Pentecostalism in Africa

Abstract

The literature on African Pentecostalism is relatively vast and growing rapidly, but it is, unfortunately, caught in the circle of trying to define what African Pentecostalism is, and how it is what it is. How does African Pentecostalism constitute itself in relation to its sensibilities? How does it bear witness to its form of religiosity as a spirituality that is continually affected by African traditional religions, by economic exigencies and political developments in Africa, and by traditions, doctrines, and the gospel message of Christianity? What does it mean for Africans to express or modify Pentecostalism? How does one capture the style by which African Pentecostals leave their marks on Pentecostalism? The question of how African Pentecostalism defines itself is ultimately a question about Africa bearing witness to itself in African Pentecostalism, and about Pentecostalism expressing itself in an African context. The study of this religious movement, then, is not only about African Pentecostalism, but also about Africans bearing witness to their particular mode of being Pentecostal. It tells the story of the multi-directional openness of African Pentecostal social life without applying a constrictive universalizing framework to the fragmentary nature of African Pentecostalism. The movement is an assemblage of practices, ideas and theologies, and interpretations of reality, whose tangled roots burrow deep into the past, present, and future segments of African temporality. African Pentecostalism, like any other human endeavor, is full of fragments, and to understand it scholars must think in parts rather than in unified cultural wholes.