is just about, I think, in the next two weeks, going to defend his PhD. He's the principal of the college. And they are a generation, relatively young generation, who are really wrestling with these issues. They are engaging with Augustine and other early fathers of the early North African church, and they're very consciously aware of what the challenges are for Algerian Christians today. So I see in them a lot of hope for the future. There's courage, and most of all, there's faithfulness. So I am, I guess, optimistic for good reasons. Even though the situation is really, really tough.
- [64:43]
B
It's tough. Yeah. Okay. Well, Pat, thank you. Thank you so much for engaging in this conversation about your research and your book and your findings and what you're advocating. Before we wrap up, what are you working on now? I like to ask authors that question.
- [65:02]
C
Yeah. So we are working on a couple of things apart from that translation of this current book. We're just finishing off a book looking at marriage amongst believers of Muslim background. So in the Hikmah Partnership, one of the things we do is organize and facilitate research gatherings. And we focused on marriage and family issues, starting with marriage and then focusing on raising children. And so I'm just, with three other senior editors, finishing off editing a book which is contributions from 14 different contexts across the majority Muslim world of people looking at different challenges to finding a spouse. What happens when you come to Christ and you're married to a Muslim. How do you manage that situation? How do you handle polygamy? This is an issue which in West Africa is significant for those who are coming to faith from Muslim backgrounds. So someone has four wives. How do you handle that? So the pastoral and missiological kind of responses to some of these challenges. So really excited about that book. God willing, that'll be out at the start of January. If people are interested, they can go to the Hikmah website to find out more about that. And then we're also working, we're in the early stage stages of a book looking at parenting. So similar, similar kind of issues, but this time looking at the challenges of how you parent in different situations. So all that can be found out from just going to hikmapartnership.org is the website. If people are interested in that, they can find out more information there.
- [66:44]
B
Thank you. Good to know. I've been talking with Pat Brittenden about his book Algerian and Christian Theological Formation, Identity and Mission in Contemporary Algeria, Regnum Books, 2025. Pat, it's been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you very much for being on World New Books Network with me.
- [67:05]
C
Thank you, Dave. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you. Men need a store that has the right thing for their thing. Like a Kenneth Cole suit made with show flex fabric to keep them cool at their cousin in law's third wedding in the middle of July. Whatever the thing, Men's Wearhouse has the clothes for it. Love the way you look. Men's Wearhouse.