BY: Dr. Amanda Murjan | October 21, 2025
My fellowship project explores the White Garment Church, an African (mainly Nigerian) Independent Church. This was an unplanned collaboration; the original proposal aimed to work with the police. Studying African Indigenous Christianity, worldviews, and cosmologies is entirely new territory for me, and I have been thoroughly captivated. The experience also serves as a gentle and poignant reminder of how much I don’t—and may never—know about this world.
I want to describe it as a place of intellectual and spiritual humility, yet the term ‘humility’ is too often misused. I don’t wish to link the experience to a sense of personal insignificance or diminishment, because it is something entirely different. It involves growth and expansion in the face of the unknown. It is an acknowledgement that the world will always be more mysterious than fully understood, more uncertain than clear.
My contacts within the White Garment Church are a married couple, Paul and Janet Soile. Paul is the secretary of the UK Council for African and Caribbean Churches and serves as the Chief Evangelist for the White Garment Church, while Janet is an elder in the Church.
I knew nothing about the Church when Paul first approached me in October 2024. A couple of weeks after our initial emails, I asked if I could visit and, if possible, attend one of their services. I wanted us to get a better sense of each other, and they especially needed an opportunity to gauge their trust in me as a non-Black person of Italian/Syrian heritage who would ask them deeply personal questions about their faith and experiences with racism. In November 2024, I attended two services over a weekend, each lasting between five and six hours. At Paul and Janet’s invitation, I fully participated in both. It was a moving experience.
One striking feature of the services was a strong sense of familial dynamics. People gathered for services like a family after a long absence, greeting each other with deep affection. The elders acted as grandparents to all, and everyone treated the children as their own. What set this African Indigenous Christian gathering apart from my experiences of Anglican, Catholic, and Pentecostal expressions of Christianity in the UK was its strong collective cultural identity of ‘family.’
Simply being together was a vital part of the worship experience. People started arriving nearly an hour before the service for drinks and biscuits, and they stayed long after it had ended to enjoy a hot meal. Their interactions were tender and open. There was a gentle strength and power in their solidarity. The liturgy and ceremony were not separate from their unity; one was an expression of the other.
Their kindness and openness remind me that I know little of this rich world and its people. According to positive psychology, all human experience is an opportunity to grow in complexity and thereby to become a more expansive human being. Thanks to their generosity, I have grown in complexity.
In this interdisciplinary field of science-engaged theology, one aspect of our practice that we may have overlooked is the role of mystery – embracing the vast unknown, our human limitations, and their fundamental part in the creative process. While we are making significant progress in developing new ways of thinking about theology and psychology – and I genuinely believe we are – I also recognise that there will always be more to learn.
The picture will always be broader and deeper than it seems because, in the words of Karl Rahner, perhaps even when we are dealing with what is in hand’s reach, comprehensible and amenable to a conceptual framework, we are always confronted with the holy mystery, for we are ourselves a very being of the holy mystery.[1] What does it mean for the creative pursuit of a science-engaged theology if grace is not the beginning of the elimination of mystery but the radical possibility of the absolute proximity of the mystery?
In The Symposium, Plato describes true artists as those who give birth to a new reality. The sense of the creative process as a kind of birth will, I am sure, be familiar to us all. In his seminal work, The Courage to Create, psychoanalyst Rollo May depicts the creative act as an “encounter” shaped more by absorption than by voluntary effort, involving a particular kind of engagement with the world.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist behind the concept of Flow, would likely agree. But what might we be encountering? May suggests the creative act involves an encounter with more than a subjective projection. It is an encounter with and absorption in an inescapable mystery. It is “a waiting for the birthing process to begin to move in its own organic time.” Albert Einstein expressed this idea when he asked, “Why is it I get my best ideas in the morning when I’m shaving?”
Theologians and scientists share the experience of mystery in the creative act. How we interpret it may vary, but it appears to highlight the limitations of human agency — our ability to shape the world through will or force. Perhaps the interdisciplinary space of science-engaged theology is a domain where we can find room for such discussions. A space open to embracing the expansive wisdom stemming from the Taoist principle of “effortless effort,” which resonates so strongly with Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, where peak performance occurs in a transcendent state of self-forgetting. A place welcoming the creativity that emerges from a deep awareness that our progress as academics should continually remind us of how little we know about the world. To hold the ever-curious wonder of the ‘beginner's mind’ of the Zen Buddhists.
Perhaps science-engaged theology’s keen awareness of its reliance on the wisdom of colleagues beyond its disciplinary borders and its openness to the unknown, where disciplinary boundaries stimulate creative thought rather than hinder it, are the very requirements for the courage, wonder, and compassion needed to advance our understanding of human flourishing within the essential mystery of our personhood.
[1] Karl Rahner, “The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology” in Theological Investigations, Volume IV, Trans. by Kevin Smyth (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966), p. 54.
