Addressing the African Colonization Society in 1880, the gifted African nationalist Edward W. Blyden (1832-1912) declared, in pointed reference to Psalm 68:31, that "Africa may yet prove to be the spiritual conservatory of the world … ; for the promise of that land is that she shall stretch forth her hands unto God." Within a century, the essence of this vision had been remarkably fulfilled.

Demonstrating a rate of growth unparalleled in the history of Christianity—at a time when the old centers in the West have been experiencing dramatic decline—Africa has emerged as a major heartland of the faith. But the significance of this development extends beyond numbers. Not only is the Christian story now inextricably interwoven into the fabric of life on the subcontinent, the story of modern African Christianity is also indispensable for a meaningful appraisal of contemporary global Christianity and its future prospects.

Since the 1960s, the voluminous scholarly assessments of African Christianity have paid detailed attention to the proliferating African Independent Churches (AICs), widely celebrated as the driving force of African Christianity's unparalleled expansion. Strikingly, however, the extensive body of literature on these movements has been mainly produced by sympathetic European scholars, and most studies focus on regional or particular movements. For over three decades, David Barrett's groundbreaking 1968 study, Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary Religious Movements, was the only scholarly monograph that provided a continent-wide assessment.

The lack of a comprehensive African and/or insider treatment remained a glaring omission until the 1990s, when a spate of publications (mainly articles) by African scholars began to appear, though mainly for specialist consumption. The first major publication by an African "insider" was African Reformation: African Initiated Christianity in the 20th Century (2001), by South African missiologist Allan Anderson. This landmark study provides a detailed overview of the histories, types, beliefs, practices, and growth of AICs in different parts of sub-Saharan Africa and assesses their global relevance. It remains an outstanding contribution to the existing literature.

But such is the effervescent dynamism of African Christianity that critical dimensions remain unexplored. This is especially true of the new Pentecostal churches that have exploded on the African religious landscape (disproportionately in West Africa) since the 1970s. Such is their impact that even mainline churches have been "charismatized." Their prominence and proliferation has fueled a long-standing debate over African Pentecostalism: its origins, traits, public role (or lack thereof), theology and practices, engagement with Islam, and interconnection with worldwide Pentecostalism. Once again, the dominant voices have been Western. Given this state of affairs, the publication of Ogbu Kalu's African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (2008) is both timely and invaluable.[1]

The work is a masterpiece of historical and social analysis that reflects detailed knowledge of the vast literature produced on the subject by both African and Western scholars as well as intimate familiarity with the complex and shifting topography of African Christianity. The emergence, historical development, and regional contours of Pentecostal movements in Africa, dating back to the early twentieth century, are deftly interspersed with helpful typologies and critique of a wide range of views and perspectives. However, some two-thirds of the book is devoted to penetrating examination of the new Pentecostal movement that emerged in Africa's turbulent postcolonial era, with scrupulous attention to the fairly extensive discourse surrounding it. Kalu weaves historical, cultural, instrumentalist, and religious approaches to probe topical issues such as the African Pentecostal political vision and public involvement (drawing less on the discourse of modernity than on African conceptual categories); the complex question of female Christian leadership in predominantly patriarchal contexts and the emergence of a Pentecostal feminist theology; the impact of media on the movement and its missionary engagement with popular culture; use of money and the establishment of Christian universities; and the complex and bitter story of Pentecostal Christian–Muslim conflict in Nigeria. Even more recent developments like the growing African Christian/Pentecostal immigrant congregations in Western societies receive attention.

For North American readers, the book's in-depth examination of the intersection between African Pentecostalism and Western manifestations of the movement makes for compulsory reading. The view that global Pentecostalism has its origins in North America, and specifically that the Azusa Street Revival was the starting point for the far-flung expressions of Spirit-filled Christianity around the world, is quite deeply entrenched in treatments of global Pentecostalism by Western scholars. Kalu assails this position with authority. While Pentecostalism in Africa has benefited from external interventions and religious flows, he contends, it is firmly rooted in the African religious universe and fomented by African indigenous creativity.

To start with, in the period immediately following the Azusa Street Revival (up to the First World War), Western Pentecostal Missionary initiatives were relatively small, ill-funded, and poorly organized (or dogged by infamous solo efforts); most ended in shambles. In Africa such efforts bore little fruit or quickly collapsed. More to the point, unlike the original preaching of the gospel message, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit does not need a foreign missionary. And the nature of African spirituality is such that "from the earliest contact with the gospel, Africans have tended to appropriate its charismatic dimensions, attracted to the extra power offered by the new religion, and stamped it with an African identity." On the ground, local believers spontaneously experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit in the context of recurrent revivals and a perennial quest for spiritual power—much to the consternation of foreign missionaries, whose fastidious norms and control mechanisms were thus subverted. Western (Pentecostal) outsiders were only invited after the fact.

How then should the nature of African Pentecostalism be understood? Kalu is at pains to argue that the tendency to pin Western religious labels or concepts like "fundamentalism" on non-Western religious phenomena misleads. Yet, some ideas or ideologies associated with American Pentecostalism are so globally diffused, and particular African forms appear so branded by Western modernist precepts, that they seem at first glance to validate the dominant view: namely, that African Pentecostalism owes its celebrated dynamism less to homegrown spirituality and indigenous instincts than to external sources and influences. This is most obviously true of prosperity theology: the teaching (of which there are many permutations) that proclaims a rigid correlation between personal acts of faith and individual material prosperity. Some believe that the prominence of this teaching within African Pentecostalism reflects enduring African dependence on external forms and vulnerability to foreign influences associated with economic modernization.

Kalu explains that the prosperity message flowed into Africa in the 1980s (during a time of widespread economic collapse and political instability) from a number of sources, both in the West and in the non-Western world. The American version was one among many. But his main argument, supported by insights drawn from other African scholars, is that "the popularity of the message was buttressed in its resonance with African indigenous concepts of salvation, abundant life, and goals of worship." The African understanding of salvation or conversion emphasizes not only the gift of eternal life but also liberation from life-threatening and life-diminishing experiences. In other words, African Christian communities' understanding of wholeness and material (as well as physical and psychic) well-being derives from an all-encompassing spiritual worldview and from African readings of the Bible. In truth, a small number of urban-based African Pentecostal ministries betray a surrender to crude displays of capitalist acquisition and mirror an individualistic ethos. But the African understanding of prosperity typically focuses less on material wealth than on inner peace, supernatural deliverance or power over ubiquitous malevolent spirits, fertility, communal harmony, and, above all else, healing.

Undoubtedly, African contact with American Pentecostalism increased significantly in the 1980s and stimulated a host of partnerships and connections. But these, like many other foreign Pentecostal currents, were mainly limited to urban contexts, leaving massive swathes of rural-based African Pentecostalism untouched. Even so, external influences did not displace or replace homegrown initiatives, nor did global convergence inhibit the thrust of local/regional trajectories. In striking contrast to mainline denominations, African charismatic movements are self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating from conception. Indeed, they account for a significant proportion of the massive non-Western missionary movement that has witnessed the proliferation of African immigrant congregations in Europe and North America.

Kalu is emphatic that understanding African Pentecostalism requires studious attentiveness to Africa's shifting historical and socio-political contexts and the varieties of African responses to the gospel mediated by its encounter with the African spiritual world and cultural universe. He explains that Ethiopianism, a 19th-century movement of African cultural nationalism and religious protest (against forms of European domination), laid the foundation for the various prophet-healing and revival movements that emerged in the early 1900s. These original AICs—labeled Zionists in southern Africa, Aladura in western Africa, and Abaroho in eastern Africa—rooted Christianity in the African religious world and combined ritual symbolism with demonstrations of spiritual power. They are the main precursors of the new African Pentecostal movements. But Kalu also detects in the latter's pan-African vision and political awareness residues of Ethiopianism's core ideology. These interconnections are very noteworthy. But the story of how these movements of reformation and renewal emerged, evolved, converged, adapted to foreign impulses, and produced regional variations is a hugely complex one.

Ethiopianism provided a major stimulus for subsequent African initiatives in Christianity, but it lacked the charismatic impulse. The multitudinous AICs emphasize spiritual power, as do the new Pentecostal churches, but the growth of the latter has largely been at the expense of the former. In fact, the question of continuity and discontinuity between the two entities remains a contentious one. While AICs emerged as innovative alternatives to Europeanized forms of Christianity, the newer movements trace their origins in part to European evangelical initiatives like Scripture Union and the Keswick movement. Both also reflect radically different adaptations of the African cultural heritage and somewhat conflicting approaches to the African spiritual world. At the same time, there is also much overlap and strong family resemblance. Some "new" Pentecostal charismatic movements (like Nigeria's Redeemed Christian Church of God) started life as AICs or prophetic ministries. Additionally, both movements embody the African worldview; both epitomize the fundamental African affinity for the charismatic dimensions of the faith; both expose the limitations of mainline churches (with regards spiritual fervor, female participation, and evangelistic zeal); and both reflect the critical role that forces of socio-political change have played in the development of African Christianity.

Kalu's treatment of these issues is illuminated by attentiveness to the nuances of the debate, emphasis on typological distinctions (some older AICs can hardly be described as Christian), and a careful unpacking of the conflicting readings of the African religious universe that render the two movements "estranged bedfellows." But the unmanageable fluidity and unpredictable creativity of African religious life means that wholesale or rigid differentiations—mainline church, Ethiopian, AICs, Pentecostal, etc.—tend to be unstable. We are left with a strong sense of the massive complexity of African Pentecostalism and reminded of the irreducible gaps between academic discourse and lived reality. Even so, this groundbreaking exploration of African Pentecostalism leaves few stones unturned, and the richness of detail rewards patient consumption. Kalu's book provides a comprehensive and scrupulous assessment of one of the most important religious movements of the 21st century.

Jehu J. Hanciles is associate professor, history of Christianity and globalization, at the School of Intercultural Studies, Fuller Theological Seminary.

1. Editor's note: Ogbu Kalu died on January 8, 2009, a few months after the publication of the book under review. For a tribute to Kalu and to Richard John Neuhaus, who died on the same day, please see the piece by Mark Noll.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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