African Pentecostalism and World Christianity. Группа авторов

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      Introduction

The Worlding of World Christianity and African Pentecostalism1

      Nimi Wariboko and Adeshina Afolayan

      Christianity across the World

      Since the inauguration of the concept of World Christianity in the mid-twentieth century, it has gone on to define a multiplicity of the conceptual manifestations of Christianity all across the globe. When it first emerged, its objective was to understand the scope and extent of the Christian community across the globe, and especially to define the understanding of Christian unity and Christian missions. World Christianity, therefore, redefines the need to limit the regulatory boundary between Christians and non-Christians, to understand Christianity outside the West as not just mere manifestations of Western Christianity, and to expand the universal sense of catholicity.

One of the most interesting issues in its conceptual emergence is its insertion into the ideological contexts of globalization, and the critical distinction between the global North and the global South. A growing number of literatures has explored the complex relationship of Christianity with different regions and contexts in ways that led to distinct and dramatic social, religious, political and cultural changes to both the contexts and regions themselves as well as to Christianity.2 Some other scholars have focused specifically on the historical and theological implications of World Christianity, especially as it manifests in the Global South.3

Dana Robert argues for the emergence of World Christianity as a reputable academic discourse from the transformation of historical missionary activities across the world into mission studies as an academic discipline. European imperialism and the globalization motivated by the infrastructural consequences of the Industrial Revolution gave way in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century to a huge enthusiasm for missionary journeys and the vision of world evangelization, from the West to Asia, Africa and Latin America. By 1910, according to Roberts, the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh represented “a convergence of Protestant missionary interests from around the world.”4 The rigorous Protestant missionary movement provided the fuel for the robust discussions and projections that led to the emergence of mission studies as a serious discourse:

Preliminary reports conducted the first survey of worldwide Christianity by Protestants. Analysis of such issues as missions and governments, the missionary message in relation to non-Christian religions, world evangelization, and missionary preparation relied on information gathered from hundreds of informants around the world. A comprehensive missionary atlas documented the spread of missions worldwide. The Edinburgh Conference provided visible inspiration for a multicultural Christianity.5

This understanding of the multicultural credentials of Christianity was the signal for the blossoming of interest in its relationship with the non-Western world. Yet, by the early 1900s, colonialism still eclipsed the idea of Christian multiculturalism in a way that gave global cooperation for mission and the growing recognition of an enlarged and extended understanding of the “Kingdom of God” a limited global configuration. The idea of Protestant unity still largely possesses a European imprint. Yet, the ardent desire for the unity of the church of God led to the birth of an ecumenical movement in the 1940s, around the worldview of one world under God. Ecumenism was particularly fueled by the horrors of the Second World War and the palpable fear of a spreading Communism. And these led to the growing desire, founded on the mission experiences, for an alternate totalizing worldview that brings God’s people worldwide under “one church.”6 John Joseph Considine published World Christianity in 1945. And in 1947 Henry P. Van Dusen published a book titled World Christianity: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow that was defined around a new world order founded on a Christian ecumenical base. In other words, for the world to survive as one, there is an urgent need for a world church—“To an age destined to survive, or to expire, as ‘one world,’ we bring a world Church,” says Dusen.7

      When the World Council of Churches was founded in 1948, Dusen’s view about the organic unity of World Christinaity (rather than just a Christian multiculturalism that grounds Europe as Christendom) was vindicated. Robert argues that the emergence of the World Council of Churches was, for Dusen,

both the culmination and the end of the historic expansion of Europe and the beginning of the new age of World Christianity. The centrifugal movement of missions gave birth to the centripetal movement of church unity, which together characterized the world church of the twentieth century. Van Dusen not only used missions and ecumenism as the two poles of his historical analysis, but he worked to unite them visibly in his role as chairman of the joint commission for the integration of the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches in 1961.8

Yet, like the idea of multicultural Christianity before it, the optimism heralded by Dusen and other Protestant ecumenists was to fail in the shadow of the Cold War and the militant rise of anticolonial movements in Africa and Asia. The triumphalism of world ecumenism, according to Robert, was overtaken by a different interpretation of history that was grounded on conflict rather than consensus. In other words, “the ecumenical movement failed to recognize the full-blown implications of the so called fourth self of mission theory—that of self-theologizing.”9 The ecumenical spirit of World Christianity was colored by the tragedy of European imperialism, colonialism and racism.

It was the 1970s that gave birth to a postcolonial model of a renewed World Christianity on the ashes of mainline mission theology and evangelization. The reconfiguration of World Christianity along a postcolonial dynamics was inaugurated around the emergence of multiple and culturally inflected indigenous forms of Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America. And there began to grow the institutional recognition of a switch from the “center” of Christianity to its “margins”; or, as Robert puts it, several institutional endeavors began to bring home the realization of “how the ‘margins’ of Christianity were becoming the ‘center.’”10 By 1989, and with the fall of USSR and international communism, World Christianity was rejuvenated and relaunched as a serious theological and academic discourse. First, Christianity became untethered from Cold War politics to become a significant indigenous form which “stressed multiculturalism, numerical growth, diversity, and multiple nodes of authority.”11 And Robert recognizes the publication of Lamin Sanneh’s book, Translating the Message (1989), as a game changer that unhinged mission from colonialism, and grounded on a new understanding of mission as the motivation for indigenous Christianity everywhere. Thus, “Asian, African, and Latin American Christians were not clones of northern Europe and North America but had embraced Christianity on their own terms.”12

      Africa represents one of those ideologically volatile contexts within which Christianity has unfolded its theological and ideological underpinnings. This becomes so significant with the complicity of Christianity in the mission civilatrice of colonialism. The engagements of Christianity with the divergent cultural and social formations in Africa led to several transformations both in the internal theological mechanism of Christianity itself and in the religious dynamics on the continent. While Christianity, in its incarnation in the African Initiated Christianity or African Independent Churches (AIC), has remained a solid entry point by which scholars attempt to understand the postcolonial religious trajectory of the continent, Pentecostalism has achieved a tremendous growth and presence that have insinuated it into the important sectors of the African life, from politics to economic development.

Several scholars have focused on the relationship between World Christianity and Africa.13 Only few, however, have explicitly interrogated the fundamental dynamics involved in the critical engagements between World Christianity and African Pentecostalism. Even fewer still have been interested in the critical influence of the media and digital media technologies on the transformation of African Pentecostalism and World Christianity. One of such scholars is Johnson Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu. He is one scholar of Pentecostalism who has assiduously dedicated himself to pushing the boundaries of understanding of the relationship of World Christianity to African Pentecostalism. His research interest spans the nature and manifestation of Christianity in Africa СКАЧАТЬ