Deepening the faith

76. The Church in Africa, in order to evangelize, must begin "by being evangelized herself ... She needs to listen unceasingly to what she must believe, to her reasons for hoping, to the new commandment of love. She is the People of God immersed in the world, and often tempted by idols, and she always needs to hear the proclamation of the ?mighty works of God' ".145

In Africa today "formation in the faith ... too often stops at the elementary stage, and the sects easily profit from this ignorance".146 A serious deepening of the faith is thus urgently needed, because the rapid evolution of society has given rise to new challenges linked to the phenomena notably of family uprooting, urbanization, unemployment, materialistic seductions of all kinds, a certain secularization and an intellectual upheaval caused by the avalanche of insufficiently critical ideas spread by the media.147