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Confronting the Ills of Society: Thomas Clarkson and the Slave Trade
Get PDFThe first generation of Christians constituted a small minority within the Roman Empire and did not seek to wield significant social influence. Thus, the New Testament does not provide a direct mandate for social transformation. Instead, Christians were encouraged to maintain a constructive relationship with the state while also being prepared to adopt adversarial stances when faced with oppression from hostile authorities. This context characterised their existence under the centralised, undemocratic Roman Empire. The challenge arises in applying the teachings of the New Testament to a participatory democracy, where Christians have ample opportunities for public engagement. Using Thomas Clarkson’s approach to confronting the slave trade in Britain as an entry point, this paper has a two-pronged focus: 1) to bring Clarkson’s somewhat eclipsed story into contemporary church-state discussions and 2) to contend that the strategies employed by Clarkson and other abolitionists can serve as a model for contemporary African churches and Christians in their efforts to engage with the democratic state, aiming to foster societal transformation
The Church of Pentecost and the Moral Transformation of Ghana
Get PDFThe paper argues that the close relationship between Ghana’s largest church, the Church of Pentecost, and the country’s main political parties is indicative more generally of an increasingly close relationship between Christianity and politics, including in relation to seeking to amend and improve the moral behaviour of Ghanaians which in turn could help improve the quality of the country’s democracy, said to be declining. The paper adopts a comparative and qualitative methodological approach while also drawing on Afrobarometer’s quantitative data. The key result is that there is a link between morality and democratic health in Ghana, while the major conclusion is that the potential to improve democratic health by improving national morality is limited, mainly because many citizens are sceptical that such a path is likely to achieve the desired objective.
“God Would Himself Raise Up a Nation out of Africa”: God’s Covenant, The Church of Pentecost and Ghana’s Public Sphere
Get PDFIn this article, I discuss the trajectories of religion and politics in Ghana, which have been extensively analysed, focusing on the role of the Church of Pentecost (CoP) in shaping the country’s public sphere. Given the burgeoning contestation over Ghana’s public sphere, focusing particularly on the CoP’s visible presence in the country’s sphere as providers of social services and vanguards of the country’s moral rectitude, this paper concentrates on answering the questions: what accounts for the conviction and boldness of the CoP shattering the boundaries of religion and politics? How is the church reorienting its members to conform to its moral reforms? My questions chime with the debate between the often glossed-over and blurred lines of demarcation between religion and politics. As a methodological approach, I deploy critical reading of Ghana’s socio-political histories and the ideas of secularism to argue that the CoP, currently Ghana’s largest Pentecostal denomination, has revitalised the premodern logic of state-religion relations, based on its intermeshing of covenantal relationship with God since the 1930s and oral theology, to stage itself as an important player in Ghana’s public governance. The CoP’s perception of itself as God’s chosen church rationalises its efforts at choreographing Ghana away from Western cultural influences. Thus, both religion and CoP’s covenant are prior to the state, and the church seeks to guide the public sphere and governance of Ghana so that the country can fulfil its calling as God’s end-time chosen nation from Africa for global evangelism
Stephen D. Barkley, Pentecostal Prophets: Experience in Old Testament Perspective, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2023 Kindle Edition, pp. 172.
No full textBased on his doctoral dissertation, Stephen D. Barkley\u27s "Pentecostal Prophets" explores prophecy through Old Testament Scripture and modern Pentecostal practices
“Bless and do not curse”: Contemporary Pentecostalism, African cultures, and the practice of cursing
Get PDFWe discuss in this article the phenomenon of cursing in African Christianity, specifically contemporary Pentecostalism, and how this relates to African cultures and the teachings of Scripture. In both African cultures and contemporary Pentecostalism, the phenomenon of cursing is quite widespread. In Romans 12:14, Paul states: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.”53 Pentecostalism is a religion that believes in biblical authority and so we must ask the question why do their leaders encourage cursing which goes against the grain of Scriptural teaching? The sub questions guiding these reflections include the following: What is a curse? How does it feature in the African traditional worldviews? Why have charismatic leaders of contemporary Pentecostal churches and ministries adopted cursing as an arsenal against their enemies? What does the weaponization of curses teach about contemporary Pentecostal notions of spiritual authority and to what extent does Christian cursing resonate with traditional cultural practices
Religion and sonic practices: Similarities as a source of conflict between Pentecostals and adherents of indigenous religions
Get PDFSilence plays a critical role in many Christian traditions as an important platform for prayer. However, the lived experiences in Pentecostal-Charismatic173 Christianity are seldom quiet. Indeed, participating in a Pentecostal church service involves exuberant activities such as calls-and-responses, clapping, dancing, singing, and shouting. Sound and bodily movement are fundamental because central to their belief is the idea that the Holy Spirit fills adherents, making every action spirit-filled. These practices tend to be controversial and create tension with a section of the population in Ghanaian cities around the year, but they come to a full expression during the implementation of the annual ban on drumming and noisemaking preceding the celebration of the Ga festival of Homowo in Accra
Invalidating indigenous religious traditions via Christianity: Popular Ghanaian gospel songs/music
Get PDFThis paper is about a subtle means deployed by followers of Christianity in delegitimizing Indigenous Religious Traditions (IRTs) in Ghana. It traces the activities of the historical debut of both the fourteenth-century Portuguese entry and the 19th-century missionary activities. It argues that local gospel music lyrics are meant to communicate a message to the listener, and the message is geared almost all the time towards delegitimizing the mainstay IRTs and their contents. The current generation of Christians, even though headed by Africans, are following suit of what happened earlier in those two periods—employing various means in expanding Christianity in an attempt to shrink or uproot IRTs. Lyrics and graphic video pictures in Songs/Music have been an ardent device directed to this agenda. Using historical and the content analysis method in analysing fifty local Ghanaian gospel music, we noted the genre in the songs as fear, spiritual battle between the enemy, the devil (witches, dwarves, juju,) disease, and God, power, empowerment, healing, freedom, and appellations. The recurring markers from songs composed by both known musicians and anonymous composers were grouped into three broad themes and analyzed. Findings indicate that the local gospel songs depict a plan to undermine IRTs by distinguishing between good and evil. Supplier, giver of good things (God and his son Jesus), and the destroyer and detractor of good things is the (devil) present in IRTs
A theological reflection using Pentecostal narratives to explore the connection between Pentecostalism and indigenous religions of Malawi
Get PDFThis essay uses a theological reflection of Pentecostal narratives from Malawi in southeast Africa where I was born and raised to explore the connection between Pentecostalism and indigenous religions. It has been sparked and undergirded by several key events that I have experienced in my faith life. I am a descendant of a Pentecostal preacher (my father), a Presbyterian minister (my grandfather) who had two brothers, one an indigenous religion priest and spiritual healer and the other a founding apostle of an African Independent Church. Yet, I have taken on an academic journey in theological education with Pentecostal leanings. Chief among the events that sparked my Pentecostal curiosity behind the argument of this essay is the conversion of my grandfather’s brother from an indigenous religion to Christianity and the myriad struggles he faced as he discerned what to do with his longstanding spiritual gifts as a medium for the community. He had refused to convert to Christianity for a long time in spite of—or maybe because of—his Presbyterian brother’s witness. He always said that Christianity (especially that of his Presbyterian brother) did not understand the spirit world with which he had dealt every day all his adult life. He refused to recognize it as a religion because for him, a religion must attend to the spirit-world. If it did not, like the Christianity of my grandfather, it was only fit to be a moral philosophy
Charismatic theology of the blood in Ghanaian Christianity
Get PDFThere are several independent Charismatic churches in contemporary West Africa, where worshippers carry communion wine and olive oil to be prayed upon, and sanctified as sacramental substances and tokens either for spiritual protection or for dealing with various existential problems. However, the belief in tokens is an African phenomenon and not something attributed only to a group of Christians labeled African Charismatics. It is an irony, that while the leaders of the historic mission denominations and classical Pentecostal traditions often dismissed these resources of supernatural succor as demonic and discouraging their use in their sermons and publications, most of their own members secretly visit these prophets who give them tokens and symbols like holy water, soaps, handkerchiefs, olive oil, apotropaic baths, candles, concoctions, magical rings, magical creams and many more. Sacred statements, words and songs can also be considered as tokens. Some scholarly works have been done on African Christian songs. These include Hayfron and Quayesi-Amakye.155 However, their focus is not on the place of the blood of Jesus in African Christian songs
