African Pentecostalism and World Christianity. Группа авторов

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      59. Gerloff, “Holy Spirit and the African Diaspora,” 91.

      60. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, 17.

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      Independent, Enthusiastic, and African

      Reframing the Story of Christianity in Africa

      Harvey C. Kwiyani

      Exploring Africa’s Enthusiastic Christianity

My intention in this essay is to discuss the significance of Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu’s expansive work on African Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in the context of Africa’s widespread enthusiastic Christianity.61 To do this, I will attempt to situate Asamoah-Gyadu’s work in the wider story of the development of African Christianity. I will draw connections between the early African encounters with the missionaries in the nineteenth century and the currently ongoing charismatization of African Christianity. I will also attempt to locate it in the wider subject of world Christianity as Africa will shape Christianity in the world for this century. I make use of a historical phenomenology to make sense of the twentieth-century narrative of Africa’s spirit-centered Christianity and to make two suggestions. First, a properly contextualized Christianity will be enthusiastic in its outlook. Thus, I argue that only a Christianity that can engage the spirit world just like the old African traditional religions did would be viable both in colonial and post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa. The emergence of African independent churches suggests that on the one hand, attempts to limit expressions of Christianity in Africa to non-charismatic denominations are often a form of miscontextualization (or undercontextualization, or even non-contextualization) and can only result in a religious and theological identity crisis for Africans.

      On the other hand, the labels that we use for African Christianity do not sufficiently describe what is happening on the ground. Many African independent churches precede Pentecostalism and most of them do not subscribe to Pentecostal theology even though they are often lumped together as Pentecostals. Second, I argue that Asamoah-Gyadu’s work is of greater and broader significance as it (inadvertently, I believe) announces the full arrival—or the mainstreaming—of spirit-centered expressions of Christianity in the form of Pentecostal, Charismatic, and Neo-Pentecostal movements in the continent in Africa. Looking back at the body of his literature, it becomes rather clear that he presents to us African Christianity at a tipping point where it confidently assumes its identity as African Christianity both in the continent and in the diaspora, and in the process, it begins to influence world Christianity. He catches the story at a moment when Africa Christianity is able to actually become African. I attempt to connect this current development to the African independent churches of old. Of course, it is in the past two decades that African Christianity has begun to let go off its western robes, theological and otherwise, and Asamoah-Gyadu has provided a critical commentary to the process. Indeed, he captures for us the story of the africanization of Christianity, first in Ghana in his African Charismatics but later, in his subsequent works, in the wider African context including that of the African diaspora. I argue that this africanization of Christianity reflects the momentum of African independent churches and is shaped largely by the encounter between African culture and Christianity (and not Pentecostalism).

      Appropriating Asamoah-Gyadu in African Christianity

      Asamoah-Gyadu’s work stands tall in a long line of important scholarly writings on African Christianity. Before him are towering figures of such scholars of renown as Andrew Walls, John Mbiti, Lamin Sanneh, Kwame Bediako, Allan Anderson, and many others. He picks up the baton in the late 1990s and emerges to make a critical commentary on subsequent developments in African Christianity in a period when it begins to reshape itself as an African religion. Asamoah-Gyadu has dedicated a great deal of his work for the past two decades to making a very important commentary—a critical one for that matter—on the ongoing africanization and charismatization of Christianity in Africa. This story of African Christianity does not begin in the second half of the twentieth century when Africa emerges to be a significant Christian heartland while Europe’s secularization continues at a shockingly rapid pace. Thus, Asamoah-Gyadu’s work serves to connect contemporary Christianity in Africa both with its past and its future. The africanization that we are seeing is in its very early stages. Africa will shape a great deal of ecclesial history for the next few centuries. This time that we live in, following the great works of Asamoah-Gyadu, will be recognized as the tipping point when African Christianity embraced its enthusiastic nature and rose up to re-energize world Christianity. This story will not be told without the mention of the eloquent words of J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu. But to appreciate his impact, we have to start at the beginning.

      Why Did You Hide the Spirit from Us?

      The emergence of spirit-oriented forms of Christianity in Africa precedes the birth of the Pentecostal movement by at least two decades. Early African spirit-oriented churches began to appear in West Africa in the 1870s, long before the partitioning of the continent at the Berlin Conference of 1884, the scramble for Africa that followed, and the colonizing of Africa by European powers. Indeed, they appeared long before the rise of the Pentecostal movement in California in 1906. We could actually look to the charismatic tendencies in early Christian communities of North Africa (e.g., the Montanists and Saint Anthony, 100–500 CE) and the Kongo (e.g., Kimpa Vita, 1500–1700 CE) to say that enthusiastic Christianity actually precedes the arrival of the nineteenth-century missionaries in Africa. However, that said, my argument in this essay only focuses only on those enthusiastic expressions of Christianity that emerged after the missionaries arrived in Africa in the 1800s. These spirit-oriented churches were labelled African independent churches right from the moment they emerged—and in the course of the decades that followed, they have been called African instituted churches or African initiated churches, or in some cases, African indigenous churches.

African independent churches first appeared in West Africa where many European missionaries begun to work in the early decades of the nineteenth century. They emerged largely because of two factors; access to education and the presence of African religions. Often, the missionaries started with education partly because they needed their new converts to be able to read the Bible. They established schools for the teaching of the children of their converts and used them to convince and coerce others to conversion. Along with education and evangelism came the need to translate the Bible into African vernaculars. But above all this, education was the only perceivable way to civilize the heathens out there, so they reasoned. It was largely through education that they would civilize and christianize the Africans.62 Thus, education fit well with the missionaries’ agenda to bring civilization to Africa. Practically speaking, educated Africans—and by this, in the context of nineteenth-century Africa, I have in mind primary-school-educated Africans—could be more helpful in serving the missionaries both in the church as altar boys or deacons, for instance, and at home as gardeners and cooks. All in all, educated Africans were beneficial to the missionaries. In addition, many African leaders were open to having their subjects go to school under the missionaries as they understood that “you could only defeat the white man if you had the white man’s education.”63 Before long, quite a few Africans were able to read the Bible in their own languages. Some Africans actually learned to read and write in European languages and could, therefore, read the Bible in English, French, Dutch, or German. This direct access to the Bible meant they could interpret the Bible for themselves without needing the help of the missionaries. Consequently, Africans could also confidently disagree with the missionaries on how they understood the text of the Bible.

One subject of contention between the Africans and the missionaries was that of the Spirit and the spirit-world. On the one hand, African converts were informed by traditional religion, from which they had converted, and which had a vibrant and dynamic spirit-world that shaped the entirety of their lives, СКАЧАТЬ