Hofmeyr, JW & Kalu, OU1
University of Pretoria

Modelling the Genealogy and Character of Global Pentecostalism: An African Perspective (Part 1)

ABSTRACT

This article revisits the historiography of global Pentecostalism by addressing the claim that the movement started from Azusa Street from where it spread across the globe. A distinction is drawn between the origins and character of the movement and interrogates the perception of globalism as a power concept that promotes homogeneity and diminishes the agency of local actors. Rather, it argues that the global should be understood to refer to the various expressions of Pentecostalism world-wide. Therefore, studies in pneumatology assist us to better classify Pentecostalism because early protagonists privileged the event of Pentecost. The different roots of the movement in various places compelled believers to name the movement differently.

INTRODUCTION

In Pentecostal historiography, the North American voice dominates the story. The dominant voice claims that Pentecostalism is as American as the apple pie, that it traces the genealogy to North America. From here it recounts how the movement started from humble roots in the country and flowered into a multimillion religious enterprise because it is a religion made to travel and a religion that harbours a strong missionary impulse within its genes. It weaves a direct connection between Pentecostalism and the English language though other language speakers participated in its early story. David Martin, Harold Bloom, and Harvey Cox point to the fact that

“ to attend a Pentecostal or evangelical church in Latin America or virtually anywhere else is to encounter an enhanced understanding of English and increased contact with Anglo-American world.”2

This profile has created a problem of externality (or extraversion) for protagonists outside North America. It has left the impression that world-wide Pentecostal churches are American outposts. Thus, when the Americans attacked Iraq, Muslims in northern Nigeria burnt Pentecostal churches in revenge. Charismatic churches in Serbia fear physical attacks from those who perceive them as traitors fronting for expansive American interests in former Soviet enclaves. Some Western scholars profile Pentecostalism in Africa, for instance, as either the extension of the American electronic church, or as fodders in the conspiratorial exportation of American right wing religiosity serving the interest of American capitalism. Pentecostalism becomes the new crusading vanguard of a certain fundamentalism that instigates Muslim fury and evokes radical counter-insurgence. From this perspective, the profile narrows the genealogy of Pentecostalism to a debate over the primacy of either Charles Parham or William Seymour. A combatant declared that Seymour is a paper tiger created by Frank Bartleman.3 The counterattack drew attention to Parham’s own clear assertion that his Apostolic movement is different from Seymour’s Pentecostal movement, and to the false doctrines of Parham that could hardly pass Pentecostal muster and was the cause of the repudiation by E.N. Bell, Chairman of the Assemblies of God, published in Word and Witness in October 1912.4 It is argued that doctrinal flaws rather than blatant, raving racism were the source of Parham’s downfall. Recently, a mediator argued that Parham was the originator of the primary doctrine in Pentecostalism and Seymour was the father of the movement.5 This begs the question whether Parham did not acquire this primary doctrine and its missionary implications from Frank Sandford’s Shiloh community in Maine during a visit in 1900. Thus, contrary to Goff’s defence, Parham’s racist ideas blossomed before the Azusa Street phenomenon.6 The first question in reimagining the genealogy of global Pentecostalism is whether this intra-mural debate has much to do with the genealogy of global Pentecostalism. Second, what does the global in global Pentecostalism signify? North American claims image the global dimension of Pentecostal as the geographical spread of a religious impulse and movement that started from North America and spread to other regions of the world. This sounds like a story about the travels and travails of the American apple pie. But among the many ways that the terminology could be used are two significant ones: the global refers to a geographical purview, the whole inhabited earth, (Greek: oikumene).The other is a power concept imbued with an asymmetrical power relationship in which various cultures are webbed together by an ideology, technology, or a religious force. This concept of globalisation is akin to the New Testament concept of kosmos, a world order controlled by an inexplicable, compulsive power, “the god of this world,” dazzling with allurements or kosmetikos, the root word for cosmetics. Some wonder whether friendship with it does not evoke enmity with Christ. It is characterised by a process of homogenisation and sameness in which the local identities are overawed by global processes. The peripheries imbibe and replicate the “resources of externality” emanating from the centres without any initiatives, agency, or creativity. The image is that foreign culture bearers write their scripts on blank tablets.7 Within this perspective, world-wide Pentecostalism serves as the enchanted cultural version of globalisation, or becomes the religious dimension of the cultural hegemony emanating from the North Atlantic and enveloping the globe.8 Various genres of this assertion could be traced in the works of Stoll, Martin, and other sociological studies of Pentecostalism in Latin America. Jean-Pierre Bastian intoned that they “lent themselves to be true ideological vanguards of North American interests and those of the national bourgeoisie in Latin America.9” This view of globalism echoes Hilarie Belloc’s assertion of “territorial complex” that Europe is the faith. Or, as Paul Gifford has argued,

“Whatever else it is, Christianity is a cultural product, honed in the West over centuries. The format of Africa’s crusades and services, the music, the use of the Bible and even the selection of texts continually suggest the particular origins and betray particular roots.” “In Africa, given the widespread and increasing dependence in so many fields, it is natural to ask whether the balance between the local and the external within Christianity is different from that in other less dependent parts of the world.”10

Kwame Bediako and David Maxwell have adequately responded to Gifford.11 The point here is that the Northern dominant voice is buttressed with a certain genre of the globalism discourse that distorts the image of African Christianity and Pentecostalism. The globalisation discourse raises two issues: the first is how globalisation impacts local cultures and how local cultures respond. The appropriation of global forces within local contexts and communities has drawn attention to how local cultures gestate, absorb, internalise, domesticate, or transform external change agents. In-depth exploration has queried the aptness of the concept of globalism in interpreting contemporary Christianity. Some substitute trans-nationalism, others prefer World Christianity or world-wide Pentecostalism.12 Thus, the real question should be how world-wide Pentecostalism utilises the resources of the cultural flows within the oikumene. This could be traced through the exchange of symbols and material things, through the constraining embrace with other cultures in the everyday life of the people of God. The second issue is whether the story line in the dominant voice is accurate, and whether the uni-directional perspective constitutes the global genealogy of Pentecostalism. Did world-wide Pentecostalism emerge from North America and spread like the 19 th century missionary enterprise into all the world? Clarity demands that the question of genealogy should be separated from the profile or the character of Pentecostalism, and that both the genealogy and the global character of the Pentecostal movement should be subjected to a closer examination.

NAMING THE MOVEMENT

The first question raised by the above scenario is how to name the phenomenon. Scholars complain about the confusing categories used by David Barrett in his annual attempts to provide the statistics of the world-wide movement. The confusion is because the North American categories do not replicate easily outside the region. He is annually compelled to invent new categories to deal with empirical observations in the non-Western world that could not fit into the mould of Western categories. In these far regions of the world, Pentecostals centre the Bible as the origin of the movement. The question is often about the manifestations of the pneumatic dimensions of the gospel in various regions and cultures and how the people appropriated these dimensions. Perhaps they privilege the supernatural origins that enlightened concerns have blotted out of the literature in pursuit of the modernity discourse.

But there has been a recent resurgence of interest in pneumatology that could be helpful; for instance, Velli-Matti Karkkainen’s contribution that surveyed a wide range of authors.13 A Biblical pneumatological approach would emphasise the re-appropriation of the event that occurred on the Day of Pentecost. The event was not isolated but linked with the powerful ministry of Jesus that was connected to the fulfilment of God’s interventions in the life of Israel in the Old Testament. The old pietists called the born again experience as experiencing “a Pentecostal day,” and Fletcher and Wesley believed that everyday should be a day of Pentecost for believers as they walk in the Spirit and live a life of holiness. The Seattle, Washington, Apostolic Herald declared in 1901 that: instead of this visitation being a reform, or strictly a movement, it is rather a breaking forth of centuries of overdue power, the praying down of heaven’s Pentecost.14

The Pentecost event included the transfer of the baton to the disciples whose ministries were continued in the early church. Naturally, early Pentecostals traced their genealogy to a recovery of the character of the early church. This approach names Pentecostalism by rooting it in the religious experiences of individuals and in the signs of the pneumatic explosions in the lives of transformed individuals who begin to walk and talk like the saved. The manifestation of the charismata in the lives of believers defines the devotees of the new religious movement. They were perceived as new because the old evangelicals believed that these charismata had ceased. This means that in studying world-wide Pentecostalism, effort should be made to distinguish the Pentecostals from other forms of Protestant Christianity just as the insiders do. Of course, Pentecostalism “set to work” the core message of evangelical Protestantism and may be the old evangelicalism writ large but they are not necessarily the same. Pentecostals emphasise different teachings and have different histories. This explains why older forms of Christianity have been more virulently against Pentecostalism, perceived as intimate enemies, than unbelievers and secularists. Edward Cleary and Hannah Stewart-Gambino in Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America protested that “a good deal of discussion of Protestant history in Latin America has been irrelevant for explaining Pentecostal growth.”15 This is because of the relationship between early Pentecostalism and the evangelical streams. Allan Anderson characterises Pentecostalism as part of a larger 19 th/20 th century charismatic movement that embraced the Irvingites among others but Ian M. Randall in an earlier study of English evangelicals indicated the negative attitude of the Keswick movement to early Pentecostalism.16 Thus, the North American debate about genealogy names the phenomenon around a specific revival and a specific movement, the Azusa Street revival and thereby circumscribes the historiography. Undoubtedly, the Azusa Street revival is very important but it is a North American event, and a certain movement that first called itself Pentecostal and whose genealogy may be traced to a host of religious antecedents such as holiness movements, Wesleyan Methodism, black spirituality, and Roman Catholic devotional practices which converged because of shared elements, especially theology. Allan Anderson’s An Introduction to Pentecostalism has done a good job by tracing a wide variety of “precedents”. Fletcher, Wesley himself, a host of pietists, and early church fathers provide the theological origins of Pentecostalism. They canvassed the nuances in the concepts of baptism with the Spirit, baptism in the Spirit, in-filling of the Holy Spirit, sanctification as a process, and perfectionism. Racial and doctrinal reasons led to the splintering of this movement in spite of efforts to create an inclusive community.17 But all the genres retained certain core characteristics. From here the debate specifies the doctrinal divisions such as the place of tongues, the attitude towards the Trinity, and the understanding of the eschatology. The identity marker of the movement, therefore, goes beyond the new birth to include theological emphases.

The question still remains whether the other regions of the globe did not experience the same phenomenon before the Pentecostals from either Azusa Street or from many of its divisions arrived, aided by the new transportation and communication technology. If they did not, there will be little doubt about the genealogy of that movement. But if other regions experienced the move of the Spirit independently, then, there is a need to reconstruct the historiography of the movement world-wide. For instance, Dale Irvin admits that Azusa Street was a “local history with a global design” because missionaries were sent from Azusa Street. But he used the concept of “the logic of Pentecostal spirituality” to explain the global dimension. One is not sure about the content of the “logic,” but it allegedly resulted more often than not in the immediate localising of these global designs in the new situations to which they were communicated. The result was the rapid adoption and adaptation of Pentecostal spirituality and practice far beyond Azusa Street often without any reference or deference to the Azusa Street experience…One can trace some form of historical line of apostolic succession from virtually every Pentecostal and Charismatic movements today back to Azusa Street.18

This is a stupendous claim that assumes that all the protagonists in the non-American Pentecostal and Charismatic movements trace their genealogy to Azusa Street and merely adopted and adapted the spirituality without paying due deference to the origin. It echoes Karla Poewe’s assertion that “what is global are traditions that reach across national boundaries, take local colour, and move again.19” The most benign response is that the story line ignores the clues from different regions that the same Holy Spirit started the process by manifesting itself to believers all over the whole inhabited earth without deference to any single geographical source. There was a repeat of the astonishment that perplexed Peter in Caesarea or the Swedes from North Dakota who went to South Africa at the turn of the century and were scandalised when the “heathens” spoke in tongues. In fairness, both Irvin and Poewe are attentive to the process of indigeneity. As Irvin argued in a different setting,

A new framework or mission studies is actively under construction today extending these insights in light of the growth of Christianity world-wide. In the emerging paradigm we find the agency not just of western missionaries but of the prophets, catechists, preachers, priests and other indigenous church leaders who were responsible for constructing the history of Christianity in various global regions figuring more prominently.20

The emphasis is that the story of Pentecostalism is different from the story of cross-cultural missionary enterprise or primary evangelisation process. The latter requires that someone should proclaim Christ to another person; but in the former, the Spirit could baptise without a human agency! This is the subtle point made in an interview by G. Campbell Morgan, a protagonist in the Welsh Revival. He pointed to the characteristics of the revival: rapid, ubiquitous, over-powering, and spontaneous, and concluded thus:

You tell me that the revival originates with Roberts. I tell you that Roberts is a product of the revival. If you and I could stand above Wales, looking at it, you would see fire breaking out here, and there, and yonder, and somewhere else, without any collusion or prearrangement21

Pentecostal historiography must abandon the search for founding missionaries in non-western contexts.

In the Latin American case, Cleary and Stewart-Gambino objected to the stereotype:

“Pentecostalism is not a North American invasion. It did not begin with a pervasive outside missionary effort, nor are major groups sustained by personnel or money from United States or Europe. In the three most prominent areas where Pentecostalism has expanded, Brazil, Chile, and Central America, outside missionaries helped to spark, not create, a Latin American institution.”22

In Chile, the indigenous people invited Willis C. Hoover, a convert, to become their leader. He was not their founder. In Brazil, the missionaries’ roles were catalytic. They were few in numbers and did not finance the growing operations. This is the major contention of David Stoll’s book.23 He discovered that the Assemblies of God with ten million members in Latin America (at that time) expended about twenty million dollars yearly, much of it spent in the United States. These scholars recognise the role of and connection with the US but distinguish between pervasive and minimalist presence, funding and non- or limited funding, and being a catalyst/spark and creating/ constructing a movement. The implication is to examine more clearly the dynamics of the American connection in each region because the pattern of relationship changed through time and space.

In many parts of the world there are three caveats that must be emphasised: charismatic revivals started without such catalytic sparks. People received Holy Spirit baptism before inviting outsiders. Moreover, the size of Pentecostal missionary enterprise in the early period between the years 1900-14 (when the First World broke out) was relatively small. First, the failure of tongues to breach the language barriers was accentuated by the limited success of many solo enterprises that had insufficient funding. Second, the attempt to mobilise a group effort from 1909 failed in the US. In Britain, it gave rise to the Pentecostal Missionary Union of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1926, they had only 26 missionaries: 17 in China, 6 in India, 2 in Japan, and 1 in Africa. Allan Anderson has used their journals to reconstruct the sources of their failure. In spite of the missionary impulse within the movement, and the hyped reports in the newsletters, the story in the field was less edifying: missionaries lacked cross-cultural training and orientation, they were insensitive, impolite, patronising, racist, and wrote tendentious, confrontational, inaccurate reports.24

In Africa, for instance, branches of classical Pentecostal churches are fewer in number than the indigenous ones that did not originate from the classical group. Among the latter, many early devotees of the new birth did not know about Azusa Street, and do not refer to themselves as “Pentecostal”. In Congo Brazzaville, they refer to themselves as revival churches, in Ghana as charismatic churches, and in Nigeria as born again Christians. The pattern of naming memorialises the experiences that constituted the origin of the phenomenon. This makes periodisation important to the issue of naming because a number of the indigenous group developed contacts with the classical groups later. Each of the indigenous group designates itself by its ministerial emphasis: evangelism, deliverance, intercession, fellowship, bible distribution, child evangelism, mission to other African countries, mission to the un-reached communities within each nation, or by theological emphasis: prosperity, holiness, witchcraft cleansing, spiritual warfare, prophecy, and so on. Many are so eclectic in their doctrinal emphases that the contentious matters in North America do not arise, and do not define the identity of the Pentecostal. Few trace their genealogy to North America. Are they distorting the global Pentecostal genealogy or merely identifying where the rain of the charismatic gospel or showers of blessing met them?

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF GLOBAL PENTECOSTAL GENEALOGY

The historiography raises three issues: time and periodisation, space and geography(the outward context) generate the historical discourse. Culture and indigeneity (the interior context) feeds the cultural discourse, while interactions, interpenetrations, and modes of appropriations (convergences) enable the historian to engage the instrumentalist discourse. The implication is that the scholar exploring the genealogy of global Pentecostalism must be attentive to the historical dimension, especially the preceding revivals (or revitalisation movements). Some had indigenous origins. Among those that had external contacts, the outward and interior dimensions of the context are crucial in appreciating the patterns of convergence. The design of time frames first reach back to the past of the community, and then forward to the encounter with the change agents. Attention must be paid to the process of change (its direction, pace, momentum, magnitude, and effects). The geographical location (outward context) and the cultural dynamics and worldview (interior contexts) determine the vertical patterns and the horizontal patterns of expansion and explain the emergent forms that appear in the convergences. Interpretation must start from the people’s past because people respond to change agents based on where they are and how they live, organise themselves, and respond to the numinous world and the external forces around them. To tie the issues into a bundle: as the gospel spreads into various regions of the world and encounters different peoples, mental and material cultures are exchanged, people appropriate the message and new ideas and material cultures through the prism of their worldviews and cultures, they become creative in demonstrating the indigenising capacity of the gospel to answer questions raised within the interiors of those cultures, and they weave emergent cultures that create new challenges in daily living. New forms of religious expressions emerge in the multi-layered encounters. As time goes on, people move from merely accepting the new gospel and abandoning the gods of their forebears to a different level in which they seek a closer, personal relationship with Christ through an experience of the power of the Holy Spirit. The pathway is the indigenous religion. The element of continuity must be stressed before identifying the breaking points in this religious journey. Robin Horton’s seminal paper on “African Conversion”, therefore, sought to enrich the social-structural analysis with the intellectualist discourse in probing why people would make the double jump in their worldviews.25

The process is beyond mere adaptation. As St. Paul argued in the early church period, a convert is neither a proselyte nor a God-fearer. The convert turns all that is important in the individual and communal contexts towards Christ who makes all things new. The urge for a revitalised, transforming spirituality puts the born- again Christian at odds with the mainline churches. In Uganda, the charismatic (balokole / tuketenderazza) youths told the Principal of their Anglican teachers’ college (Mukoni) in the 1930s that they were “obedient rebels” contesting the modernist views of some of their teachers.26 They set on wheels what their teachers had shown them in the Bible, and brought puritan ethical challenges to the mission institution in which evangelical zeal had routinised. The balokole youths insisted upon the gospel demands on the lives of the Spirit-filled believers. In other contexts the new ethical challenges resembled the situation in Corinth where the question about the propriety for the Christian to eat meat that was acquired from idol temples could only arise from the encounter of the gospel with non-Jewish cultures. St. Paul’s answer demonstrates a great sensitivity to a new culture and the need to privilege indigenous appropriation. Theories of culture teach us that culture contact generates a spectrum of responses best understood within the totality of the culture. In the encounters, emergent cultures arise that are new.

As the Indian scholar Mathias Mundadan observed, the history of Christianity is the history of the encounter of the gospel message of Jesus with different peoples, the impregnation of these contexts by the gospel, the assimilation of the cultures of the peoples by the gospel and that of the gospel by their cultures, and the consequent changes in the Christian movement and of the cultures of the people.27

We need to listen to Margaret Mead again because this compels an admission that there are different stories in the Pentecostal story and the stories move along different time frames. But there are large areas of convergence that re-define the contours of each experience, and may even create homogenous dimensions. Christianity has a global impulse that Pentecostalism inherited and intensified.

To re-emphasise the perspective on the genealogy of world-wide Pentecostalism, there are two issues underlyin the historiography on genealogy: the first is what constitutes global Pentecostalism? The second is how the story should be told. I have argued that the extant literature is unidirectional, profiling the global in terms of Western spread to non-Western contexts, or the missionary extension of the North American Pentecostalism to the rest of the world, or, how the yeast from North America leavened the whole inhabited world. To the contrary is the image of encounters with the Holy Spirit in universes filled with many spirits, and the expressions of conversions that enabled the Holy Spirit to perform in better ways the roles that the indigenous spirits played in the individual and communal lives. People express the new relationships in various ways that reflect on their indigenous cosmologies. As they come into contact with others who share the same charismatic spirituality, they reconfigure certain aspects of what they teach, believe, and practice, and translate the charismatic affirmations and expressions into the language that people understand and in ways that serve the people’s needs. They build inter-national and intra-regional linkages that enhance their evangelical capacities and image, avoid foreign control, and essay to be recognised as a ministerial partner. A global perspective recognises the integrity of the multiple contexts. It is beyond geography; it involves the enlargement of the religious space in the interior and at the surface levels. The global consists of the various ways in which charismatic spirituality is appropriated, expressed, articulated, and lived in response to the challenges from indigenous cultures and ecosystems and other competing religious forms. There is no centre and there is no periphery. In North America, Pentecostals are challenged by innumerable culture wars and technologically-driven morality just as believers in other parts of the world are challenged by shamanism and witchcraft. As David Martin would say, the truly global is quintessentially local.

Wilbert R. Shenk, therefore, urged that we should enlarge the story; that, if we observe that history’s river has overflowed its traditional banks and is cutting new channels, then the emphasis falls on discontinuity and we recognise that our perspective framework must be modified if we are to do justice to this dynamic reality.

He pointed to three forces that compel the enlargement of the story:

“the shift from being a Eurocentric church to a polycentric one; the multiple sources of growth-biological, missionary, indigenous dynamics; and the dynamic social, political,and economic environment that has contributed to this rapid change.”28

AMERICAN CONNECTIONS AND MULTIPLE-SITES IN GLOBAL PENTECOSTALISM

This brings to the fore the issues about time frame, nature, and dynamics of North American Pentecostal contact with the non-Western world. It must be recognised that the stories of Latin America, Asia, and Africa are like different streams that contribute to the river of life. For instance, the African contacts and networks with American Pentecostalism increased tremendously in the 1980s. There were occasional evangelistic thrusts from the late 1950s before the tempo increased in the 1960-1970 period. The tele-evangelists escalated the contacts from the 1980s through their television programs, books, videos, cassettes, and ministerial organisations that are set up in different parts of the world to co-ordinate or facilitate outreach events. The impact on the character of world-wide Pentecostalism cannot be denied. But the outpouring of the Spirit was experienced long before these encounters. There were many revivals in yesteryears; and many indigenous people spoke in tongues without the presence of missionaries and much to the consternation of mainline churches. Indeed, many Classical Pentecostals were invited by local believers; and most Pentecostal missionary incursions to Africa in the period 1900-1910s yielded little dividends or simply collapsed. A reconstruction of the genealogy of the movement must distinguish between the outpouring of the charismatic power, the arrival of Pentecostal groups from the outside, and the survival, development, and growth of both strands of the movement.

From the 1980s, the dynamics of Western relationships with non-Western Pentecostal groups intensified into a complex permutation with about a dozen patterns: i) invitation from non-Western believers; ii)indigenous leaders controlling a classical Pentecostal church; iii)indigenous group funded externally; iv)networks of partners for outreaches; v) an external operation controlling leadership and funding; vi) an external operation controlling leadership with locally-sourced funds; vii)Western-based partners that sponsor non-Western leaders to seminars, training in Bible schools, annual workshops, and opportunities to preach; viii)western sponsors of diaconic services (socio-economic projects); ix)television and radio ministries ( for instance, Trinity Broadcasting Network,700 Club, Daystar etc); x) exportation of material culture: books, videos, and cassettes; xi)international fellowships run by indigenous leaders (for instance, Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship, Women’s Aglow, Gideon Bible International; and xii) outposts of Western-based ministries.

To illustrate the importance of checking the time with data from Africa, the periodisation of charismatic movements highlights the significant datelines, 1910-1914, 1920-1947, and the charismatic outbreaks that started in the late 1960s and blossomed in the 1970s when an outpouring of the Spirit occurred literally from the mouth of babes. Here again the youthful puritan preachers known as the aliliki ( Malawi) or guerrillas of Christ (Kenya) had nothing to do with the charismatic renewal movement that occurred in the West from the mid-1960s. The nature of the American connection in the heady 1980s became important in the second decade of the youthful charismatic movement in Africa and created new emphases. Paul Emeka has used a study of the Benson Idahosa Factor in Nigerian Pentecostalism to demonstrate how the linkage with American televangelists (especially Baker’s PTL) enabled Benson Idahosa to reshape African Pentecostalism in five ways.29 He brought the prosperity gospel, the Episcopal polity, televangelism, mega-church with mega projects, and theological education that sponsored a large group of African students who spread the faith and deliverance theology throughout the continent. The watershed was the Fire Convention organised by Reinhard Bonnke in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1984 under the banner, Africa Shall Be Saved 30Four thousand evangelists from forty-four African countries participated in a tent supplied by Kenneth Copeland at a cost of one million dollars. Idahosa was the African among the keynote speakers.

But from the late 1990s there were six significant shifts: there was a criticism of prosperity theology, a return to holiness ethic, the blossoming of intercession ministry, an intensified evangelism, engagement of the public space, and a massive charismatisation of the mainline churches. An Africa-wide organisation of intercessors developed armed with new doctrines about spiritual warfare and land cleansing projects.31 Meanwhile, a strong missionary impulse and engagement of the public space emerged in the midst of untoward socio-economic and political turmoil and the second liberation of Africa from military dictators. This period also witnessed the impact of African and Latin American Pentecostalism on North America as the Third Wave movement (Peter Wagner, Charles Kraft and others) became prominent. Robert Priest, Thomas Campbell, and Bradford Mullen declared that a new animistic paradigm has invaded the scions of Azusa Street. In Britain Michael Reed, the pastor of Peniel Church, Essex declared it a modern mythology. The debate revealed how the face of global Pentecostalism was changing. The West was confronted with a new expression of the movement.32 The spin-off to this debate was the allegation by Western scholars that the Korean David Yonggi Cho was indulging in shamanism!33

The American connection in shaping the character of world-wide Pentecostalism from the

1980s can neither be denied nor ignored. But as American Pentecostalism impacted the non- Western world so did the spirituality from those regions flow into the North American religious environment. The questions are when did the connection occur and how did it function? Does it explain the origins in many global contexts? or did it shape the expressions or character of Pentecostalism at certain points in time? To what extent was the character of American Pentecostalism re-shaped by global connections? The perspective here is that the American connection is more important in studying the character of the movement during the last three decades of the millennium than in tracing its genealogy.

Clues point to multiple origins of Pentecostalism in various regions of the world. It is interesting that just before the Welsh Revival in 1904, Korea experienced its own in 1903 at Wosan. In 1905 a major revival started in Mukti India. The following year, Dr Howard Agnew Johnston brought the stories about the Welsh and Mukti revivals to Korea and triggered another revival in Pyongnang, Korea, as narrated by Jonathan Goforth. As the Mukti revival flowed to Gujarat in 1906, the Azusa Street revival flowered. While the revivals in the Korean peninsula were connected, they intersected with the spirit of the Welsh and Indian revivals. However, the distinctive power of the Welsh revival was its vernacular. People in Azusa Street heard about the revivals in Wales and India but neither precedent catalysed the Azusa Street phenomenon. For instance, when the Alfred G. Garr and his wife Lillian came to India from Azusa Street they exulted that “the revival had already broken out among the natives and some were speaking in tongues.” The Apostolic Faith newspaper had declared the Garrs as the first pastors to leave Azusa Street for the “regions beyond.” Later, they participated in the Calcutta revival of 1907/10. 1910 was the same year when Wade Harris started a major charismatic thrust from the Grebo Islands through Ivory Coast to the Gold Coast in West Africa. He itinerated, baptised, preached, taught new choruses in the vernacular, healed, and performed many miracles. He quickened the pace of Christianisation and stamped it with a charismatic character.

In all these places except Azusa Street the emphasis was on confession of sins. In Wales, the prayer, Lord, bend me! changed Evans Robert and became a recurring theme of his ministry. Public confession featured in North America but the revivalists privileged and argued about evidentiary tongues. Speaking in tongues appeared later at Mukti and was never regarded as an initial evidence or an identity marker. Minnie Abrams sided with those who opposed evidentiary tongues.34 Some of these revivals may have been episodic while others created new churches that blossomed into the future. The 1907 event has shaped the character of Protestantism in South Korea to the present. Azusa Street revival certainly had much significance and an impact beyond its brief life time. The Welsh phenomenon equally had a wide impact. Revivals broke out in distant places as people listened to the story of what happened in other places; thus, Mukti was connected to Valpraiso, Chile. A keen eye to periodisation helps us to reconstruct the genealogies and the changing faces of the movement. It shows the global convergences as well as the separate trajectories as each region confronts its specific problems or demons.35

For African Pentecostals other directions and connections developed beyond the American connection: Rosalind Hackett has explored the inter-southern hemisphere connections, and Matthew Ojo probed the intra –African networks. Many Nigerian Pentecostal churches started branches in other African countries. For instance, within its first decade (1982-1992), the Deeper Life Bible Church, founded by William Kumuyi in Lagos opened branches in sixteen African countries. Gerrie ter Haar has examined the patterns of reverse missionary flows by African Christians in Europe, and Cephas Omenyo has pointed to the intensity of South Korean missionary enterprises setting up churches in Ghana.36 An aspect of the contemporary era is the growth of immigrant churches in the Western world. A Nigerian evangelist has built the largest church in Kiev while the Redeemed Christian Church of God, founded in 1952 by an illiterate preacher in Nigeria recently paid over a million dollars to purchase 490 acres of Floyd, Texas ( an ancient citadel of the Klu Klux Clan). They plan to build a huge amphitheatre, an artificial lake, and a water park. The church now has over three million members in eighty countries. In the explosion of Christian Universities in Africa, Pentecostals are major players. They have built world- class universities in Africa such as Covenant University, Otta, established by Winners Chapel, Nigeria. The local context is important because this is a religious force that is sensitive to the socio-economic and political terrains. Its adaptability in various regions has been one major source of growth even though it has been accused of being other-worldly.37

CONCLUSION

What, then, is the global character of Pentecostalism? The complexity and fluidity of the movement is notorious. As David Martin intoned, movements play different roles at different times in different places, even while they retain continuity and family likeness.38 Martin emphasises the ambiguities born of the dynamism of the movement as it assumes different colours in various parts of the world: even when it crosses borders, it goes native; there are some cases of Anglo-Saxon origins but many where it is free standing; in some places it expresses folk religiosity but ingests it; the class content of its membership cannot be easily classified; it may be varied but retains family likeness; it fuses the modern mode with an ancient spirit or primal piety; it recovers the Word but transcends it. It is a movement characterised by variety, flexibility, and an expanding continuum of adaptive social inventions traceable in its ministerial formation, liturgy, economic practices, organisations, and infrastructure that range from storefronts in poor favellas to imposing structures in cities. A viable study of its genealogy and character begins by collating the rich cameos of local histories. In these resides its global identity.

TREFWOORDE

Pentekostalisme, Wêreldwye Pentekostalisme, Wortels van Pentekostalisme, Historiografie van Pentekostalisme, Afrika perspektief

KEY WORDS

Pentecostalism, Global Pentecostalism, Roots of Pentecostalism, Historiography of Pentecostalism, African perspective

Prof. JW Hofmeyr
Fakulteit Teologie
Universiteit van Pretoria
PRETORIA

Hoffie.Hofmeyr@up.ac.za

Prof. OU Kalu
McCormick Theological Seminary
Chicago
Illinois
VSA

okalu@mccormick.edu