Christianity In Ghana Research Articles

Book Review: African Proverbs Reveal Christianity in Culture: A Narrative Portrayal of Builsa Proverbs Contextualizing Christianity in Ghana

Book Review: African Proverbs Reveal Christianity in Culture: A Narrative Portrayal of Builsa Proverbs Contextualizing Christianity in Ghana

Book Review: African Proverbs Reveal Christianity in Culture: A Narrative Portrayal of Builsa Proverbs Contextualizing Christianity in Ghana

Book Review: African Proverbs Reveal Christianity in Culture: A Narrative Portrayal of Builsa Proverbs Contextualizing Christianity in Ghana

Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power. Charismatic Christianity in Ghana

Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power. Charismatic Christianity in Ghana

Transformation and Migration Among Members of a Pentecostal Church in Ghana and London

AbstractWhile an ideology of rupture is central to understanding Pentecostal Christianity in Ghana, not enough attention has been given to the moral relationships and ritual practices that help sustain a Pentecostal transformation and its situational application in different contexts. By comparing the experiences of members of the Church of Pentecost (CoP) in Ghana and London, I show how Pentecostal transformation provides church members with an ethical framework, that helps them cope with unhealthy relationships, witchcraft attacks, and migration, albeit differently. I argue that while promoting discontinuity, individuality, and positive change, Pentecostal transformation also raises concerns regarding continuity, communality, and negativity.

“Whom Do Men Say that I Look Like?”: Representing Christ and Christian Personae in Ghana

From the earliest attempts to spread Christianity in Ghana, European missionaries used religious art as an important tool for spreading ideas about the Christian faith. This was particularly so for the Catholics and Anglicans who have long-established traditions of religious iconography. Initially this art was highly Eurocentric in that Christ and Christian personae were represented as Caucasians. In the 1960s the need for what was described as inculturation, “the ongoing and critical dialogue between faith and culture,” challenged this tradition, and there were a number of attempts to make religious art, especially in Catholic churches in Ghana, more Afrocentric. This article looks at how this switch from a Eurocentric religious art to an Afrocentric inspiration developed, and at the reaction on the part of Ghanaian Christians to what Afrocentric clergymen in the United States have described as an attempt to “dehonkify Christ.”

Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches in Ghana and the African Culture: Confrontation or Compromise?

AbstractThe paper establishes the reality of conflict between Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches in Ghana and the African culture. It examines the history of this conflict since the early days of Christianity in Ghana as well as the causes of the conflict. It also looks at the effects of the conflict on the dialogue expected between Christianity and the African culture, mediation efforts by third party governance and civil society organizations, and the theological implications of the antagonism for the Christian engagement with other non-Christian religions, especially, Islam, which shares Africa with Christianity.

Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power: Charismatic Christianity in Ghana

Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power: Charismatic Christianity in Ghana

Jane E. Soothill. Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power: Charismatic Christianity in Ghana. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007. Studies of Religion in Africa series, xii + 261 pp. Notes. Select Bibliography. Index. $99.00. Cloth.

Jane E. Soothill. Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power: Charismatic Christianity in Ghana. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007. Studies of Religion in Africa series, xii + 261 pp. Notes. Select Bibliography. Index. $99.00. Cloth. - Volume 51 Issue 2

Gender, social change, and spiritual power: charismatic Christianity in Ghana

Against a backdrop of debate concerning the role of Pentecostalism as a mediator of 'modernity', this book examines the interaction between charismatic Christianity, spiritual power and gendered social change in contemporary Ghana.

Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power: Charismatic Christianity in Ghana

Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power: Charismatic Christianity in Ghana

Religious Remediations

This article addresses the interface of video-films and Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity in Ghana. This interface, it is argued, needs to be examined from a position that transcends the confines of film studies and religious studies and leaves behind a secularist perspective on the relationship between religion and film. On the basis of detailed ethnographic research, it is shown that, far from standing apart from the realm of religious beliefs, video-films call upon audio-visual technologies so as to remediate Pentecostal views of the invisible world around which Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity evolves. Video-films invoke a “techno-religious realism” that addresses spectators in such a way that they authorize video representations as authentic. Transcending facile oppositions of technology and belief, media and authenticity, and entertainment and religion, video-films are shown to achieve immediacy and authenticity not at the expense of, but thanks to, media technologies and practices of remediation.

Anointing Through the Screen: Neo-Pentecostalism and Televised Christianity in Ghana

Anointing Through the Screen: Neo-Pentecostalism and Televised Christianity in Ghana

Ghanaian Christianity and Popular Entertainment: Full Circle

In this paper I look at the relationship between Christianity and popular entertainment in Ghana over the last 100 years or so. Imported Christianity was one of the seminal influences on the emergence of local popular music, dance, and drama. But Christianity in turn later became influenced by popular entertainment, especially in the case of the local African separatist churches that began to incorporate popular dance music, and in some cases popular theatre. At the same time unemployed Ghanaian commercial performing artists have, since the 1980s, found a home in the churches. To begin this examination of this circular relationship between popular entertainment and Christianity in Ghana we first turn to the late nineteenth century.The appearance of transcultural popular performance genres in southern and coastal Ghana in the late nineteenth century resulted from a fusion of local music and dance elements with imported ones introduced by Europeans. Very important was the role of the Protestant missionaries who settled in southern. Ghana during the century, establishing churches, schools, trading posts, and artisan training centers. Through protestant hymns and school songs local Africans were taught to play the harmonium, piano, and brass band instruments and were introduced to part harmony, the diatonic scale, western I- IV- V harmonic progressions, the sol-fa notation and four-bar phrasing.There were two consequences of these new musical ideas. Firstly a tradition of vernacular hymns was established from the 1880s and 1890s, when separatist African churches (such as the native Baptist Church) were formed in the period of institutional racism that followed the Berlin Conference of 1884/85. Secondly, and of more importance to this paper, these new missionary ideas helped to establish early local popular Highlife dance music idioms such as asiko (or ashiko), osibisaaba, local brass band “adaha” music and “palmwine” guitar music. Robert Sprigge (1967:89) refers to the use of church harmonies and suspended fourths in the early guitar band Highlife composition Yaa Amponsah, while David Coplan (1978:98-99) talks of the “hybridisation” of church influences with Akan vocal phrasing and the preference of singing in parallel thirds and sixths in the creation of Highlife.

STANDING UP FOR JESUS: A survey of new developments in Christianity in Ghana

STANDING UP FOR JESUS: A survey of new developments in Christianity in Ghana

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:THE BIBLE IN MISSION AND EVANGELISM: The Indispensable Old testament. By G. H. Wolfensberger.THE BIBLE IN MISSION AND EVANGELISM: Multiplying the Loaves: The Bible in Mission and Evangelism. By G. H. Wolfensberger.THE BIBLE IN MISSION AND EVANGELISM: Reform of the Ministry: A Study in the Work of Roland Allen. By David M. Paton, ed.THE BIBLE IN MISSION AND EVANGELISM: A History of Christianity in Ghana. By Hans W. Debrunner.THE BIBLE IN MISSION AND EVANGELISM: Religion in Japanese History. By Joseph M. Kitagawa.