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 through his evangelism. Braide was jailed because his ministry threatened lowering tax on alcohol as people were convicted to stop drinking beer. See Isichei, “Soul of Fire”; Tasie, Christian Missionary Enterprise.
72. Mongo Beti’s classic novel, The Poor Christ of Bomba, narrates an excellent story that reflects the complex relationship between mission and colonialism. However, this is a theme that has been explored to a great depth by many scholars in the past century. See Beti, Poor Christ of Bomba. I would also refer the reader to Robert, Converting Colonialism. Another good resource is Carey, God’s Empire.
73. Andrews, “Christian Missions and Colonial Empires Reconsidered,” 663.
74. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation,” 144.
75. Isichei, “Soul of Fire,” 24.
76. Anderson, African Reformation.
77. Anderson, African Reformation, 7. He adds that the World Christian Encyclopedia put the figure at eighty three million, and this only highlights the problematic nature of these statistics, especially when they have to do with Christianity in Africa.
78. 151 million for Independents plus 29 million for Unaffiliateds. Zurlo and Johnson, “Religious Demographies of Africa,” 155. Both Pentecostals and African independent churches are included in this figure, and that makes the figure seem rather conservative. This is part of the challenge of depending on Western categories to explore African Christianity.
79. Shepperson and Price, Independent African.
80. Strohbehn, Pentecostalism in Malawi.
81. John Gatu’s request for a moratorium on Western missionaries in Africa in 1971 was inspired by the process of political decolonization that swept through sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s. See Reese, “John Gatu and the Moratorium on Missionaries.”
82. For example, the Kimbanguist Church has a significant presence in Belgium. The Apostolic Church of Zimbabwe has several congregations in England.
83. Kwiyani, Sent Forth, 110.
3
From/To the Ends of the Earth
Mission in the Spirit
Kirsteen Kim
Dr. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu is known in World Christianity especially for his sympathetic studies of African Pentecostalism. Many studies of Pentecostalism have explained it in purely sociological terms, or criticized it using Western theological categories. However, Asamoah-Gyadu offers cultural