demands that we generate new terms which interrogate what it means to be “pentecostal,” “charismatic” or “neo-pentecostal.”
Kirsteen Kim’s “From/To the End of the World” is a unique reading of the Book of Acts of the Apostle that demonstrates the apostolicity and catholicity of the church. Juxtaposing the central objective of mission (as sending the disciples to the ends of the earth) with the career of Christianity throughout the world (seen as from the ends of the earth), for Kim, provides a critical move that enables the decentering of Christianity away from Europe. Craig Keener, in chapter 4, declares categorically that “the first non-Jewish Christian was from Africa.” And this is with regard to Luke’s reference to the Ethiopian official in Acts 8:27. If Luke is taken to be motivated by the task to take the Gospel to the end of the earths, then Kim argues that his interest in the African official cannot be taken to be “exotic,” as scholars have argued. And this interest in the official reveals, for Kim, that Africa produced “the first gentile Christian.” Both chapters 5 and 6 provide specific critical perspectives that draw on the development in world Christianity and Pentecostalism in Africa. Charles Prempeh interrogates the notion of gender in Ghana’s Church of Pentecost (CoP), and how the emergence of a “modernist” orientation, defined around the use of English, seems to undermine the “primitive solidarity” which the CoP shares with global Pentecostalism as a spiritual movement for those on the fringe of society. In chapter 6, Kenneth Ross explores the implications that World Christianity could have in a world that is gradually being taken over by what he calls the “strongman.” According to him, “When measured by biblical standards, the shortcomings of today’s strongman leaders are clearly exposed.”
Part two of this volume—Spiritual Reality, Worldviews, and Formations—contains four essays that fundamentally take their starting point from Asamoah-Gyadu’s fundamental third way that balances between what Trevor H. G. Smith, in chapter 7, calls “a hyper-spiritualized (the global South’s temptation) and hyper-materialized (the West’s temptation) cause and effect understanding of reality.” Smith then engages with Asamoah-Gyadu’s biblical hermeneutic and ecclesiology “developed out of Africa’s single-tiered ontological understanding of reality, an understanding that holds material and spiritual cause and effect as equally important and necessary for understanding this world God has given us.” Vivian Dzokoto, in chapter 8, is more concerned with what she calls the “Akan folk theory of mind,” and “how these representations of the mind help explain the success of the pneumatic Pentecostal Christian movements that Johnson Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu focuses on in his prolific program of research on Christianity in Africa today.” In chapter 9, Chammah J. Kaunda and Felix Kang Esoh investigate the concept of libation, a key concept in Asamoah-Gyadu’s research, as a point of investigating the continuity and discontinuity between African Pentecostalism and African traditional religions. They conclude that the practice of libation amongst the neo-Pentecostals in Cameroon demonstrates a deep tension between continuity and discontinuity. Lastly in chapter 10, Patrick Kofi Amissah critically interrogates the relationship between Pentecostalism and social justice in Isaiah 61:1–2 and Luke 4:18–19. Specifically, the chapter explores how the issues of poverty and oppression in Ghana can be confronted by Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians from the twin perspectives of spiritual and social justice that these two scriptural texts espouse.
Three critical chapters make up the third part of the volume titled “Media, Mediatization and World Christianity.” The idea of the mediation of Pentecostal and Christian practices plays a crucial role in the theological oeuvre of Asamoah-Gyadu. The three essays by Caleb Nyanni, Marleen de Witte and Oluwaseun Abimbola extend Asamoah-Gyadu’s interest in the African diaspora, in Ghana and in Nigeria respectively. Chapter 11 critically engages with the role that the new media technologies are playing in refocusing and redefining the religious worldviews of second generation African migrants in the United Kingdom. Chapter 12 is a reflection “on the possibilities and limits of ‘African Pentecostalism,’” especially with regard to those who are distinctly not a part of it, like the neo-traditionalists in Ghana. The chapter then interrogates the ways in which mass mediation complicates the relationship between the Pentecostals and the neo-traditionalists in Ghana. In Nigeria, on the other hand, Abimbola’s essay is concerned with the enhancement of pentecostal performances, on the one hand; and on the other hand, the “ways in which religious rituals are also shaping an online culture that gives agency to anonymity and performativity.”
The last and final part of this volume—African Pentecostalism in Context—with four essays, takes up specific substantive issues relating to African Pentecostalism and the African predicament. Philomena Mwaura’s exploration of the role of Pentecostalism in economic development and poverty eradication connects with the issues of poverty and oppression raised by Patrick Amissah in chapter 10. Mwaura argues that the significance of Pentecostalism in economic development is not due to its “consciously defined development activities but rather through the very nature of Pentecostal beliefs and practices”; that is, the nature of its worldview that links the secular to the spiritual under the supervision of God. The issue of development is also the focus of Dietrich Werner in chapter 16. With the call for the recognition of the role that religion, and Faith-Based Organization (FBO) can play in the achievement of sustainable development on the continent. Chapter 15 is also continuous with the gender issue raised by Prempeh in chapter 5. But here, Faith Lugazia deploys a critical feminist stance and a feminist hermeneutical method to tease out the implications, for Pentecostalism, of theologizing from the experience of the woman as the “other” in religious practices. The last chapter, by Allan H. Anderson, takes up the challenge of new term to characterize religious phenomena in African Pentecostalism and Christianity raised by Kwiyani (chapter 2), by interrogating the issue of “prosperity gospel” crucial to African Pentecostalism. A productive analytic strategy, according to Anderson, demands examining prosperity gospel in African Pentecostalism “from the perspective of ancient African beliefs on prosperity and success, and discuss whether it represents continuity with African religious beliefs or a transformative discontinuity with past beliefs.”
In all, these brilliant essays provide a critical tour through the excellent and enlightening oeuvre of Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu on how African Pentecostalism has extended itself through mass mediation, and has transformed our understanding of World Christianity. The uniqueness of this volume is in its specific focus on the complex relationship between World Christianity and African Pentecostalism, and how all these intersect with media and mediatization. This is one dimension of the historical and theological trajectory of the Christianity discourse that has not received much scholarly attention in the literature on World Christianity. It is our hope that this volume will enable scholars of African studies to critically engage with the trajectory of World Christianity and African Pentecostalism in conceptual, cultural and historical interactions. It will assist theologians and religious studies scholars to understand the transformations and transmutations of Christian doctrines, practices and spiritual forms in different contexts. In the sociology of religion, the volume, we hope, will facilitate a deep assessment of the sociological elements that go into the articulation of Christianity, and specifically Pentecostalism in various contextual forms. Finally, it is our hope this volume will provide valuable resources for students and scholars of religions, and of Christianity, specifically in seeing how the works of 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