African Pentecostalism and World Christianity. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ screaming. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, it was common for mission-founded churches to demand that their members should not fellowship with the tongue-speaking Charismatics. Some denominations excommunicated their members for behaving like Pentecostals. Today, we have generations of African Christians who have never belonged in a non-charismatic church, many who cannot imagine being church without the charismatic gifts of the Spirit being manifest.

      We Need New Terms

      In African Christianity, the lines between the Pentecostals, Charismatics, and Neo-Pentecostals are blurred and very permeable. Most people are not even clear whether they are Pentecostal or Charismatic and why they belong to those camps. Many do not even know what differentiates them from other traditions. A typical “Pentecostal” pastor in rural Africa has never heard of Azusa Street, Amos Yong, or Wayne Grudem. More important though, Pentecostals, Charismatics, and Neo-Pentecostals form only a small section of the many spirit-oriented Christians in the continent. Just like those Christians who formed AICs before the birth of Pentecostalism, African Christians do not need to be Pentecostals, Charismatics, or Neo-Pentecostals to believe in the active power of the Spirit. In addition, the lines between these spiritist denominations and mission-founded churches have also become thinner in Africa by the year. African Christians can be in a Catholic or a Presbyterian church and yet be filled with the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues and find it normal. Generally speaking, Africans do not even need to be Christians to believe in the power of the spiritual world. The power of the spirits is part of their worldview. Such Africans find a Christianity without an active spirit-world impotent and strange. A religion whose spirit cannot perform miracles does not make sense to most Africans. A god that cannot help its people in times of need is not a god at all.

      For this reason, when we use these generalized labels to describe African Christianity, we risk being vague and out-of-context. Of course, labels are important; they help us categorize whatever it is that we are working with, based on similarities, differences or any other criteria. Labels help us box similar things together and, at the same time, keep those things that are dissimilar, and do not belong, out of the box. However, labels always make sense in the perspective of the people doing the labelling. They hardly reflect the self-understanding of those being labelled. This explains why people reject labels given to them by others. In this conversation, all the labels that we use—Pentecostal, Charismatic, Neo-Pentecostal and/or Neo-Charismatic—are imported from the West. They work well when used to describe some sects of Western (and usually American) Christianity. However, it appears to me that, more often than not, when we import them to Africa, we often fail to recognize that what we identify as African Pentecostalism is in many ways different from American Pentecostalism. Even when we are talking about one and the same Pentecostal denomination operating in the United States and in Africa at the same time, (for instance, the Assemblies of God—a classical Pentecostal denomination in the United States that has found its way to many African countries), its American and African members do not always believe the same things. Their theologies are not congruent on all issues pertaining the Spirit. Even their belief in the gifts of the Spirit does not lead to the same behaviours and manifestations. Here in Britain where this writer resides, the Ghanaian-originated Pentecostal denomination, the Church of Pentecost, looks and behaves nothing like its British sister-denomination, the ELIM Pentecostal Church. I am even more intrigued when I see that the Ghanaian members of the Church of Pentecost in Britain are happier to belong to their Ghanaian denomination and not the British ELIM even when it takes more effort to do so.

In Europe, where there exists today a significant presence of African Christians, it is well-accepted that the type of Christianity that has come from Africa is Pentecostal in nature.83 The term “African Pentecostalism” has almost become synonymous to African Christianity. The largest African denominations in the diaspora are Pentecostal, and they have become representative of African Christianity outside Africa. Be it the Redeemed Christian Church of God with their one thousand congregations in the UK alone, or the Church of Pentecost that has almost two hundred assemblies in the UK, or even Sunday Adelaja’s Blessed Embassy of the Kingdom of God in Kiev, Ukraine, when researchers write about African Christianity in Europe, it is usually these Pentecostal churches that are in focus. However, both the ethnocentric label, “African,” and the theological one, “Pentecostal,” are problematic, especially in the diaspora. “African Pentecostals” forms a double fronted missional barrier to Westerners who, while finding “African” exotic and interesting, are suspicious of Pentecostalism—it is foreign to the Western Enlightenment-shaped worldview. I believe that if African Christianity is taken for what it is, and understood to be necessarily enthusiastic because of the culture that shapes it, it has a great deal to offer to the world.

      Conclusion

      Africa’s enthusiastic Christianity makes a unique contribution to the world. The circumstances around its emergence are unique. The historical realities of Africa’s encounter with Europe—the four hundred years of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the ensuing attempts to evangelize and colonize Africa—plus the spiritual realities of African cultures make a distinct flavour of Christianity inevitable. Several decades after the Scramble for Africa, we see Christianity gain traction in the continent, even when the Africans were beginning to agitate for independence. Most of those Africans who found Christianity attractive needed a type of Christianity that was strong enough to meet all their spiritual needs. An enthusiastic Christianity emerged that continues until today. It is this Christianity that has reshaped the religious landscape of Africa. It is larger than any of our current labels can contain. It arises out of Africa with the potential to reach the world in the power of the Spirit. One of its major scribes is Asamoah-Gyadu. As the next generation will write about it, they will owe a great deal of that history to him.

      61. “Africa” in this essay is used to describe what would be rightly called “sub-Saharan Africa.”

      62. It is also because of education—the access given to Africans to learn the white man’s book—that Europe’s colonization of Africa only lasted eighty years.

      63. Both Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o are clear about this in their novels Things Fall Apart and The River Between respectively.

      64. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy.

      65. Bediako, Christianity in Africa.

      66. Magesa, What Is Not Sacred?

      67. Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology. John Mbiti tells a fictitious yet tragic story of a young African PhD graduate majoring in theology who returns home after many years of study abroad and cannot exorcize his sister (as expected by his family and community) because Bultmann had demythologized demon possession. See Mbiti, “Theological Impotence.”

      68. Hayward, African Independent Church Movements, 50.

      69. Oosterwal, Modern Messianic Movements, 36 (my italics).

      70. For the fascinating story of the Prophet Kimbangu, see Mokoko Gampiot and Coquet-Mokoko, Kimbanguism.

      71. Harris was deported from Ivory Coast for disturbing peace СКАЧАТЬ