African Pentecostalism and World Christianity. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ Asamoah-Gyadu and the contributors to this volume enable diverse perspectives, paradigms and models that ground the understanding of Christianity itself in its various and variegated multiplicity across space and time.

      1. The concept of “worlding” is one of Martin Heidegger’s contributions to philosophy. It involves the transformation of the noun “world” into an active verb, “worlding,” which signifies a process of world-becoming and world-making as an ongoing process of meaningful being. Since its emergence in Heidegger’s magnus opus, Being and Time (1927), the concept of worlding has been applied to several aspect of human endeavors, from international politics to globalization and from secularization to the “enfleshment” of God in the world. We are adopting the term here to reflect the expansion and the deepening of Christianity across the world and in multiple theologies that provide meanings for several people.

      2. Farhadian, Introducing World Christianity; Sanneh and McClymond, Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Christianity; Pachuau, World Christianity.

      3. Hassan, Religion and Development in the Global South; Kim, Rise of the Global South; Daughrity, Rising; Sanneh and Carpenter, Changing Face of Christianity.

      4. Robert, “Naming ‘World Christianity.’”

      5. Robert, “Naming ‘World Christianity,’” 2–3.

      6. Robert, “Naming ‘World Christianity,’” 4.

      7. Robert, “Naming ‘World Christianity,’” 4.

      8. Robert, “Naming ‘World Christinaity,’” 5.

      9. Robert, “Naming ‘World Christianity,’” 6.

      10. Robert, “Naming ‘World Christianity,’” 8.

      11. Robert, “Naming ‘World Christianity,’” 8.

      12. Robert, “Naming ‘World Christianity,’” 9.

      13. Sanneh and Carpenter, Changing Face of Christianity; Bediako, Christianity in Africa; Bongmba, Routldge Companion to Christianity in Africa; Maxwell and Lawrie, Christianity and the African Imagination; Barnes, Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic.

      14. Asamoah-Gyadu, Taking Territories, 7.

      15. Asamoah-Gyadu, Taking Territories, 2–8.

      16. Asamoah-Gyadu, Contemporary Pentecostal Christianity, 113.

      17. Asamoah-Gyadu, “African Pentecostalism,” 31.

      18. Asamoah-Gyadu, “Spirit and Spirits,” 50.

      19. Asamoah-Gyadu, Taking Territories, 25.

      20. Asamoah-Gyadu, Taking Territories, 7, 8, 25.

      21. Asamoah-Gyadu, Taking Territories, 10.

      Section I

      Christianity in History

      1

      Bird’s-Eye View of Contemporary Christianity in Africa

      Opoku Onyinah

      I first met Professor J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu when I was studying at the Regent Theological College at Nantwich, in the UK, and our meeting was providential and fortuitous. The Director of Studies at Regent had recommended that I pursue a Doctor of Philosophy degree in theology, but he preferred that my supervisor be a Pentecostal theologian. During this time, our school hosted a Pentecostal conference, and a student from the University of Birmingham attended. This student gave me a greeting and a telephone number from Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, who was then a PhD student at Birmingham. I contacted Kwabena, who introduced me to Professor Allan Anderson, one of the premier scholars of Pentecostalism, and he graciously agreed to be my PhD supervisor. This was in perfect accord with what my director of studies had recommended. Soon, my family moved to Birmingham, and we stayed at Griffin Close, next door to Asamoah-Gyadu and his family, and a great friendship developed. We shared things together and often joined in prayer. He told me that when he finished his course, he wanted to return to Ghana and equip people in Christian education.

Like a prophet, Professor Anderson (who was Asamoah-Gyadu’s internal examiner) told me that Kwabena had the potential to become a great scholar. Indeed, that is what has happened. Asamoah-Gyadu is a world-renowned African Christian educationist.22 His writings and teachings have proven to be timely and relevant for African Christians now that the Western missionary enterprise in Africa has significantly declined, and the Christian faith is in African hands. The missionary effort resulted in the spread of Western Christianity across sub-Saharan Africa. Missionaries sought to evangelize the continent and to keep the faith—and its followers—pure, with no syncretism. To achieve this, missionaries often removed believers from their homes and placed them in so-called “Salem” environments. But those days of partitioning African Christians from Africa are long gone. In the latter part of the twentieth century, Christian churches in Africa transitioned to be led by African leaders.

This chapter looks at what African Christians consider to be the vital, essential parts of the faith. In short, they seek a direct, victorious, supernatural encounter with God, who transforms all aspects of their lives. Under African leadership, this reformed Christian experience, dubbed as the “Pentecostalization” of Christianity, evolved through African ingenuity in the transformation of Evangelical Pentecostal Christianity, which had been tied to American Pentecostal/Charismatic spirituality. Professor Asamoah-Gyadu has helped guide this shift. His writings and teachings are evidence of what David Barrett predicted in 1970, that “African Christians might well tip the balance and transform Christianity permanently into a non-western religion.”23 This is not just happening on African soil. African Christians who have traveled abroad have transported their Christian experience to the diaspora, where many of them worship the Lord in the same manner in which they worship Him in Africa. In this chapter, I will also take note of that very significant movement.

      I shall begin by giving a historical overview of Christianity in Africa. The emergence of the Pentecostal СКАЧАТЬ