The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume V: The Twentieth Century: Themes and Variations in a Global Context 0198702256, 9780198702252

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T H E O X F O R D HI S T O R Y O F P R O T E S T A N T D I S S E N T I N G TR A D I T I O N S , VOLUME V

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THE OXFORD HISTORY OF PROTESTANT DISSENTING TRADITIONS General Editors: Timothy Larsen and Mark A. Noll The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I The Post-Reformation Era, c.1559–c.1689 Edited by John Coffey The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume II The Long Eighteenth Century, c.1689–c.1828 Edited by Andrew C. Thompson The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume III The Nineteenth Century Edited by Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume IV The Twentieth Century: Traditions in a Global Context Edited by Jehu J. Hanciles The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume V The Twentieth Century: Themes and Variations in a Global Context Edited by Mark P. Hutchinson

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The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions Volume V The Twentieth Century: Themes and Variations in a Global Context

Edited by MARK P. HUTCHINSON

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2018 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018937565 ISBN 978–0–19–870225–2 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements Attempting to address global themes on any subject takes one out of one’s frame, and ‘stretches’ the scholar’s imagination and skill set in often painful ways. Despite a recent (re)turn to ‘world’ and transnational history, historians are largely careful creatures who like to stay close to their sources and contexts. The sort of ‘meaning projection’ required of the authors (and the editor) of this volume in almost every case required a high level of vulnerability, a willingness to be ‘wrong’ on this or that detail so that something larger might be achieved. I thank each of the authors for their willingness to throw themselves into such a difficult task, particularly Candy Gunther Brown (Indiana) for her willingness to see material moved so that the connecting tissue of the volume could be constructed and repetition minimized. To Tim Larsen and Mark Noll, we corporately thank you for entrusting us with this impossible remit: you won’t be surprised, however, if a later approach to do likewise receives the reply ‘not known at this address’! On a more serious note, my personal thanks go to Tim Larsen (Wheaton), Mark Noll (Notre Dame), David Bebbington (Stirling), Stuart Piggin (Macquarie), and John Wolffe (Open University), who have been treasured colleagues and fellow-travellers in the craft of history for many decades. Without the sage advice (and extensive networks) of these friends, and of expert figures such as Brian Stanley (Edinburgh), during the preparation of this volume, the range of authorial input would have been more limited than it is. They performed repeated ‘saves’ when (as is inevitable when operating across five continents in every imaginable academic context) some participating authors dropped out, refused to answer emails, moved, or just went silent. The reader’s indulgence is sought if the result of this global treasure hunt has been that rather more of this volume was written by the editor than was originally intended. This is partially the cost of real working relationships with scholars who—in Ghana, or India, or even on the transitory edges of the academic edifices of the West— often don’t work in positions where study leave or funding is available. This, to me, makes their work all the more remarkable, and I admire them for it. Finally, to the third generation who knocked quietly at the closed editorial door—Lily and Oliver, Simona, Will, and Allegra—the often absent figure known variously as nonno or zio would like you know that you are always in his heart. The world is yours and your talents great: treat them both kindly.

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Contents List of Contributors Series Introduction by Timothy Larsen and Mark A. Noll

Introduction: Dissenting Traditions in Globalized Settings Mark P. Hutchinson and Candy Gunther Brown 1. Encounters with Modernity among Received Spiritualities and Traditions Candy Gunther Brown

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2. Dissenting Traditions and Politics in the Anglophone World Gordon L. Heath

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3. The Bible in the Twentieth-Century Anglophone World Mark P. Hutchinson

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4. Biblical Interpretation in the Majority World K. K. Yeo 5. Dissenting Preaching in the Twentieth-Century Anglophone World Mark P. Hutchinson

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6. Preaching in the Global South Jason A. Carter

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7. Emergent and Adaptive Spiritualities in the Twentieth Century Andy Lord

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8. Glocalized and Indigenized Theologies in the Twentieth Century Mark P. Hutchinson

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9. Organizing for Ministry in the Anglophone World: Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation Barry Ensign-George

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10. The Manufacture of Dissent: Reflexive Christian Traditions in a Global Setting Graham A. Duncan

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11. Dissenting Traditions and Missionary Imaginations: Novel Perspectives on the Twentieth Century Justin D. Livingstone

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12. Gender, Race, and Twentieth-Century Dissenting Traditions Laura Rademaker

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13. Mission, Evangelism, and Translation: From the West to Elsewhere Atola Longkumer

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14. From Reverse to Inverse to Omni-Nodal Dissenting Protestant Mission Mark P. Hutchinson

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15. Communications, New Technologies, and Innovation J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu

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Index

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List of Contributors J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu is Baeta-Grau Professor of Contemporary African Christianity and Pentecostal Studies at the Trinity Theological Seminary, Legon, Accra, Ghana. He has published widely on World Christianity, including articles and book chapters on conservative evangelicalism and media in Africa and among African immigrant communities in Europe and North America. His publications include Contemporary Pentecostal Christianity: Interpretations from an African Context (Eugene, 2013); Pentecostal Mission and Global Christianity (Eugene, 2014); and Sighs and Signs of the Spirit: Ghanaian Perspectives on Pentecostalism and Renewal in Africa (Oxford, 2015). Candy Gunther Brown is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. A historian and ethnographer of religion and culture, her particular focus is the United States (understood within broader global cultural flows), and global charismatic healing practices. She has published widely, including The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill, 2004); Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing (edited; New York, 2011); Testing Prayer: Science and Healing (Cambridge, 2012); The Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America (New York, 2013), and The Future of Evangelicalism in America (co-edited with Mark Silk; New York, 2016). Jason A. Carter has been involved in the training and equipping of pastors and leaders for over ten years in Central Africa. In Equatorial Guinea, he has served as a full-time Professor of Theology, Mission, and Biblical Studies at Instituto Bíblico ‘Casa de la Palabra’ (IBCP Seminary). He is the author of Inside the Whirlwind: The Book of Job through African Eyes (Eugene, 2017). Graham A. Duncan is Emeritus Professor of Church History and Church Polity at the University of Pretoria. A church historian and missiologist, his particular focus is on South African mission history with a special interest in the history of Presbyterianism and theological education. He has published widely, including Lovedale—Coercive Agency: Power and Resistance in Mission Education (Pietermaritzburg, 2003); Partnership in Mission (Cape Town, 2008); and The Native School that Caused all the Trouble: A History of the Federal Theological Seminary of Southern Africa (with Philippe Denis; Pietermaritzburg, 2011). He is also involved in the work of the National Research Foundation and the Council on Higher Education in South Africa. Barry Ensign-George served for twelve years as Associate for Theology in the Office of Theology & Worship of the Presbyterian Church, USA. He has

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written and taught extensively on the nature of church law and denominational/ministry forms, including Denomination: Assessing an Ecclesiological Category (co-edited with Paul M. Collins; London, 2011). Gordon L. Heath is Professor of Christian History, Centenary Chair in World Christianity, and Director of Canadian Baptist Archives at McMaster Divinity College. His research interests lie particularly in the area of church–state and church–war issues. He is the author of A War with a Silver Lining: Canadian Protestant Churches and the South African War, 1899–1902 (Montreal, 2009) and The British Nation is Our Nation: The BACSANZ Baptist Press and the South African War, 1899-1902 (Milton Keynes, 2017). Mark P. Hutchinson is Professor of History at Alphacrucis College in Sydney. As an Australian intellectual historian he has published widely in the history of evangelical Protestantism (with a particular focus on Italian Protestantism) and Australian higher education. He is a Core Member of the Religion and Society Research Cluster at Western Sydney University, and Dean of the Faculty of Education, Arts, and Social Sciences, Alphacrucis College, Sydney. He has published fifteen books and over one hundred research papers, including Iron in our Blood: A History of the Presbyterian Church in NSW, 1788–2001 (Sydney, 2001); A Short History of Global Evangelicalism (Cambridge, 2012); and A University of the People (North Sydney, 2014). Justin D. Livingstone is Queen’s Research Fellow in the School of Arts, English, and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast. He is a literary critic and cultural historian, with interests in Victorian travel writing (particularly the literary culture of African exploration), missionary literature, and colonial fiction. He is the author of Livingstone’s ‘Lives’: A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon (Manchester, 2014) and is currently editing a digital edition of Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857) for publication on Livingstone Online (http://livingstoneonline.org). Atola Longkumer is a Baptist from Nagaland and teaches Religions and Missions at the South Asian Institute of Advanced Christian Studies, Bangalore, India. Her recent writings include Faith and Culture in South and Central Asia in the Edinburgh Companions to Global Christianity series. She also serves as the book review editor of the Mission Studies journal (Brill). Andy Lord is Associate Tutor at St John’s College, Nottingham, UK and pastors three Anglican churches. He teaches in areas of church, mission, and spirituality and is a member of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. He is the author of Spirit-Shaped Mission (Milton Keynes, 2005); Network Church (Leiden, 2012); and Transforming Renewal (Eugene, 2015).

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Laura Rademaker is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian National University with expertise in histories of race, gender, and religion. Her research received the Council of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences 2017 Future Leaders Prize and the 2016 Taylor and Francis prize for best article in History Australia. She is the author of Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission (Hawai’i, 2018). K. K. Yeo is currently Harry R. Kendall Professor of New Testament at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary, and Affiliate Professor at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University (Evanston). He is also a Visiting Professor of Peking University, Peking Normal University, Zhejiang University, Huaqiao University, and Fudan University in China. He has published widely in English and Chinese, and is one of the editors of the Majority World Theology series that includes Trinity Among the Nations (Grand Rapids, 2015) and So Great a Salvation (Grand Rapids, 2017).

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Series Introduction Timothy Larsen and Mark A. Noll

There is something distinctive, if not strange, about how Christianity has been expressed and embodied in English churches and traditions from the Reformation era onwards. Things developed differently elsewhere in Europe. Some European countries such as Spain and Italy remained Roman Catholic. The countries or regions that became Protestant choose between two exportable and replicable possibilities for a state church—Lutheran or Reformed. Denmark and Sweden, for example, both became Lutheran, while the Dutch Republic and Scotland became Reformed. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) established the right of sovereigns to choose a state church for their territories among those three options: Roman Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist. A variety of states adopted a ‘multi-confessional’ policy, allowing different faiths to coexist side by side. The most important alternative expression of Protestantism on the continent was one that rejected state churches in principle: Anabaptists. England was powerfully influenced by the continental Reformers, but both the course and outcome of its Reformation were idiosyncratic. The initial break with Rome was provoked by Henry VIII’s marital problems; the king rejected the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith and retained the Latin mass, but swept away monasteries and shrines, promoted the vernacular Scriptures, and had himself proclaimed Supreme Head of the Church of England. Each of his three children (by three different wives) was to pull the church in sharply different directions. The boy king Edward VI, guided by Archbishop Cranmer and continental theologians like Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr Vermigli, set it on a firmly Reformed trajectory, notably through Cranmer’s second Prayer Book (1552) and the Forty-Two Articles (1553). Mary I reunited England with Rome, instigating both a Catholic reformation and a repression of Protestants that resulted in almost three hundred executions. Finally, Elizabeth I restored the Edwardian settlement (with minor revisions), while sternly opposing moves for further reformation of the kind favoured by some of her bishops who had spent the 1550s in exile in Reformed cities on the continent. In contrast to many Reformed churches abroad, the Church of England retained an episcopal hierarchy, choral worship in cathedrals, and clerical vestments like the surplice. The ‘half reformed’ character of the Elizabethan church was a source of deep frustration to earnest Protestants who wanted to complete England’s

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reformation, to ‘purify’ the church of ‘popish’ survivals. From the mid-1560s, these reformers were called ‘Puritans’ (though the term was also applied indiscriminately to many godly conformists). They represented a spectrum of opinion. Some were simply ‘nonconformists’, objecting to the enforcement of certain ceremonies, like the sign of the cross, kneeling at communion, or the wearing of the surplice. Others looked for ‘root and branch’ reform of the church’s government. (All Dissenting movements would remain expert at employing biblical images in their public appeals, as with ‘root and branch’, taken in this sense from the Old Testament’s book of Ezekiel, chapter 17.) They wished to create a Reformed, Presbyterian state church, that is, to make over the Church of England into the pattern that ultimately prevailed north of the border as the Church of Scotland. Still others gave up on the established church altogether, establishing illegal separatist churches. Eventually, England would see a proliferation of home-grown sects: Congregationalists (or Independents), General Baptists, Particular Baptists, Quakers (or Friends), Fifth Monarchists, Ranters, Muggletonians, and more. These reforming movements flourished during the tumultuous midcentury years of civil war and interregnum, when the towering figure of Oliver Cromwell presided over a kingless state and acted as protector of the godly. But when the throne and the established church were ‘restored’ in 1660, reforming movements of all sorts came under tremendous pressure. The term ‘Dissent’ came to serve as the generic designation for those who did not agree that the established Church of England should enjoy a monopoly over English religious life. Some of the sects—such as the Ranters, Muggletonians, and Fifth Monarchists—soon faded away. Others, especially Independents/Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers survived. Crucially, they were now joined outside the established church by the Presbyterians, ejected from the livings in 1660–62. Although Presbyterians continued to attend parish worship and work for comprehension within the national church, they were (as Richard Baxter noted) forced into a separating shape, meeting in illegal conventicles. In 1689, Parliament confirmed the separation between Church and ‘Dissent’ by rejecting a comprehension bill and passing the so-called Act of Toleration. The denominations of what became known as ‘Old Dissent’—Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers—now enjoyed legally-protected freedom of worship, even as their members remembered being second-class citizens, excluded from public office unless they received Anglican communion. Over the course of the seventeenth century, all of these Dissenting movements had established a presence in the British colonies of North America. (They became ‘British’ and not just ‘English’ colonies in 1707, after the Union of England and Scotland that created ‘Great Britain’.) In the New World began what has become a continuous history of English Dissent adapting to conditions outside of England. In this instance, Congregationalists in New England

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set up a system that looked an awful lot like a church establishment, even as they continued to dissent from the Anglicanism that in theory prevailed wherever British settlement extended. Complexity in the history of Dissent only expanded in the eighteenth century with the emergence of Methodism. This reforming movement within the Church of England became ‘New Dissent’ at the end of the century when it separated from Anglican organizational jurisdiction. In America, that separation took place earlier than in England when the American War of Independence ruled out any kind of official authority from the established church across the sea in the new nation. In the great expansion of the British Empire during the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, Anglophone Dissent moved out even farther and evolved even further. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and other imperial outposts in Africa and Asia usually enjoyed the service of Anglican missionaries and local supporters. But everywhere that Empire went so also went Dissenting Protestants. The creation of the Baptist Missionary Society (1792) and the London Missionary Society (1795) (which was dominated by Congregationalists) inaugurated a dramatic surge of overseas missions. Nowhere in the Empire did the Church of England enjoy the same range of privileges that it retained in the mother country. Meanwhile, back in England, still more new movements added to the Protestant panoply linked to Dissent. Liberalizing trends in both Anglican and Presbyterian theology in the later eighteenth century saw the emergence of the Unitarians as a separate denomination. Conservative trends produced the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren who replicated the earlier Dissenting pattern by originating as a protest against the nineteenth-century Church of England—as well as lamenting the divisions in Christianity and longing to restore the purity of the New Testament church. The Salvation Army (with roots in the Methodist and Holiness movement) was established in response to the challenges of urban mission. Even further complexity appeared during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries when Pentecostal movements arose, usually with an obvious Methodist lineage, especially as developed by the Holiness tradition within Methodism, but also sometimes with a lineage traceable to representatives of ‘Old Dissent’ as well. Historically considered, Pentecostals are grandchildren of Dissent via a Methodist-Holiness parentage. Whether ‘New’ or ‘Old’—or descended from ‘New’ or ‘Old’—all of these traditions have now become global. Some are even dominant in various countries or regions in their parts of the globe. To take United States history as an example, in the eighteenth century Congregationalism dominated Massachusetts. By the early nineteenth century, Methodism was the largest Christian tradition in America. Today, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States is the Southern Baptist Convention. Or with Canada as

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another example, Anglicans remained stronger than did Episcopalians in the United States, but Methodists and Presbyterians often took on establishmentlike characteristics in regions where their numbers equalled or exceeded the Anglicans. In different ways and through different patterns of descent, these North American traditions trace their roots to English Dissent. The same is true in parallel fashion and with different results in many parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, where Pentecostalism is usually the dominant style of Protestantism.

THE F IVE VOLUMES OF THIS SERIES The five-volume Oxford History of Dissenting Protestant Traditions is governed by a motif of migration (‘out-of-England’, as it were), but in two senses of the term. It first traces organized church traditions that arose in England as Dissenters distanced themselves from a state church defined by diocesan episcopacy, the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and royal supremacy, but then follows those traditions as they spread beyond England—and also traces newer traditions that emerged downstream in other parts of the world from earlier forms of Dissent. Second, it does the same for the doctrines, church practices, stances toward state and society, attitudes toward Scripture, and characteristic patterns of organization that also originated in earlier English Dissent, but that have often defined a trajectory of influence independent ecclesiastical organizations. Perhaps the most notable occasion when a major world figure pointed to such an influence came in 1775 when Edmund Burke addressed the British Parliament in the early days of the American revolt. While opposing independence for the colonies, Burke yet called for sensitivity because, he asserted, the colonists were ‘protestants; and of that kind, which is the most adverse to all submission of mind and opinion’. Then Burke went on to say that ‘this averseness in the dissenting churches from all that looks like absolute government’ was a basic reality of colonial history. Other claims have been almost as strong in associating Dissenters with the practice of free trade, the mediating structures of non-state organization, creativity in scientific research, and more. This series was commissioned to complement the five-volume Oxford History of Anglicanism. In the introduction to that series, the General Editor, Rowan Strong, engaged in considerable handwringing about the difficulties of making coherent, defensible editorial decisions, beginning with the question of how fitting the term ‘Anglicanism’ was for the series title. If such angst is needed for Anglicanism, those whose minds crave tidiness should abandon all hope before entering here. Beginning again with just the title, ‘Dissenting’ is a term that obviously varies widely in terms of its connotations and

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applicability, depending on the particular time, place, and tradition. In some cases, it has been used as a self-identifier. In many other cases, groups whom historians might legitimately regard as descendants of Dissent find it irrelevant, incoherent, or just plain wrong. An example mentioned earlier suggests some of the complexity. In colonial Massachusetts, ‘Dissenting’ Congregationalists in effect set up an established church supported by taxes and exercising substantial control over public life. In that circumstance, ‘Dissent’ obviously meant something different than it did for their fellow Independents left behind in England. Nevertheless, Massachusetts Congregationalism is still one of the traditions out-of-England that we have decided to track wherever it went—even into the courthouse and the capitol building. Much later and far, far away, Methodism in the Pacific Island of Fiji would also take on some establishmentarian features, which again suggests that ‘Dissent’ points to a history or affinities shared to a greater or lesser extent, but not to an unchanging essence. Indeed, because Dissent is defined in relation to Establishment, it is a relative term. Another particularly anomalous case is Presbyterianism, which has been a Dissenting tradition in England but a state church in Scotland and elsewhere. When one examines it in other parts of the world, a sophisticated analysis is required—for example, in the United States and Canada (where Presbyterianism was once a force to be reckoned with) and in South Korea (where it still is). In these countries one encounters a tradition originally fostered by missionaries and emigrants with both Dissenting and establishmentarian roots. By including Presbyterians in these volumes, we communicate an intention to consider ‘Dissent’ broadly construed. Other terms might have been chosen for the title, such as ‘Nonconformist’ or ‘Free Churches’. Yet they suffer from the same difficulty—that all groups that might in historical view be linked under any one term will include many who never used the term for themselves or who do not acknowledge the historical connection. Yet ‘Dissenting Studies’ is a recognized and flourishing field of academic studies, focused on the history of those Protestant movements that coalesced as Dissenting denominations in the seventeenth century and on the New Dissent that arose outside the established church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Still, the problem of fitting terminology to historical reality remains. The farther in geographical space that one moves from England and the nearer in time that one comes to the present, the less relevant any of the possible terms becomes for the individuals and Protestant traditions under consideration. Protestants in China or India, for example, generally do not think of their faith as ‘Dissenting’ at all—at least not in any way that directly relates to how that word functioned for Unitarians in nineteenth-century England. Even in the West, a strong sense of denominational identity or heritage has been waning due to increasing individualism and hybridization. Such difficulties are

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inevitable for a genealogy where trunks and branches outline a common history of protest against church establishment, but very little else besides broadly Protestant convictions. The five volumes in this series, as well as the individual chapters treating different regions, periods, and emphases, admittedly brave intellectual anomalies and historical inconsistencies. One defence is simply to plead that untidiness in the volumes reflects reality itself rather than editorial confusion. Church and Dissent, Anglicanism and Nonconformity, were defined by their relationship, and the wall between them was a porous one; while it can be helpful to think it terms of tightly defined ecclesiastical blocs, the reality of lived religion often defied neat lines of demarcation. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglicans read Puritan works, while many Dissenters imbibed the works of great Anglicans. Besides, an editorial plan that put a premium on tidiness would impoverish readers by leaving out exciting and important events, traditions, personalities, and organizations that do fall, however remotely or obscurely, into the broader history of English Protestant Dissent. Which brings us to the second, more significant justification for this fivevolume series. On offer is nothing less than a feast. Not the least of Britain’s contributions to world history has been its multifaceted impact on religious life, thought, and practice. In particular, this one corner of Christendom has proven unusually fertile for the germination of new forms of Christianity. Those forms have enriched British history, while doing even more to enrich all of world history in the last four centuries. By concentrating only on the history of Dissent, these volumes nonetheless illuminate the extraordinary contributions of some of the greatest preachers, missionaries, theologians, pastors, organizations, writers, self-sacrificing altruists and (yes, also) some of the most scandalous, self-defeating, and egotistical episodes in the entire history of Christianity. Taken in its broadest dimensions, this series opens the story of large themes and new ways of thinking that have profoundly shaped our globe—on the relationships between church and state, on the successes and failures of voluntary organization, on faith and social action, on toleration and religious and civil freedom, on innovations in worship, hymnody, literature, the arts, and much else. It is a story of traditions that have significantly influenced Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and even the Middle East (for example, the founding of what is now the American University of Beirut). Especially the two volumes on the twentieth century offer treatments of vibrant, growing forms of Christianity in various parts of the world that often have not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve. All five volumes present the work of accomplished scholars with widely recognized expertise in their chosen subjects. In specifically thematic chapters, authors address issues of great current interest, including gender, preaching, missions, social action, politics, literary culture, theology, the Bible, worship, congregational life, ministerial training, new

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technologies, and much more. The geographical, chronological, and ecclesiastical reach is broad: from the Elizabethan era to the dawn of the twentiethfirst century, from Congregationalists to Pentecostals, from Cape Cod to Cape Town, from China to Chile, from Irvingite apostles in nineteenth-century London to African apostles in twenty-first-century Nigeria. Just as expansive is the roster of Dissenters or descendants of Dissent: from John Bunyan to Martin Luther King, Jr., from prisoner-reformer Elizabeth Fry to megamega-church pastor Yonggi Cho, from princes of the pulpit to educational innovators, from poets to politicians, from liturgical reformers to social reformers. However imprecise the category of ‘Dissent’ must remain, the volumes in this series are guaranteed to delight readers by the wealth of their insight into British history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by what they reveal about the surprising reach of Dissent around the world in later periods, and by the extraordinary range of positive effects and influences flowing from a family of Christian believers that began with a negative protest.

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Introduction Dissenting Traditions in Globalized Settings Mark P. Hutchinson and Candy Gunther Brown

On first blush, it might appear that the twentieth century opened with the victory of Dissent/dissent, and closed with its irrelevance. While the Test Acts were repealed in 1828, it was not until the 1850s that dissenters and nonconformists could matriculate or graduate from the great British Universities, and Divinity fellowships and professorships remained out of reach until the university statutes were changed in 1913. The long rearguard action of Anglican establishment in Britain, conflated with the Irish question amid the passions swirling around the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (under the Irish Church Act, 1869), meant that the presumption of Anglican class establishment lingered long in Britain. (Some would suggest that it lingers still.) This was less uniform elsewhere in the anglophone world. Despite effective disestablishment in the 1830s and 1840s in Canada and Australia, there were still echoes of the interaction of class, race, and religion until the early 1960s. In both countries, part of the resolution of issues surrounding national representation, global ecumenicity, and relationships with the indigenous peoples of the land(s), resulted in the formation of national ecumenical churches which absorbed much of their former dissenting constituencies. In the USA, ‘race’ remained a key distinguishing issue (indeed does so through to the present), and sheer size and continuing inter-regional distinctions in class and tradition continued to separate Baptists from Presbyterians, Methodists from Congregationalists. What they had in common was the fact that the meanings of ‘dissent’ were already fading rapidly in the nineteenth century in such regions of plural religious settlement. In response to a correspondent asking in 1889 ‘What is a Nonconformist?’, for instance, the editor of the Launceston Daily Telegraph had to revert to a dictionary for the answer.¹ The practice of referring

¹ Daily Telegraph Thursday, 13 June 1889, p. 3.

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to all non-Anglicans alike as ‘nonconformists’ was still common enough in the 1940s, however, to ensure a continued ‘twitchy-ness’ among minority protestant groups. In Australia, where the Anglican Church still imported its bishops from Britain, Presbyterians such as E. L. Slade Mallen, Presbyterian minister of Wallsend, NSW, repeated in 1943 the words of their founder (John Dunmore Lang) of a century or more before: There is no State Church in this country, and therefore no Nonconformist churches. All are on the same level. It may be interesting to some of your readers to know that Episcopalians of England, when going to Scotland, are ‘Nonconformists.’ His Majesty the King becomes a Conformist—a Presbyterian. No doubt D. C. Williams [the author to whom he was responding] does not mean the word to convey any inferiority of these ‘Nonconformist’ churches, but some do so use it. It was strange to me that Archbishop Mowll [then Anglican Archibishop of Sydney] did not apparently approach these ‘Nonconformist’ churches regarding the joint statement. My opinion is that the statement is far too conservative and anxious to preserve the status quo. It is a very tame and timid affair.²

It was a problem of language, which still carried the classist presumptions of the ‘old country’. Mallen’s appeal to law, democratic temperament, and the need for reform was typical of the long-running dissenting campaign to establish education and more equable social solutions, root out privilege, and establish equity. They would be more successful than they thought. Dissenting groups, with their emphases on liberty of conscience and the centrality of the text (as an ecclesiological as well as an artefactual reality) readily absorbed ‘the historicist hermeneutic’³ as a way of sidestepping the need to define biblical authority by means of creedal, canonical, or papal definition. As a consequence, D/dissenters became central to both the liberal and the conservative camps which divided over the rise of rationalism, secularism, and their inroads into the authenticity/authority of the Bible. The reality for Protestant D/dissenting movements in the twentieth century was dominated by contending and often confusing global shifts in economics, politics, and culture. In the West, dissenting groups couldn’t predict the rapid dissolution of their self-definition against the established churches with the concurrent dissolution of the more generic ‘Christian country’ compact under the pressure of war, mass migration, consumerism, and (in particular) the rise of the bureaucratic welfare states which were emerging into an globalized inter-national system.⁴ In ‘the great exception’ (the United States), disestablishment had been a fact since the Revolution, though its progress took longer ² Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate Friday, 16 July 1943, p. 3. ³ Michael J. Lee, The Erosion of Biblical Certainty (New York, 2013), p. 173. ⁴ Natalie Sabanadze, Globalization and Nationalism: The Cases of Georgia and the Basque Country (Budapest and New York, 2010), pp. 10–11.

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to work out in the various commonwealths. It entered the twentieth century striding the world stage as a huge entrepôt of dissenting traditions, the energies and resources of which would continue to have a significant impact on the arc of Dissent/dissent through the rest of the period. The question for Western citizens of the early twentieth century was ‘what did dissent mean when there was no formal establishment?’ By the end of the century, it had become, ‘what did dissent mean when there was no “establishment” except bureaucratized secular rationalism’? Trends in American religious affiliation (as reported by the Pew Research Center) reflected this fact in the increased polarization of Americans, with the disappearance of the liberal middle, some weakness among younger generations, a ‘modest drop in overall rates of belief and practice’, and consistently strong affiliations among those who considered themselves religious.⁵ Voting patterns during the 2016 presidential campaigns fuelled these divisions, with post-mortems over the ‘Trump miracle’ making apparent the vast disconnect between the secular media, liberal politicians, and the 26 per cent of the American voting public composed of white evangelicals.⁶ Elsewhere, the ‘establishment’ against which Protestant ‘dissent’ defined itself could range from single party nation states (China, the USSR up to its collapse in 1989, Cuba, Iraq, and the like) to fundamentalist theocracies (from the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, and increasingly India, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan, among others) to dysfunctional formal states dominated by economic and class elites. The proliferation of the numbers (of members, denominations, and organizations) and types (of political, cultural, and economic drivers and expressions) associated with the Old and New Dissents, and their successors, is now too large to capture readily in a single volume. For this reason, the type of ‘dissent’ is roughly indicated by the usage: ‘Dissent’ in this volume refers to one of the formal Old or New Dissents to emerge from Europe (capitalized when referring to proper nouns, and lower case when speaking of the related movements), while (D)issent refers to an organized successor or innovative alternative not necessarily directly attached to these predecessor movements, and (d)issent to a globalized popular movement or tendency which may or may not have a formal organizational identity. A similar protocol relates to the use of ‘nonconformist/(N)onconformist’ throughout the text. If the citizens of the West could not, by 1900, escape ‘the habit of mind which is the result of inductive—that is, of scientific—reasoning’,⁷ by 2000 it was clear that ‘the audit society’ was making escape from statist bureaucratic ⁵ ‘U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious’, Pew Research Center, http://www.pewforum.org/ 2015/11/03/u-s-public-becoming-less-religious/, accessed 17.10.2017. ⁶ Myriam Renaud, ‘Myths Debunked: Why Did White Evangelical Christians Vote for Trump?’, Martin Marty Center, University of Chicago, https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/ myths-debunked-why-did-white-evangelical-christians-vote-trump, accessed 17.10.2017. ⁷ R. J. Campbell, City Temple Sermons (New York, 1903), p. 10.

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reductionism equally impossible. If modernity, as Brad Gregory has claimed, is ‘an extraordinarily complex, tangled product of rejections, retentions and transformations of medieval Western Christianity’,⁸ then one might equally say that the high modern/postmodern form of modernity was equally a complex, tangled product of rejections, retentions, and transformations of the dissenting rejection of establishment. The ‘freedom’ of the twentieth century, which by its end included personal freedom from religion and from the traditional bases (at least in the burgeoning cities of the West) for interpersonal and professional trust, was in part a twisted reception/rejection of the nonconformist/dissenting vision. The promulgators of the 1890s would, by the 1990s, perhaps have had mixed feelings about their legacy. As shall be seen, the support that dissenting traditions gave to secular pluralism as a solution to (originally Anglican) establishment was an important departure point. Dissent by the end of the twentieth century was not actually irrelevant, merely invisible. Its success in establishing what Berger calls the ‘heretical imperative’⁹ removed the point of difference by which dissent could be distinguished against the background of perpetual social change. With this in mind, it is helpful to define some key terms as they are used in this volume. ‘Modernity’ is, among others used here, a contested term. Its entanglement with ideological modernism and secularism has proven contentious among postcolonial and other scholars. The twentieth century is, par excellence, the global century, and globalization ensured that wherever ‘modernity’ fell to earth, it would take on different forms. As Olupona notes, ‘modernity’ is typified by diversity, both for practical and for methodological reasons: ‘Secularization, globalization and the expansion of “dominant” world religions affect indigenous peoples throughout the world.’ To propose a consolidated, homogeneous modernity, therefore, is to impose upon such peoples the ways that they can respond and still be considered ‘modern’ as opposed to ‘primitive’.¹⁰ The term’s glib associations with the secularization of Protestant Christianity (largely relevant in European settler societies), humanism (something which does not apply in the same way, for instance, in Japan), the prominence of scientific thought (and so a presumed ‘increased rationality’),¹¹ (neo)colonialism and the like, come to indicate as much about the precommitments of the observer as they do about the actuality being observed. The world in which dissenting Protestantism emerged in the twentieth century was thus one ⁸ Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, 2012), p. 2. ⁹ Discussed most famously in his The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (London and New York, 1980). ¹⁰ ‘Introduction’, Jacob K. Olupona, ed., Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity (London, 2003), p. 2. ¹¹ Mark Elvin, ‘A Working Definition of “Modernity”?’, Past & Present 113 (November 1986), p. 209.

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which moved from the apparent dominance of a single mode of modernity (typified by ‘the Cartesian exchange of truth for certainty’), to a surprising (to some) deprivatization of religion and multiple modernities, in which there was ‘the continued resilience of webs of belief, pre-predicative linguistic structures and practices, that must be taken on credit by our propositions if they are to make sense’.¹² One leading attempt at ‘making sense’ of the sudden re-emergence of the religious into world affairs has been in the work of the late Peter Berger. Berger’s five-category model (wherein Modernity involves processes of abstraction, futurity, individualization, liberation, and secularization) is helpful. The tendency to theologize (and so abstract) about the faith involved, in many cases, a separation between ‘intellecting’ in dissenting traditions and their originating spiritualities. The usefulness and form of ‘intellecting’ also relates to the institutional bases for knowledge work available to each culture. ‘Abstraction’ is more of a tendency in highly developed institutional settings than in others, something which partially explains the differential success of various types of dissenting movement as these have scattered around the world. Common among both liberalizing and conserving tendencies in those traditions was a set of justifications rotating around ‘if not this, then . . . ’ statements. Liberal futurism was driven alternatively by the fear of loss of relevance in a rapidly changing society (‘if we don’t change, we will die’), and by a ready imbibing of modernist teleologies (‘the future is better than the past’) based on a faith in basic ‘human nature’. This was the sort of faith which recognized that moments of great national turmoil—such as the Second World War—also produced a sea change in the way that people received spiritual solutions. As Matthew Hedstrom has noted in his account of the rise of ‘Liberal Religion’ in the USA, the 1950s commenced with the profound suffering of war, and ended with widespread disillusionment as to the capacity of traditional religious forms (which had been captured by the ‘idolatry of the suburban middle class’) to respond to the human condition.¹³ By way of contrast, conservative dissenting futurism (when not truncated by expectations of the imminent return of Jesus) was confident about the coming of the postmillennial Kingdom, towards which one could work effectively. Both traditions had a form of individualism—among scholars, with a sort of humanist confidence in the mind, or among other believers in ‘God’s special plan for my life’. The sanctified mind could liberate, as could the gracious action of the Spirit of Christ. And as a result, (d)issenting Christians into and through much of the twentieth century were properly ambivalent ¹² Miguel Vatter, ‘Introduction: Crediting God with Sovereignty’, in M. Vatter, ed., Crediting God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism (New York, 2011), p. 2. ¹³ Matthew Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2013), pp. 172–3.

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about secularization. ‘Secularism’, as Taylor and others have pointed out, is itself ‘a politico-theological movement that can be traced back to the ecclesiastical and legal reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, associated with the rise of Scotist-Occamite nominalism’,¹⁴ and so shares some roots with the Old Dissent. Secularization of the establishment was, after all, considered by many nineteenth-century dissenters to be a good thing, and many twentiethcentury (D)issenters continued to energetically support the separation of Church and state (indeed, were prepared as J. M. Dawson was in the establishment in 1947 of Protestants and Other Citizens United for the Separation of Church and State, to work with others of differing Christian faith and none) as a matter of faith, even while they agitated for this or that piece of legislation. In both liberal and conservative camps, liberty of conscience remained a defining element of dissenting Protestantism as much as did Western views of the modern society. This was a state of détente which lasted until the Culture Wars of the 1980s established intolerance of the left for the right (and vice versa), of liberals for conservatives (and vice versa), and of secularists for religionists (and vice versa).¹⁵ As Stephen Smith points out, however, the compromises with modernity made by some D/dissenting traditions in pursuit of continued influence in the emergent secular public square—in the association of ‘freedom of conscience’ with ‘personal autonomy’, for example—involved a ‘subtle slippage . . . prone to pass without detection’.¹⁶ This bore profound consequences for the ecclesial alliances which supported organized Protestant Dissent through the 1920s and 1930s. In the aftermath of a breakdown in both public and Christian consensus, tolerance became merely another label applied to one’s own side and intolerance a stick with which to beat the other. As James Davison Hunter pointed out of religious politics at the end of the twentieth century, ‘in their framework, method and style of engagement, politically progressive Christians are very similar to their politically conservative counterparts’.¹⁷ All sides became modernists, albeit with regard to different causes and with regard to how they would apply that term to themselves. They are all, in their own way (and with the exception of some Calvinist restorationists, such as Rushdoony) effectively secularist, though on a scale which slides from separation of Church and state to the disappearance (either as per ‘Sea of Faith’ liberalism or per

¹⁴ Referenced in Vatter, ‘Introduction: Crediting God with Sovereignty’, in Vatter, ed., Crediting God, p. 5. ¹⁵ James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York and Oxford, 2010), pp. 90–2. ¹⁶ Stephen D. Smith, ‘The Phases and Functions of Freedom of Conscience’, in John Witte and M. Christian Green, eds., Religion and Human Rights: An Introduction (New York and Oxford, 2011), p. 163. ¹⁷ Hunter, To Change the World, p. 147.

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Peter Rollins’ postevangelicalism)¹⁸ of religion as a distinct sphere altogether. As Berger himself noted towards the end of his career, such modernisms are not irreversibly teleological with regard to religion.¹⁹ Again, as Olupona (following Robin Horton) notes with regard to Africa, and Simon Chan notes of Asia,²⁰ religious engagements with modernity have shown intellectual and cultural flexibilities, the willingness to embrace alternatives, which undermine any hegemonic conception.²¹ The beginning of the twenty-first century was thus marked by the death of the hard secularization thesis, and missed disenchantments/re-enchantments of public life in various parts of the world. As will be seen in this volume, then, under the ‘plough’ of great global trends, Dissent also became a matter of mobile, globalized flows where ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / gang aft a-gley.’²² Following this logic, this volume embraces Elvin’s suggestion that modernity involves a qualitative shift in ‘the capacity to change the structure of systems’, which is often evinced by the harnessing of new forms of power.²³ As Longkumer notes in this volume (Chapter 13) with regard to ‘Hinduism’, it could also ‘manufacture’ a consolidated system out of cultural resources which were not previously well organized. The consequence of this for the study of D/dissent is that the subject(s) of the chapters in this volume are both the subjects and the promoters of change. They can, as has been noted in previous volumes, be subject to the unravelling of systems (as is implied in the study of secularization in the West, following the unravelling of establishment religion), but (as noted above) also ‘modernizing’ without necessarily secularizing. On the one hand, there is little doubt that the deep liberalism of dissenting traditions in the USA created a situation of decreasing difference between the message of the Churches and that in the broader public square. As George Marsden notes with regard to American universities, the rise of the ‘established unbelief ’ of the knowledge classes in the West was entangled with the liberalization of Protestantism, which traded identity for inclusion in a form of accepted Protestant universalism.²⁴ As a result, liberal Protestantism has been ¹⁸ Two key texts by these authors include, Don Cupitt, The Sea of Faith (New York, 1988); Peter Rollins, The Divine Magician: The Disappearance of Religion and the Discovery of Faith (New York, 2015). ¹⁹ Peter L. Berger, ‘The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview’, in Peter L. Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington and Grand Rapids, 1999), p. 2. ²⁰ Simon Chan, Grassroots Asian Theology: Thinking the Faith from the Ground Up (Downers Grove, 2014), p. 7. ²¹ Olupona, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–4. ²² Robert Burns, ‘To a Mouse: On Turning up in Her Nest with the Plough’, in Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock, 1785). ²³ Elvin, ‘A Working Definition of “Modernity”?’, p. 211. ²⁴ George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York, 1994), p. 5; see also David Millard Haskell, Kevin N. Flatt, and Stephanie Burgoyne, ‘Theology Matters: Comparing the Traits of Growing and Declining

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subjected to a long, slow decline through ‘dissipation’,²⁵ the causes of which have been the subject of continuing debate. In many Western societies, some traditional forms of nonconformism (such as Congregationalism, which has largely merged with various ecumenical bodies in the acts of union which brought about the United Church of Canada, 1925; the Church of South India, 1947; United Church of Christ, 1957; the Uniting Church in Australia, 1977) are on the verge of disappearing altogether.²⁶ On the other hand, in the same cities, migration and mission go hand in hand. It is not unusual to see, for instance, Korean or Chinese congregations buying up or reoccupying disused Presbyterian or Congregationalist churches and filling them with a distinctly more conservative form of faith. The scenario noted by Adam Cohen in 1997 has moved on: Sunday morning at St. Louis’ Kingshighway Baptist Church could pass for a slow day at a retirement-home chapel. The dwindling flock is a sea of white hair and bald heads. And the service, which kicks off with prayers for a colon-cancer victim, is heavy with talk of illness and grandchildren. But as a grandfather of 10 gets up to testify, an unexpectedly joyful noise seeps through the floorboards— the sounds of salsa-inflected guitars and tambourines. The musicians, practicing in a basement fellowship room, belong to a fast-growing young Latino Baptist congregation that has shared Kingshighway’s building for the past two years. After the old white folks leave, the Peruvian-born Rev. Amadeo Torres and his Spanish-speaking congregation go upstairs. The pews fill with worshippers from eight countries, including an abundance of fidgety children, and frayed-at-theedges Kingshighway is transformed into the vibrant Catedral de Dios Iglesia Bautista.²⁷

Such liberal traditions, like the Uniting Church in Australia, have been the recipients of large-scale migration from former missionary-receiving areas in the Pacific and Asia, or growth among indigenous communities. They now consider one possible future is that those failing white traditions established to promote ‘progressive’ causes in the twentieth century might find themselves much closer to their conservative eighteenth- and nineteeth- (or even second-)

Mainline Protestant Church Attendees and Clergy’, Review of Religious Research 58.4 (2016), pp. 515–41. ²⁵ Rodney Stark, What Americans Really Believe: New Findings from the Baylor Surveys of Religion (Waco, 2008), pp. 21–2. ²⁶ Damian Thompson, ‘2067: The End of British Christianity?’, The Spectator 13 June 2015, https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/06/2067-the-end-of-british-christianity/, accessed 17.10.2017; John Sandeman, ‘Decision Time for Uniting Church in Australia’, Eternity Magazine 16 June 2017, https://www.eternitynews.com.au/in-depth/decision-time-for-uniting-church-in-australia/, accessed 24.10.2017. ²⁷ Adam Cohen, ‘Gathering in Faith but Not Too Close’, Time Magazine 150.1 (7 July 1997), p. 70.

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century origins (Keith Suter’s ‘Early Church’ model) in the twenty-first century.²⁸ All sides of the Church are alive to the challenges of moving from fixed nation state frameworks to global flows. As Larry M. Goodpaster, bishop in the United Methodist tradition, noted in 2010: ‘Our bureaucracy and institutional maintenance focus favors a settled church as opposed to a movement. Can we do something no other institutions have been able to do: become a movement once again?’²⁹ At the same time, in the Majority World, ‘modernization’ occurs in ways which ignore or positively build upon the fruits of D/dissenting communities. Church communities direct social energies towards changing systems in settings which are poor in other forms of capital. So, in 2016, Ghanaian software startup ‘Asoriba’ was named ‘Africa’s best startup’ at the inaugural Seedstars Africa event held in Casablanca, Morocco.³⁰ The unique element in the award is that Asoriba ‘is a Christian technology company [that has] set out to win more souls using technology as a tool’, providing ‘web and mobile apps for church leaders and members to easily connect with each other, get content from services, information about events, and donate/pay tithes and offerings’.³¹ This is only one case in a much wider process of religious capital building in Africa, as the basis for the creation of other forms of capital, in which advanced technologies are playing a key role.³² The ready flow of such technologies across borders, and around the world across the networks created by diaspora, is a natural consequence of this.³³ It is not a modernity which is much appreciated by those committed to the ‘amoral heart’ of Western modernity,³⁴ as can be seen by the amoral moralizing of many Western academics over the rise of African church-based politics, culture, and economics.³⁵ ²⁸ Keith Suter, ‘Does the Uniting Church in Australia have a Future?’, http://www.churchfutures. com.au/, accessed 24.10.2107. ²⁹ Deborah Arca Mooney, ‘Reclaiming a “Movement”: The Future of The United Methodist Church, Interview with Bishop Larry M. Goodpaster’, Patheos 26 July 2010, http://www.patheos. com/resources/additional-resources/2010/07/reclaiming-a-movement-the-future-of-the-unitedmethodist-church, accessed 24.10.2017. ³⁰ ‘Ghana’s Asoriba named Africa’s best Startup at Seedstars Event’, Disrupt Africa, http://disrupt-africa.com/2016/02/ghanas-asoriba-named-africas-best-startup-at-seedstars-event/, accessed 17.10.2017. ³¹ ‘Asoriba: The Mobile App Revolutionising African Churches’, Africa Business 2020, http://africabusiness2020.com/2017/04/03/asoriba-mobile-app-revolutionising-african-churches/, accessed 17.10.2017. ³² See Birgit Meyer, ‘Impossible Representations: Pentecostalism, Vision, and Video Technology in Ghana’, in B. Meyer and A. Moors, eds., Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere (Bloomington, 2006). ³³ Michael Perry and Kweku Okyerefo, ‘African Churches in Europe’, Journal of Africana Religions 2.1 (2014), p. 98. ³⁴ Olupona, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–4. ³⁵ e.g. Katrien Pype, ‘Blackberry Girls and Jesus’s Brides: Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity and the (Im-)Moralization of Urban Femininities in Contemporary Kinshasa’, Journal of Religion in Africa 46.4, pp. 390ff.

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It is, however, one of a mounting number of examples of how D/dissenting traditions engage with modernity differently in the new global realities of the twenty-first century. The term ‘modernity’ is thus imprecise in time frame and content, but generally connotes a transition from a relatively stable, ‘simpler’ world to the rapidly moving, multifaceted societies of today. Definitions often include an emphasis on Enlightenment reason, rational thought, and empirical observation. These become institutionalized in specialized university education and professionalization, scientific medicine, urbanization, industrialization, capitalism, technologies that facilitate travel and communication, and globalizing processes that make the world seem a smaller place. The ‘value’ effects include the rise of individualism, the declining authority of traditional religious and social institutions, and the projects of people in power to institutionalize principles such as democracy, human rights, and consumerism. Such processes have a much longer history, but the present volume focuses on the acceleration of modernizing developments and their religious repercussions over the course of the twentieth century.³⁶ Until recently, Western scholars have been relatively unified in associating modernization with ‘secularization’. This latter term can describe differentiation between religious and other institutions; privatization, or a squeezing of religion out of the public sphere; decline of religious belief and practice; or a transformation in the conditions of belief, in which ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’ (or active ‘practitioners’ and ‘nominals’) alike must prove what once seemed self-evident. The combined impact of the Protestant Reformation, the rise of nation states, capitalism, and scientific revolutions presumably ‘disenchanted’ the world by facilitating the replacement of supernatural with natural explanations of human affairs; the departure of supernatural forces such as spirits, demons, or gods; and the disappearance of human intermediaries such as sorcerers and magicians. Scholars who have come to acknowledge the persistence of religion, even in its starkly supernaturalist forms, have observed that modernization intensifies pluralism. Although multiple people groups and religions have coexisted in the same societies for a very long time, what seems lost in the modern era is the taken-for-grantedness of inherited traditions, which can breed doubt—or increased conviction. Modern individuals have more viable choices among religious options and between religious

³⁶ Peter Berger, The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age (Boston, 2014), p. 5; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, 2007), p. 22; Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2003), p. 13; Martin Albrow, The Global Age: State and Society beyond Modernity (Cambridge, 1996), p. 95; José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994), p. 9.

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and secular world views, and a propensity to move among multiple selections rather than choosing one at the expense of all others.³⁷ The tendency to assume as normative such concepts as ‘the nation state’ becomes questionable in the face of such movement. In the context of immigration and the movement of populations between the Majority World and the West, the term ‘Majority World’ (preferred in this volume to older terms such as ‘developing world’) takes on a cultural connotation. In other words, one may observe that new immigrant Churches (such as Oceanian, Korean, Hispanic, or African) in Europe or in the US often more closely resemble those in the Majority World rather than their neighbouring white Churches. Terms such as ‘the West’ and ‘Majority World’ no longer simply follow national boundaries, but participate in flows that are multidirectional. Terms such as ‘modernity’, ‘secularization’, ‘pluralism’—and even ‘religion’— thus each have their own histories. Far from being neutral descriptions of objective reality, these are ideas that developed in culturally specific contexts and that have often been deployed, intentionally or unwittingly, in service of complex ideological, political, and economic agendas. For the space available here, a few summary points will suffice. Despite the prognostications of Western intellectuals, modernization has not, when considered on a global scale, universally resulted in the decline of religion—as the African case illustrates. True, secularizing—and certainly pluralizing—tendencies can be observed, particularly in Europe and the United States, but even in these settings there are countervailing indicia of religious and spiritual resurgence. Thus, the ‘last-gasp’ modification of the secularization thesis—that religion expands in the early stages of modernity only to contract in the later stages— inadequately accounts for historical developments to date.³⁸ It is the ‘global’ nature of the realities described which places pressure on such academic orthodoxies. Following Giddens, Malcolm Waters’ definition of globalization as the compression of time and distance, often under the influence of new technological or transport mechanisms, is now a byword: ‘Time-space compression involves a shortening of time and a shrinking of space—progressively the time taken to do things reduces, and this [reduction] in turn reduces the experiential distance between different points of space.’³⁹

³⁷ Taylor, Secular Age, pp. 1–3; Berger, Many Altars of Modernity, pp. ix, 49; Casanova, Public Religions, pp. 7, 21; Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, 2nd edn (New Brunswick, 2008), pp. 1–3; Rodney Stark, Craig J. Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., Rethinking Secularism (New York, 2011); Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, eds., Secularisms (Durham, 2008). ³⁸ Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, 2013); Peter L. Berger, ‘Secularism in Retreat’, in John L. Esposito and Azzam Tamimi, eds., Islam and Secularism in the Middle East (New York, 2000), p. 46. For a sampling of the numerous publications on this subject, see also the sources cited in notes 36 and 37. ³⁹ Malcolm Waters, Globalization (London, 1995), p. 5.

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After this generic introduction, however, the topic is made complex by the theoretical presuppositions of the commentator. For a long period, for example, neo-Marxist World System theorists (led by Immanuel Wallerstein) effectively ignored the role of cultural globalizations such as those sponsored by religion, as they started with the assumption that the only realities were material/ economic in nature. The long-cycle transformations of global events were driven by class conflict. As Beyer notes, however, this stance essentially just ‘temporalizes’ an otherwise religious perspective, that of identifying the transcendent which ‘give[s] the immanent whole definition’.⁴⁰ Berger’s observation is important: the ideological foundations of much theory predetermine appreciable conclusions about the nature of religion in global spaces. As noted in this volume, for example, ideas about ‘reverse mission’ among Majority World D/dissenting traditions are in part driven by preconceptions about the contextual dominance of (post)colonialism. While helpful in some settings, such a predilection for following the tracks laid down by past imperialisms can blind one to the reality of other pathways established by global flows: in, for instance, what Appadurai implies about sacriscapes.⁴¹ Waters’ observation that spatial reduction in globalization is ‘experiential’ instead points to the fact that shared religious experience and conceptions of the world are also modes of ‘shortening’ the distance between communities. As Dorcas Dennis has shown with links between the Church of Pentecost (Ghana) and their daughter Churches in Melbourne, Australia, participation in ‘migration spirituality’ in the home society links travellers through a charismatic imaginary with their home base, no matter where they go. The space between the promise— articulated in Ghana through prayer camps, prophecy, and passport rituals— and its materialization (in the granting of permanent residency, employment, etc. in the destination country) is made instantaneous through the realization that the recipient has been ‘blessed’ of God, a status which confirms both the sending authority and the location of receipt as divinely ordained.⁴² The D/dissenting imagination has, in its missional orientation and its lack of commitment to the earthly kingdoms, always had implicit in it this sort of universalist presentism. The shift from ‘thin’ globalizations (which reach back, Dawei and others note in their summary of the theoretical literature, some 5,000 years) to the ‘thick’ globalizations made possible by modern travel and communications technologies, has had a profound impact on creating modes

⁴⁰ Peter Beyer, Religion and Globalization (Thousand Oaks, 1994), p. 20. ⁴¹ Note the discussion of this in Mark P. Hutchinson, ‘The Global Turn in American Evangelicalism’, in Heath W. Carter and Laura Porter, eds., Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, 2017), pp. 205–6. ⁴² Dorcas Dennis, ‘Travelling with the Spirit: Pentecostal Migration Religiosity between Ghana and Australia’, unpublished PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2016, p. 10.

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of contextualization for this imagination.⁴³ Whether attempting to implement visible unity through the World Council of Churches, or the ‘spiritual unity’ of transnational fellowships (from the denominationally oriented Baptist World Alliance to the rhizomatic ‘apostolic networks’ which have sprung up to fill the spaces left by declining magisterial traditions), D/dissenting traditions have attempted to project universalizing ‘oikumene’ in ways consistent with their ecclesiological presuppositions. As George Tarleton (who proved to be on a pathway to post-Christian universalism of another type) noted with regard to the theology of the emerging charismatic movement in Britain, ‘The local church is “the entire redeemed community living in the worldly community in a given area” and not arbitrarily broken up by the accidents of church tradition.’⁴⁴ In that sense, when they have inhabited the ‘prophetic’ space which envisions their connection to the local/universal Church or the missio Dei, these traditions have also been globalizing. The connections between various forms of Christian thought, practice, and globalization have become the subject of considerable attention. To what degree does theology matter? Is the ‘material religion’ determinative, or are these transferable forms which follow practice as it moves from place to place? Are labels such as ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ (so dominant in discussions in the West) useful in Majority World settings, or indeed useful any more in even the fragmented demographies of the West? With regard to the new formations of Churches in which the (D)issenting traditions organize themselves, all of these are live issues. In the megachurch (which is generally defined as a congregation that averages 2,000 persons or more attending their weekly worship services),⁴⁵ for example, theology can be central, or it can be a product of the growth plan or the underlying spirituality of the Church. Various researchers arrive (depending on their starting points) both at the conclusion that such large, usually exurban congregations either do have a firm theological basis,⁴⁶ or that there are other factors contributing to growth which are

⁴³ Derrick M. Nault et al., eds., Experiencing Globalization: Religion in Contemporary Contexts, 2013, ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uwsau/detail.action? docID=1130118, accessed 16/10/2017. ⁴⁴ Quoted in William Kay, ‘Apostolic Networks in Britain Revisited’, Pneuma 38 (2016), p. 10. ⁴⁵ The Hartford Institute for Religion Research has published extensive research on megachurches, under the leadership of Scott Thumma. An expanded definition of ‘megachurch’ can be found on the Institute’s website: http://www.hartfordinstitute.org/megachurch/megachurches. html. The Institute published extensive reports on megachurches in 2000, 2005, 2008, 2011, and 2015. See also Scott Thumma and Dave Travis, Beyond Megachurch Myths: What We Can Learn from America’s Largest Churches (San Francisco, 2007). A publicly accessible list of megachurches around the world (excluding the United States and Canada) is maintained by Warren Bird: it can be accessed at http://leadnet.org/world/. ⁴⁶ D. M. Haskell, Kevin N. Flatt, and Stephanie Burgoyne, ‘Theology Matters: Comparing the Traits of Growing and Declining Mainline Protestant Church Attendees and Clergy’, Review of Religion Research 58 (2016), p. 515.

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merely masked by an apparent convergence on conservative theology.⁴⁷ This is evident in attempts to create descriptive taxonomies for the variety of Church practice around the world. The word ‘Hyperchurch’, for example, tends to be a term used of and in South Africa’s charismatic megachurches, indicating attendances over 50,000, while a variety of terms (such as ‘superchurch’) can relate to relate internationally to the church-as-movement represented by Hillsong, or Yoido Full Gospel, where the global numbers in multiple locations can be more than 100,000. While it is clear that, in settings typified by de-denominationalization or rapid change, size matters, it is not clear how the constituents of such categories are better explained thereby. Yoido, for example, clearly grew on the trends released in industrializing post-war Korean society, while Hillsong has responded to global flows which interact with dispersed, highly mediated ‘geographies of emotion’.⁴⁸ Merely having a lot of members does not, it may be proposed, conclusively demonstrate commonality of origin or causation. It is in prospect of helping fill out the developmental trajectories of such ‘fluid’ movements that this volume seeks to connect the story of historic Dissenting movements to their offspring in the globalizing setting of the twentieth century. As noted in previous volumes in this series, the word ‘dissent’ itself is problematic (as, perhaps are all words with the prefix ‘dis’—disruption, disease, dissatisfaction, where the focus is reactive while their potential can be positive). For instance, dissatisfaction with a status quo can be a stimulus for the development of an alternative vision; so it is with dissent. ‘Dissent’ implies deviation from a norm leading to the question, ‘what is normal and, in our context, what is normative in church life’? This is related to matters of memory, a ‘prerequisite for identity’⁴⁹ which is put at risk during periods of transition as societies and cultures grapple with their pasts, as they seek to understand their presents and plan for their futures. The ‘confusion created by rapid culture change’ can spark a ‘search for identity and stability’.⁵⁰ Norms are thereby ‘adapted to reflect the practical concerns of the environment’,⁵¹ multiple modernities emerging as basic economic and identity categories (such as the role of women) are placed under pressure by globalization and

⁴⁷ Mark Chaves, American Religion: Contemporary Trends (Princeton, 2011), p. 88. ⁴⁸ For a broader discussion of this, see Mark P. Hutchinson, ‘ “Up the Windsor Road”: Social Complexity, Geographies of Emotion and the Rise of Hillsong’, in T. Riches and T. Wagner, eds., The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon the Waters (Basingstoke and New York, 2017). ⁴⁹ Cornel du Toit, African Changes: Unfolding Identities (Pretoria, 2009), p. 36. ⁵⁰ Alemayehu Mekonnen, Culture Change in Ethiopia: An Evangelical Perspective (Oxford, 2013), p. 26; cf. Allan R Tippet, The People of South-West Ethiopia (Pasadena, 1970), p. 85. ⁵¹ Jacob Olupona, ‘Globalisation and African Immigrant Churches in America’, in Afe Adogame, ed., Who is Afraid of the Holy Ghost: Pentecostalism and Globalisation in Africa and Beyond (Trenton, 2011), pp. 67–81, 70.

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transglobalism. In the West, as Giddens notes,⁵² modernity is related to the secularization of Western Protestantism and so (as noted above) to tensions over tradition, faith, authority, and the authenticity of ‘the primitive’. Working largely in the Majority World, however, Horton asserts that there is a continuity between modernity and religious belief.⁵³ Olupona illustrates this by pointing to ‘traditionalists [who] have demonstrated their own cognitive efficiency through the creation of adaptive mechanisms and institutions’⁵⁴ which enable them to retain and even enhance distinct African identities after settling in the USA. Historically, such dissonance was expressed in the United Kingdom through dissent from the doctrine and teaching, discipline, practice, and liturgical inflexibility of the Established Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Church of Scotland. This led to significant diversity of religious expression and belief. The Disruption of 1843 in Scotland⁵⁵ (a successor to the ‘Covenanting’ movement), provides a helpful illustration of what would become a standard trope in global (D)issent. It marked the genetic tendency of Scottish Presbyterianism (and other forms of nonconformism) towards secession.⁵⁶ This had serious repercussions for the global Dissenting missionary venture. Intolerance on both sides met resistance to change with obduracy and led to an outflow of separatism, evangelism, and enthusiasm across the Scots diaspora, spread across a global ‘British’ Empire founded by the English but in many places run by the Scots.⁵⁷ The result of this new form of Dissent illustrated key elements of continuing concerns of Protestant (d)issenters thereafter. They were concerned to protect the ‘true catholicity’ and apostolicity of the Church, in particular from state interference. There was to be no Head of the Church but Christ. This mobile glocalized Church was configured as a ‘covenanted membership of regenerate believers’, concerned with discerning the mind of Christ for itself and its mission in the world. It was (as Barry Ensign-George notes in Chapter 9 in this volume) adept at using a limited, but shifting palette of organizational forms to empower the laity around pragmatic principles of self-help,⁵⁸ appealing to the theology of the ⁵² Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, 1990), p. 1. ⁵³ Robin Horton, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion and Science (Cambridge, 1993). ⁵⁴ Olupona, ‘Globalisation and African Immigrant Churches in America’, in Adogame, ed., Who is Afraid of the Holy Ghost, p. 69. ⁵⁵ See Alec C. Cheyne, The Ten Years’ Conflict: The Disruption, an Overview (Edinburgh, 1993). ⁵⁶ We are indebted to the late Professor Calvin Cook, Rhodes University, South Africa for this idea. See also Andrew T. N. Muirhead, Reformation, Dissent and Diversity: The Story of Scotland’s Churches, 1560–1960 (London, 2015), pp. 115, 116, 121, 160. ⁵⁷ Bernard Porter, ‘Scotland and the British Empire’, History Today 62.7 (July 2012), p. 58. ⁵⁸ J. H. Y. Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity, 1662–2000’, in Robert Pope and Denzil Morgan, eds., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (Edinburgh, 2013), pp. 1–22; 2, 13.

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priesthood of all believers. It holds to the obligation of mutual communion and a set of common moral values. As Hugh Price Hughes noted famously, for the new global (d)issenters, ‘what is morally wrong can never be politically right’.⁵⁹ As noted above, at the core of the dissenting imagination is an idea of ‘freedom’ linked to ‘self-determination’ and ‘conscience’. The tension between what a particular expression of freedom was from, as opposed to what it was for, explains much of the relationship between Church and state, as well as the arc of secularization in many countries across the twentieth century. As the century dawned, nonconformists and dissenters/Dissenters in former established church settings saw their primary claims for freedom shifting, from the centuries-long fight for freedom from establishment privileges and exclusions, to freedom of conscience in a variety of settings. If one looks at the rise of public education legislation in various white settler societies (the USA, Australia, Canada, etc.), for instance, there are shades of responses to the established Church histories from which they came, usually in the form of some emphasis on state education being ‘secular’. The new, pluralist states could achieve this because the establishment was weak or already effectively disestablished, and the historic function of evangelical and other nonconformists in catalysing social reform movements described the space as one for freedom of conscience.⁶⁰ For dissenters, this usually meant freedom for choice in religion: to reductionist state bureaucrats and many legal apparatchiks, however, the provisions increasingly meant freedom from religion. As education was a core method of social engineering and nation building, the competing definitions helped construct the particular type of secularization dominant in each country, from conflicting separation/protectionist streams in the USA, to on-again off-again state funding in more marginal emergent welfare states such as Canada and Australia, to hardline laïcité in France and some of its dependencies. Such contesting treatments of the dissenting insistence on freedom would spark varying responses, among which the from/for tension would be definitional. As Andy Lord notes in his chapter in this volume, it was not coincidental that Pandita Ramabai’s mission was called ‘Freedom’ (Mukti), or that it would become iconic in a variety of discourses (Pentecostal, social concern, feminism, postcolonialism, among others) through the twentieth century. At the core was the common dissenting desire for freedom from (traditionalism, famine, paternalism, imperial oppression),

⁵⁹ Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: Volume III: The Crisis and Conscience of Nonconformity (Oxford, 2015), p. 229. ⁶⁰ See the debate over this between Catherine Byrne (‘ “Free, Compulsory and (not) Secular”: The Failed Idea in Australian Education’) and David Hastie (‘The Latest Instalment in the Whig Interpretation of Australian Education History: Catherine Byrne’s JRH article “Free, Compulsory and (not) Secular”,’ in the Journal of Religious History 37.1 (March 2013), pp. 20–38, and 41.3 (September 2017), pp. 386–403, respectively.

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responses to which provoked a variety of Protestant ressourcements and reconsiderations of dissenting biblical, spiritual, intellectual, and professional sources. The results have been powerful social mobilizations, many of which have defined the twentieth century in ways more entangled at their origins than they were to be at the end of the century. If one looks at the close association between pentecostalism and women’s self-determination in ministry, and between nonconformist evangelicalism and the rise of first-wave feminism, for example, it is clear that the particular type of ressourcement and reception in globalizing societies, in both global North and South, depended on the ‘froms’ dominant in the particular society, and the resources that dissenting Protestantism could bring to bear to create new and responsive ‘fors’. As Candy Gunther Brown notes in her chapter in this volume, in one society it could take the form of a healing movement, in another, a push for women’s rights, in another, an emphasis on work among the poor. As a global society emerged, so did global alternative societies. As Andrew Tomkins notes with regard to the rise of anti-nuclear campaigning in the 1970s, nonconformist Christians were among the disparate groups committed to non-violence which met to protest nuclear power stations in Germany: ‘Within many “non-violent action groups” the border between secular and religious activism could be blurry, with anarchists and Christians (and more than a few Christian anarchists) working together.’⁶¹ What united them was not a belief, but (in typically modern mode) a method, one which was oriented at a socially constructive dissent projected now not at the Established Church, but at the new global establishment. Among the peace traditions, and the new young evangelical left which was rediscovering their Anabaptist heritage, there was a deep history which now re-emerged.⁶² In Germany, in the British Commonwealth nations, and in the USA for a short while, the Christian roots of modernist communitarianism and pacifist reformism were laid bare.⁶³ All of these trends contributed to the particular form of modernity/modernization pathway which emerged in those settings. It is for this reason that the conflation of modernization with theories of secularization do not work seamlessly ‘on the ground’. Neither ‘transmitters’ nor ‘receivers’ nor ‘indigenizers’ nor ‘globalizers’ are neutral actors unreflectingly responding to homogenizing and coopting trends in ‘economics’, politics, or culture. There is, rather, both an internal story, as well as an externalized/ing story, to modernization and

⁶¹ Andrew S. Tompkins, Better Active Than Radioactive!: Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany (New York and Oxford, 2016). ⁶² David Cortright, Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge and New York, 2008), pp. 311–12. ⁶³ Larry Eskridge, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (New York, 2013), p. 99.

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secularization in both West and Majority World. While populations may converge on statistical norms, even bell curves have nonconforming outliers, and in globalizing settings the ‘space of flows’ tends to promote both homogenization and also innovation (differentiation, hyphenation, and rhyzomization). As Brown notes (herein), (D)issenting movements in the twentieth century, particularly Pentecostalism, ‘present a particular challenge to theories of “modernization as secularization”’, even as they coopt elements of modernity and refashion the edges of the secular in many societies. A simple drive up the main streets of Accra or Manila, past the ‘God is Greatest Enterprises’ electronics store or the ‘By His Grace’ chicken and fish retailer, indicates that secularization is neither uniform, not univalent, in a world of many voices. Nor, as indicated by the temporary convergence of media cultures, Pentecostal worship and the semiotics of modernity entailed by Hillsong’s splashing of ‘No Other Name’ all over Times Square, New York (on 24 April 2014), is this just ‘a Majority World thing’. (D)issent presses back against homogenization (whether through global poverty or cooptive consumerism) in its search for freedom from and freedom for. Note that while most scholars have emphasized the compulsive anticompulsionism of dissenters, they often forget to mention a common undertone of primitivism, the desire to leap back over the status quo to the sources (ad fontes), or even (as with Quakers, revivalists, pentecostals and others) to ‘The Source’. Individualism took this in the direction of disciplines, or technologies of spirituality (the techne of the self) which could be assessed against the dominant rubric of what ‘works for me’. In this sense, it was no longer the state against which dissent was defined, but against all those things which would deny the authentic self. Religion has, in the world of massification and the homogenization of the life-world, been a powerful source for this sort of self-redefinition, and a source for religious innovation among Christian dissenting communities, old and new. In a sense, the ‘prosperity doctrine’ can be seen as less about money and more about finding a way of elevating the biblical text to an all-encompassing body of technique for flourishing. It was about, in the byline of Australian charismatic innovator and founder Phil Pringle, ‘Your best life’, a democratizing materiality which rejected the liberalizing elitism of much Old Dissenting biblical interpretation. Theirs was not a world in which faith and science stood at opposite ends of the ring: there was no ring, and faith itself was a science fuelled by spiritual experimentalism.⁶⁴

⁶⁴ For a discussion of the role of ‘technique’ in globalizing spirituality, see Mark P. Hutchinson, ‘ “Without the Holy Spirit, You’re Stuffed”: Pentecostalism as Globalizing Techne’, Address to ‘Pentecostalism and Transnationalism’ Symposium, University of Western Sydney, 1 August 2013, https://www.academia.edu/4232129/Without_the_Holy_Spirit_Youre_Stuffed_Pentecostal ism_as_Globalizing_Techne, accessed 24.10.2017.

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This interacted with the defining, fundamental shift of the twentieth century, wherein the cultural and demographic centres of Christianity shifted away from the North Atlantic axis towards a global multicentricity. As K. K. Yeo points out in this volume, this shift raised significant questions about the nature of the Christian gospel, the authority of its core texts and doctrines, and even questions about the nature of its core figure, Jesus. The World Christian Database (WCD)⁶⁵ indicates that ‘Christianity started out the past century 81 percent white and ended at 45 percent . . . Christianity is steadily moving from the Caucasian, European-dominated, modern way of life . . . [to the non-Western world], even beyond Christianity as an institution [to more independent and charismatic churches].’⁶⁶ The WCD lists 13,000 people groups, 33,000 languages and dialects worldwide, and 1.178 billion Christians in the Majority World (including Oceania), but only 819 million in the Atlantic region.⁶⁷ The ‘West’ has also shifted as a term, as global migration, urbanization, and the extension of modernization outside its traditional transatlantic access, has broken up the world into variegated transnational realities which don’t necessarily follow national boundaries. Where is ‘the West’, when there are significant Western expatriate communities in modernized societies such as Singapore and Shanghai, and large ‘colonies’ of ‘Majority World’ people in what has traditionally been called ‘the West’? What to call the ‘non-West’ has, in particular, been a fraught discussion, one becoming more fraught as ‘the West’ itself becomes less a geographical and ethnographical reality and more a matter of socio-economic flows. In this volume, we will use the preferred term ‘Majority World’, in preference to older, more contentious terms such as ‘developing world’, ‘rest of the world’, the ‘third world’, and the like.⁶⁸ Philip Jenkins speaks of Asia, Latin America, Africa (and Oceania) as the ‘Next Christendom’,⁶⁹ and has used the term ‘Global South’. Although the growth of Christianity is evident in the southern hemisphere, notably Africa, the term does not encompass Korea and China, where Christianity grows by leaps and bounds.⁷⁰ Christianity ranks as the largest world religion, with growth projected to 2.6 billion people, or roughly a third of the global population, by 2020. Approximately 50 per cent of the world’s Christians are Catholic, 12 per cent

⁶⁵ Hereinafter ‘WCD’, print version: World Christian Encyclopedia, of ‘WCE’. ⁶⁶ Richard N. Ostling, ‘Researcher Tabulates World’s Believers’, Adherents.com, http://www. adherents.com/misc/WCE.html, accessed 3/7/2014. ⁶⁷ Ostling, ‘Researcher Tabulates World’s Believers’. ⁶⁸ ‘Two-thirds world’ has been used since the 1980s, referring to the two-thirds of the world’s population living in poverty, i.e. the undeveloped or developing nations; yet we know the BRIC (used since 2001 to refer to Brazil, Russia, India, and China) is becoming a global economic power. ⁶⁹ Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom (New York, 2007). ⁷⁰ Johnson, Christianity in Its Global Context, pp. 7, 14; Jacobsen, World’s Christians, pp. 111, 181, 205, 372–3; Jenkins, Next Christendom, pp. 3–4, 15.

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are Orthodox, and most of the rest can be described as Protestants. Eighty per cent of Protestants belong to a handful of denominational families: Anglicans (80 million), Reformed (75 million), Lutherans (65 million), Baptists (50 million), or Methodists (40 million). But many Catholics and Protestants can also be labelled ‘pentecostal’ in the sense that they emphasize supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit as not only historically significant, but also continuing to, and in, the present. By one estimate, pentecostals grew from 63 million, or 5 per cent of the world’s Christian population, in 1970, to 583 million, or 26 per cent in 2010, projected to 710 million, or 28 per cent of all Christians, by 2020— four times the growth rates both of the world Christian and the world total populations.⁷¹ Over the course of the twentieth century, the number and proportion of Christians—and especially pentecostals—in the global South expanded, while the Christian population of the global North contracted. In 1910, only 20 per cent of Christians lived outside Europe and North America. By 2010, 60 per cent lived in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or Oceania. This is in part a story of differential population growth; as the two-thirds world modernized, birth rates remained high, but poverty and mortality rates decreased. This is not, however, the whole story, since in much of the global South (as the Africa case illustrates) the Christian population is growing considerably faster than the total population. For instance, even as Asia’s population grew four times— up to 3.6 billion people, or 61 per cent of the world’s total—its Christian population rose twelve times over the course of the twentieth century. Asia’s Christian population augmented from 5 per cent in 1970 to a projected 9 per cent by 2020. In Latin America, the pentecostalization of Christianity is especially pronounced: the total number of pentecostals, including Protestant and Catholic charismatics, rose from 5 per cent of the region in 1970 to a projected 31 per cent by 2020. The massive pressure of Middle Eastern and African people movements—amidst which are significant numbers of Christians who have previously lived in Muslim-dominant settings—is creating ‘flows’ within European settings the future of which is unpredictable. History, as David Martin has noted, is serendipitous.⁷² By contrast, Europe’s share of the global population diminished from 25 to 12 per cent of the world’s total between 1900 and 1999, while the Christian proportion of Europe also declined. In 1910, 95 per cent of Europeans identified as Christian, but only 79 per cent did so by 2010. Revivals in Eastern ⁷¹ Jessica Martinez, ‘Study: 2.6 Billion of World Population Expected to be Christian by 2020’, CP World, 19 July 2013, http://www.christianpost.com/news/study-2-6-billion-of-worldpopulation-expected-to-be-christian-by-2020-100402/, accessed 6/10/2015; Jacobsen, World’s Christians, pp. 8, 44; Johnson, Christianity in Its Global Context, pp. 7, 14. ⁷² David Martin, ‘The Relevance of the European Model of Secularization in Latin America and Africa’, in Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt, eds., Secularization and the World Religions, trans. Alex Skinner (Liverpool, 2009), pp. 279–80.

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Europe after the 1990 fall of Communism offset this overall pattern of decline, as did the arrival of new immigrants from Africa and elsewhere in the global South, many of whom are pentecostal Christians.⁷³ The shifts in global distribution of the Protestant traditions are thus starkly apparent when comparing traditions across their total global distribution. In 1970, pentecostal Christians were about the same percentage of global Protestantism as Anglicans (not that all Anglicans would have been pleased with the title ‘Protestant’). Within thirty years, they represented more than twice the proportion of the total global Protestant population (Anglican 16 per cent, Pentecostal 49 per cent), and unlike Anglicans were continuing to grow. Pentecostals also represented more than double the total attendance of all ‘Old Dissent’ traditions combined, and ten times the combined membership of all ‘New Dissent’ traditions (Fig. 0.1). The difference between these figures stands out even more starkly when Majority World cases are isolated. In Africa, in 1970, for example, there were already twice as many Pentecostals as there were Anglicans, a disparity which continued to grow, offsetting the steady collapse in Protestant numbers in Europe (which negatively affects the global Anglican numbers downwards, despite their relatively stable numbers in Africa) (Fig. 0.2). This is a trend ⁷³ Johnson, Christianity in Its Global Context, pp. 44, 46; Jacobsen, World’s Christians, pp. 65–6, 89.

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Pop_2015

Fig. 0.2. Protestant traditions as a % of total Protestants: Africa population Source: World Christian Database: New Movements in the Context of Selected Traditions, 1970–2015, ed. Todd M. Johnson and Gina A. Zurlo (Leiden and Boston, 2017)

even more marked in Asia, where Pentecostal percentages of the Protestant total commence at 32 per cent in 1970, and peak at over 64 per cent of the total in 2015.⁷⁴ The dissenting Protestant traditions have proven to be ‘lightning in a bottle’. Success, for traditions which sought by definition to play across and outside the forms of nation states, was measured (as the suitably transitory online Urban Dictionary tells us) by ‘Capturing something powerful and elusive and then being able to hold it and show it to the world.’ In the end, either the bottle breaks (not to mention the hand which may be holding it at the time), or the energy expends itself as light. Even in Western societies (apart from the USA) it is clear that the old bottles have broken, and the fading of the Old and New Dissent has left those with the ‘new lightning’ (Pentecostals and charismatics) in possession of the Protestant ‘middle ground’. That position will, as the chapters in this volume point out, continue to place normative pressure on ⁷⁴ All data from the World Christian Database: New Movements in the Context of Selected Traditions, 1970–2015, data source: Todd M. Johnson and Gina A. Zurlo, eds., World Christian Database (Leiden and Boston, 2017): new movements defined as Pentecostal/charismatics excluding partially pentecostalized traditions.

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the leading institutions of the scattered, experiential children of John and Charles Wesley. ‘Dissent’ had become ‘(d)issent’, as liberalization and absorption into the secular public welfare states of the West eviscerated the relative value of the Old Dissenting traditions. The monarchical states and established churches against which they had been defined were, by the twentieth century, largely no more. Without a convincing spiritual war to fight, their members aged and faded away under the rationalizing weight of their vast material commitments. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, many such traditions in the West (and elsewhere) were effectively ceasing to exist. ‘Dissent’ became ‘(D)issent’ in the Majority World, however, as indigenous traditions and new denominational and ecclesial formations appropriated the faith in opposition to the many enemies of soul and life presented by the advance of colonialism, modernity, and globalization on traditional societies. In this battle, there was no end of spiritual wars to fight, material needs to satisfy. In this space, because of (rather than despite) the development of disturbing/innovating global flows, Protestant dissent has found a place to be. It is a mobile, hybridized, fractious heritage of diverging/converging traditions, one requiring attention by scholars who are close to both its grass-roots expression and to the burgeoning high-level literature which attempts to incorporate its expressions into normative classifications. References to this literature abound in this work, pointing to the repeated tendencies of Western scholars in particular to force this fissiparous phenomenon into procrustean categories, and the simultaneous ‘escapes’ of the subject into popular cultures. Secularization, ‘God is Dead’, World Systems Theory . . . all have failed at the point of the application of the particular. The scholars writing in this volume are thus not drawn from the usual ranks of northern hemisphere ‘helicopter’ superstars. They are people working in places distributed around the world, who have multiple levels of engagement with subjects which are often overlooked in the normal summarizing approaches to global topics. They engage with both theory and with the particular, rather more than might be obvious in other volumes of this type. Mark Hutchinson (Chapters 3, 5, 8, 14) and Candy Brown (Chapter 1) focus on the glocalized charismatic and Pentecostal movements. K. K. Yeo (Chapter 4) and Atola Longkumer (Chapter 13) bring personal experience of living in Asia among the subjects of their research, while Graham Duncan (Chapter 10), Jason Carter (Chapter 6), and Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu (Chapter 15) bring similar insights from writing within Africa. Rademaker (Chapter 12) not only has personal experience of Australian indigenous communities, but (with Livingstone, Chapter 11) writes from a bracing and ‘long twentieth-century’ view of race and gender across the ‘old’ anglophone imperial network of the British Empire/Commonwealth, just as Ensign-George (Chapter 9) and Heath (Chapter 2) write from either side of the border of the North American centres of Dissenting faith which dominated the ‘new’ imperial anglophone networks in the twentieth century. Among

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all the considerable number of insights which come from juxtaposing such examples of global expertise in the same volume, it is worthwhile noting (at the end of this Introduction to a final volume in a series on Dissenting movements) how common are the issues faced by both dissent and by the fading national establishments which were the subject of the previous Oxford University Press series on Anglicanism. All the formerly trans-Atlantic Christian movements emerging into the twentieth century have faced the issues of global/glocalization, laicization, voluntarism, secularization, and modernization, and have responded according to the implicit and explicit resources available to them. Liberalization, primitivism, popularization, charismaticization, re-socialization and even, in some cases, re-nationalization, are all responses to the common experiences of moving across borders, living in transnational spaces, being read and heard in different languages and sociocultural locations. The steady fraying of the pan-Anglican communion, and its re-emergence in various places as a form of consent/dissent to liberalizing Western cultures, on the one hand, and to more conservative Majority World cultures, on the other, is a testimony to the power of context. It may be worth the reader’s while keeping these comparator movements in mind as they move through the text of this volume. It is hoped that these chapters will contribute to a better understanding of how dissenting Protestantism overflowed and interpenetrated all of these categories, contributing to the world as we know it and the world as it is yet to be.⁷⁵

SEL E C T B I B L I OG R A P H Y Adogame, Afe, ed., Who is Afraid of the Holy Ghost: Pentecostalism and Globalisation in Africa and Beyond (Trenton, 2011). Berger, Peter, The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age (Boston, 2014). Berger, Peter L., ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington and Grand Rapids, 1999). Briggs, J. H. Y., ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity, 1662–2000’, in Robert Pope and Denzil Morgan, eds., T&T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (Edinburgh, 2013). Chan, Simon, Grassroots Asian Theology: Thinking the Faith from the Ground Up (Downers Grove, 2014). du Toit, Cornel, African Changes: Unfolding Identities (Pretoria, 2009). ⁷⁵ The authors particularly thank Todd Johnson and Peter Crossing of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon–Conwell Theological Seminary, who kindly made available their hard-won data, and excellent analytical abilities, from the World Christian Database (see footnote 74).

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Eskridge, Larry, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (New York, 2013). Haskell, D. M., Kevin N. Flatt, and Stephanie Burgoyne, ‘Theology Matters: Comparing the Traits of Growing and Declining Mainline Protestant Church Attendees and Clergy’, Review of Religion Research 58 (2016), pp. 515–41. Hedstrom, Matthew, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2013). Horton, Robin, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion and Science (Cambridge, 1993). Hunter, James Davison, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York and Oxford, 2010). Hutchinson, Mark P., ‘The Global Turn in American Evangelicalism’, in Heath W. Carter and Laura Porter, eds., Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, 2017), pp. 203–25. Jenkins, Philip, The Next Christendom (New York, 2007). Johnson, Todd M. and Gina A. Zurlo, eds., World Christian Database (Leiden and Boston, 2017). Kay, William, ‘Apostolic Networks in Britain Revisited’, Pneuma 38 (2016): 5–22. Meyer, B. and A. Moors, eds., Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere (Bloomington, 2006). Nongbri, Brent, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, 2013). Riches, Tanya and Tom Wagner, eds., The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon the Waters (London, 2017). Stark, Rodney, Craig J. Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., Rethinking Secularism (New York, 2011). Suter, Keith, ‘Does the Uniting Church in Australia have a future?’, http://www. churchfutures.com.au/. Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, 2007). Thumma, Scott and Dave Travis, Beyond Megachurch Myths: What We Can Learn from America’s Largest Churches (San Francisco, 2007). Waters, Malcolm, Globalization (London, 1995). Watts, Michael R., The Dissenters: Volume III: The Crisis and Conscience of Nonconformity (Oxford, 2015).

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1 Encounters with Modernity among Received Spiritualities and Traditions Candy Gunther Brown

Encounters with modernity transformed dissenting Protestant spiritualities and traditions over the course of the twentieth century. How it did so is a matter of debate: but it would be misleading to describe the net result as ‘secularization’. Rather, modernity has unfolded in manifold ways depending upon the context, and Protestants, among others, have responded variously— with particularly stark differences between the global North and South. This chapter works toward developing a partial typology of Protestant reactions. Because the Bible has long been central to Protestant history and identity, any Protestant adaptation over time involves some mode of biblical interpretation. Protestants encountering new horizons and challenges both view their changing world in terms of the Bible and read the Bible in terms of shifting experiences. Broadly speaking, modernity has fuelled rival impulses toward pentecostalization and pluralization, which have unfolded through at least six categories of Protestant responses: to (1) reinterpret the Bible in light of modern scholarship; (2) reaffirm the Bible’s authoritative status; (3) recontextualize the Bible in light of modern society and culture; (4) reinterpret medical materialism through the prism of biblical supernaturalism; (5) reassess the Bible’s compatibility with a plurality of spiritual healing resources; and (6) reappropriate modern technologies for traditional biblical ends. This chapter seeks to establish part of the context for following chapters on biblical interpretation, evangelism, preaching, and other themes. It begins with an illuminating case study, defines key terms, interrogates the relationship between modernity and the wildfire spread of pentecostalism, and then details a six-part typology of Protestant encounters with modernity.

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AFRICA AS A CHA LLENGE TO SECULARIZATION THEORI ES Secularization theorists have had to come to terms with the empirical fact that, despite the acceleration of modernizing impulses over the course of the twentieth century, the world has not been (to use the term adopted from Weberian sociology) ‘disenchanted’. Africa provides a potent illustration of how and why modernization can increase the appeal of pentecostal Christianity. European colonial powers partitioned Africa in the 1890s. Following the First World War, missionary churches grew in the context of colonial rule and the introduction of Euro-American trade, technology, and disease, as African societies became more deeply incorporated into global economic networks. Colonial and postcolonial globalizing processes exacerbated urban poverty, famine, disease, and political instability—thwarting efforts to achieve worldly success by dint of the traditional Protestant mechanisms of hard work and thrift.¹ Between 1900 and 1999, the population of Africa grew six times—climbing to 800 million people, or 13 per cent of the world’s total. During this same century, Africa’s Christian population grew a stunning forty-six times. In 1900, 5 per cent of Africa was Christian; by 1970, 39 per cent of Africans identified as Christian; by 2020, this is projected to rise to 49 per cent (some 54 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa). The proportion of the world’s Christians living in Africa grew from 2 per cent in 1900 to 20 per cent in 2010. Half the world’s Anglicans, 25 per cent of Reformed Protestants, 20 per cent of Lutherans, and 15 per cent of Methodists live in Africa. By 2020, there will be 65 million Anglicans (most of them charismatic) in Africa, compared with 27 million Anglicans in Europe, the birthplace of Anglicanism. Regardless of denomination, most Christians in Africa share a pentecostal emphasis on gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as healings, miracles, prophecy, and discernment of spirits.² The wildfire spread of Christianity in Africa—and its overwhelmingly pentecostal characteristics—came as a surprise to everyone, not least to

¹ Jehu J. Hanciles, ‘Conversion and Social Change: A Review of the “Unfinished Task” in West Africa’, in Donald M. Lewis, ed., Christianity Reborn: The Global Expansion of Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, 2004), pp. 162–3; Brian Stanley, ‘Twentieth-Century World Christianity: A Perspective from the History of Missions’, in Lewis, ed., Christianity Reborn, p. 59. ² United Nations Population Division, The World at Six Billion, 12 October 1999, http://www. un.org/esa/population/publications/sixbillion/sixbilpart1.pdf, accessed 5/10/2015; Todd M. Johnson et. al., Christianity in Its Global Context, 1970–2020: Society, Religion, and Mission (South Hamilton, 2013), pp. 7, 14, 22; Douglas Jacobsen, The World’s Christians: Who They Are, Where They Are, and How They Got There (Malden, 2011), pp. 156, 160, 163–5, 372–3; Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, 3rd edn (New York, 2011), pp. 3–4.

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many of the missionaries who rode the wave of colonialism. Many of these missionaries were Calvinists (for example, Presbyterians) who taught a ‘disenchanted’ version of Christianity, shaped by ‘cessationist’ assumptions that supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit had ceased in the modern era. By this theology, once Christians had the Bible, charismatic gifts were no longer ‘needed’ to advance the gospel.³ Because these missionaries revered the Bible as God’s revelation of the way to eternal salvation, they prioritized rationalizing processes, in particular the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages and the teaching of literacy in mission schools.⁴ Ironically, when Africans read the Bible for themselves, they discovered an emphasis on miraculous healing and God speaking through dreams and visions, themes that resonated with traditional African religions, but which Westernized missionary theology had downplayed. It seemed self-evident to African Christians that the spiritual power seen in the two Testaments was still very much ‘needed’ to address modern problems such as warfare, labour migration, famine, and epidemic disease. The Bible seemed to describe a world very much like their own, and to offer specific instructions for how to transform that world to make it more like God’s heavenly kingdom. Jesus had taught his disciples to preach good news and show mercy to the poor through self-sacrificial service, and to heal the sick and cast out demons in the name of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. African Christians set out to do the same. African churches thrived to the extent that they traded the missionaries’ emphasis on doctrinal instruction for tangible demonstrations of supernatural power.⁵ An example of how this works can be seen among the German missionaries who founded the Presbyterian Church of Ghana in 1828. By the 1880s, missionaries urged reliance on newly available biomedicine, while denigrating traditional healing as superstitious or demonic. In 1918, the end of the First World War caused the expulsion of the German missionaries while a global influenza pandemic hastened the crash of Ghana’s cocoa-export economy. The newly formed Pentecostal Faith Tabernacle won members from the Presbyterian Church by offering divine healing. Many Ghanaians testified to being healed from influenza through prayer whereas 100,000 Ghanaians died despite many of them being hospitalized. Moreover, as Ghanaians became ³ For a masterly coverage of this debate, see Jon Ruthven, On the Cessation of the Charismata: The Protestant Polemic on Postbiblical Miracles, JPTS Series 3 (Sheffield, 1993 and 1997). ⁴ Jean Comaroff, ‘As an extension of this “rationalisation of the life world” ’: see ‘Missionaries and Mechanical Clocks: An Essay on Religion and History in South Africa’, The Journal of Religion 71.1 (January 1991), pp. 1–17. ⁵ Hanciles, ‘Conversion and Social Change’, in Lewis, ed., Christianity Reborn, p. 165; Stanley, ‘Twentieth-Century World Christianity’, in Lewis, ed., Christianity Reborn, pp. 64, 71, 82; Jacobsen, World’s Christians, p. 162; Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (New York, 2006), pp. 1–8; J. Comaroff, ‘Healing and Cultural Transformation: The Tswana of Southern Africa’, Social Science and Medicine 15.3 (July 1981): 367–78.

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further integrated into capitalist modes of production and had to travel further from home in search of work, they experienced social disruptions that many attributed to supernatural causation such as curses and witchcraft. Pentecostal churches offered a protection from spiritual attacks not to be found in their Presbyterian equivalents. By 1960, membership losses brought the Presbyterian Church to a point of crisis, to which leaders responded by imitating the charismatic practices of their Pentecostal competitors. By the late twentieth century, further economic disruptions and globalization of the labour market took more workers overseas to Europe and North America. Ghanaian Presbyterians, at home and abroad, became still more invested in divine healing and deliverance practices that addressed their needs in a rapidly changing world. Here is a case in which modernization proved an enchanting, rather than a disenchanting, process.⁶ A broader pattern can be traced in which Africans who joined missionfounded Catholic or Protestant churches (including not just Presbyterians, but also Anglicans, Methodists, and others) pentecostalized them—injecting the practice of charismatic gifts into congregational life—or, if they could not overcome missionary resistance, formed African Initiated Churches (AICs) with more freedom to contextualize the missionary gospel for African society. Anglican prayer groups in Nigeria birthed the Aladura (Yoruba for ‘praying people’) churches after the First World War. To this day, these churches feature disciplined prayer and fasting, strict moral codes, spiritual combat against witchcraft and sorcery, and the exercise of charismatic gifts such as prophecy and healing.⁷ Particularly gifted individuals led the way in forming many of the AICs. The case of the Liberian William Wadé Harris (1860–1929) receives extensive coverage elsewhere in this volume, and is clearly foundational to understanding the rise of AICs (see Chapter 6 in this volume by Jason Carter). Beginning as an assistant teacher and catechist in the Episcopal Church, Harris struck out on his own as an itinerant evangelist, claiming to be commissioned directly by God through dreams and visions, confirmed by supernatural signs. He reputedly baptized 100,000 Africans within eighteen months. As Mackay notes in the case of later AIC founder, Simon Kimbangu, there are close associations with the founding evangelism of missionaries, but also a critical transformation which takes place by the reframing of (in his case) ⁶ Adam Mohr, Enchanted Calvinism: Labor Migration, Afflicting Spirits, and Christian Therapy in the Presbyterian Church of Ghana (Rochester, 2013), pp. 2, 10, 53, 81. ⁷ Cephas N. Omenyo, ‘New Wine in an Old Wine Bottle? Charismatic Healing in the Mainline Churches in Ghana’, in Candy Gunther Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing (New York, 2011), p. 232; Andrew Walls, ‘The Evangelical Revival, The Missionary Movement, and Africa’, in Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk, eds., Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990 (New York, 1994), pp. 319–20.

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Baptist theology within an indigenized charismatic Kongo cosmology: ‘Although Christians made a radical break with traditional practices . . . models of traditional belief . . . carried over into the Church.’⁸ The result was the rapid spread of Africanized faith which, with over six million members, achieved far more than its Baptist grandparents perhaps dreamed. In this instance, the exclusive demands of (proto)pentecostalism counteracted the more pluralistic context of traditional religion—as well as the pluralizing effects of modern meetings among peoples and world views.⁹ By the end of the twentieth century, AICs were attracting eighty million Africans, or some 10 per cent of the total population and 20 per cent of Christians. Of note, many Africans who participate in AICS remain members of mission-founded churches, to which they bring charismatic emphases. Since the 1970s, the ties between AICs and global pentecostal culture have also ‘thickened’. Many AICs now employ modern evangelistic strategies, such as radio and television broadcasting and the hosting of large-scale conventions that feature technologically amplified music and preaching. Contributing to transnational webs of influence, the number of Africans migrating to other continents, including Europe and North America, in search of employment has increased. Migrants form churches that retain ties to Africa through family connections, itinerant preachers, financial remittances, and media produced in Africa and circulated globally.¹⁰ African migrant churches retain a supernaturalist orientation even when transplanted into starkly naturalistic cultures— and, indeed, seek to missionize their host societies and restore charismatic gifts to rationalistic churches. The African case, then, invites a broader consideration of the relationship between modernity and the flourishing of globalized forms of Christianity.¹¹ As noted in the Introduction to this volume, Pentecostal Christianity presents a particular challenge to the theories of ‘modernization as secularization’. Not only has Christianity gained ground as modernizing processes have accelerated, but it is the most baldly supernaturalist forms of Christianity that are booming—though more so in certain modern contexts than others. ⁸ D. J. Mackay, ‘Simon Kimbangu and the B.M.S. Tradition’, Journal of Religion in Africa 17.2 (June 1987), p. 114. ⁹ Hanciles, ‘Conversion and Social Change’, in Lewis, ed., Christianity Reborn, pp. 169–70; Walls, ‘Evangelical Revival’, in Noll et al., eds., Evangelicalism, p. 316. ¹⁰ Kathleen Openshaw, ‘Home is Where the Spirit Is: How Members of Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pentecostal Parishes on the East Coast of Ireland Make Home’, MA thesis, Nui Maynooth, 2013; Annalisa Butticci, African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe: The Politics of Presence in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, 2016). ¹¹ Hanciles, ‘Conversion and Social Change’, in Lewis, ed., Christianity Reborn, pp. 171–2; Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley, 2007), p. 26; Jacobsen, World’s Christians, p. 162; Claudia Währisch Oblau, ‘Material Salvation: Healing, Deliverance, and “Breakthrough” in African Migrant Churches in Germany’, in Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, pp. 63–5.

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(The definitional issues surrounding ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’ are, in part, one cause of this.) Pentecostalism is thriving in part—indeed, arguably for the primary reason—that it promises healing to societies that report feeling more vulnerable to physical disease, psychological disorders, and spiritual malaise than previously experienced in the modern era. Modernization has affected global health for better and for worse, thereby intensifying awareness of the need and insufficiency of medicine alone to meet the need for healing. Modern people do on the whole enjoy improved standards of living and greater access to non-local resources. Medical technology has been widely employed to clean up food, water, and sewage disposal; conquer many infections with antibiotics, vaccines, and antiseptic surgical procedures; increase access to skilled care in modern hospitals; mitigate pain through anaesthesia; and increase life span. Yet at the same time modern wars, colonial empires, postcolonial political instability, and powerful multinational corporations have increased the toll of poverty-related infirmities (for example, nutritional deficiency, depression, substance abuse, and violence), global epidemics and fear of epidemics (spread through the global export market, international travel, and media), crowded and unsanitary working and living conditions (which spread contagions while wearing down immunity), and inequitable distribution of healthcare (roughly 80 per cent of the world’s population lacks affordable access to quality conventional medical treatment).¹² Even the extension of lifespan in the West has multiplied the instance of incurable pathologies in a setting where the omnipresence of actuarial assessment leaves citizens ever aware of residual risk. ‘Wealth’ in advanced modernity, as Ulrich Beck has noted, is contingent on the creation of the ‘risk society’.¹³ Even the most sophisticated medical interventions have failed to halt the spread of global killers such as cancer or to eliminate chronic pain or psychological malaise. The side effects of advanced treatments such as chemotherapy are notorious. Iatrogenic disease—a euphemism for the unintended effects of medical treatment—ranks among the top killers in industrialized countries. Many people have, moreover, experienced the depersonalization and specialization of medical treatments as alienating. Even in the West, the unfulfilled promises of the modern medical bureaucracy (particularly in high-cost nonsupported or welfare state settings struggling with multiple track ageing and

¹² David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Malden, 2002), pp. 1, 105; Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Reading, 1995), pp. 104, 109; André Corten and Ruth Marshall-Fratani, introduction to Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America (Bloomington, 2001), pp. 3, 6; R. Andrew Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (New Brunswick, 1997), p. 82; M. V. Gumede, Traditional Healers: A Medical Practitioner’s Perspective (Braamfontein, 1990), pp. 38, 203. ¹³ Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi, 1993), p. 19.

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pluralizing demographies) heighten the appeal of healing from a personally concerned God through the hands-on, emotionally intense prayers of a loving community—while also encouraging experimentation with multiple spiritual resources.¹⁴ In the Majority World, the ‘promise’ of medical utopias is often not sufficiently present as to be ‘unfulfilled’. In a highly mobile, global society, where there is extensive movement between these worlds, it is not hard to find situations where the spiritual technologies of the one are adopted in the other. It is significant that the AICs mentioned above, for instance, have a strong emphasis on healing. One of the three key dates in the Kimbanguist calendar is the celebration of the restoration of healing to the Church, a celebration carried with their communities into spiritual praxis in Europe and North America.¹⁵

PENTECOSTALISM IN ITS GLOBAL CONTEXTS Pentecostal Christianity is a high-threshold, exclusivist religion that insists that the Christian God is the one true God—the most powerful source of help in this world and the world to come, and the only worthy object of devotion. The ‘full’ gospel of salvation from sin, healing from disease, deliverance from demonic oppression, and baptism with the Holy Spirit, are all and only possible through the love of God the Father, in the name and authority of God’s Son Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Conversion implies a renunciation of the help of other gods, and the belief that the Christian God is all-sufficient for needs of both the body and the soul. In practice, many pentecostals—regardless of where they live—fail to live up to the ideal of relying exclusively on the Christian God for spiritual help. Indeed, the Bible narrates repeated failures even of God’s chosen people for whom He extended special care to respond with exclusive allegiance. Nevertheless, the ideal remains as an organizing core, or techne, to this energetic cosmology.¹⁶

¹⁴ Amanda Porterfield, Healing in the History of Christianity (New York, 2005), p. 184. ¹⁵ Carolina Major Diaz San Francisco, ‘Migration, Transnationalism, Illness and Healing: Toward the Consolidation of the Self among the Congolese Diaspora in Boston and Lynn’, unpublished MSc thesis, Boston University, MA, 2016; Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, Kimbanguism: An African Understanding of the Bible (Philadelphia, 2017), ch. 6: ‘Miraculous Healing and Worship’. ¹⁶ Miroslav Volf, ‘Materiality of Salvation: An Investigation in the Soteriologies of Liberation and Pentecostal Theologies’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 26.3 (1989), p. 458; Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil, p. 82; Candy Gunther Brown, The Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America (New York, 2013), p. 15. For this argument, see Mark Hutchinson, ‘ “Without the Holy Spirit, You’re Stuffed”: Pentecostalism as Globalizing Techne’, Address to ‘Pentecostalism and Transnationalism’ Symposium, University of Western Sydney,

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In the global South, modern pentecostalism emerged in a context in which most people assume that the natural and spiritual worlds are both very real and tangibly interconnected. Modernization brought both material gains and losses, notably exacerbating practical needs such as physical healing and provoking new longings for ‘wholeness’ in the midst of alienating bureaucratic states. As globalizing processes accelerated the circulation of people and ideas, the effect was not to undermine confidence in the existence of spiritual forces, but rather to raise questions about whether newly encountered gods are more powerful than previously available sources of aid.¹⁷ In the global North, on the other hand, pentecostalism entered a landscape shaped by rationalizing (particularly Calvinistic) Protestantism, Cartesian mind–body dualism, and Enlightenment rationalism. Word-oriented Christianity prepared the faithful for the afterlife, but seemed less relevant to everyday needs such as healing—which many perceived as a distraction from salvation. Protestants influenced by John Calvin (1509–64), the architect of ‘cessationist’ theology—rejected Catholic miracles as superstitious or diabolical, instead welcoming modern medical science as a successor to miraculous healing. But since neither Calvinist Churches nor the emerging medical profession (which, in the expansive medical faculties of Scottish and Dutch universities, were long mutually reinforcing)¹⁸ adequately addressed pressing needs for healing and intensifying desires for psychological wellbeing, people looked elsewhere for help—including both emergent divine healing, Pentecostal, and charismatic movements, and also (despite ironies and theological inconsistencies) ‘integrative’ healing movements rooted in non-Christian religions.¹⁹ As Christians from diverse cultures come into contact, influences flow in multiple directions, rather than proceeding in a linear fashion from centre to peripheries. Indeed, as globalization brings Christians from more and less developed societies into closer contact, Christians from the global North seem more disposed to borrow supernaturalistic world views from their Southern neighbours than do Southern Christians to adopt a purely materialistic conception of faith.²⁰ 1 August 2013, https://www.academia.edu/4232129/Without_the_Holy_Spirit_Youre_Stuffed_ Pentecostalism_as_Globalizing_Techne, accessed 27/8/2016. ¹⁷ Währisch Oblau, ‘Material Salvation’, in Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, p. 62; Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge, 2004), p. 15. ¹⁸ Ian McBride, ‘The Edge of Enlightenment: Ireland and Scotland in the Eighteenth Century’, Modern Intellectual History 10.1 (2013), pp. 135–51, and John Robertson, The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge and New York, 2005). ¹⁹ John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion IV.18 (Grand Rapids, 1953), vol. 2, p. 636, quoted in Morton T. Kelsey, Psychology, Medicine and Christian Healing (San Francisco, 1988), p. 17; Brown, Healing Gods, p. 16. ²⁰ Candy Gunther Brown, Testing Prayer: Science and Healing (Cambridge, 2012), p. 54.

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NUMERICAL GROWTH AND GEOGRA PHIC SHIFT OF WORLD CHRISTIANITY As noted elsewhere in this volume, over the course of the twentieth century, the global population of Christians skyrocketed both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the world’s total—and this growth has disproportionately occurred among pentecostals in the global South. Although pentecostalism has thrived among the world’s poor, its appeal is by no means restricted to those ‘disinherited’ by modernity. In the United Kingdom, weekly attendance at Church of England services plummeted 37 per cent (from 1.37 million to 870,000) between 1980 and 2005. Yet during the same period attendance at British evangelical ‘new’ churches soared 145 per cent (from 75,000 to 184,000), and Pentecostal attendance rose 30 per cent (from 221,000 to 288,000). As one sign of Christianity’s revitalization and pentecostalization even in Europe, the Alpha Course, a ten-week introduction to Christianity (with a notably Charismatic bent) started in 1990 at the Anglican Holy Trinity Brompton Church (HTB) in London and, by 2005, had attracted two million Britons and fifteen million people globally.²¹ By the time of writing, some thirty million people across a wide range of denominations (Dissenting and otherwise) had had an Alpha experience, and the HTB model had been implemented as the core Church of England (UK) approach to survival as it faced its future as an effectively disestablished church.²² Exhibiting a similar pattern, even as the total Christian proportion of the United States has declined, pentecostal and evangelical Christianity strengthened. The percentage of Christians in the United States fell from 91 per cent in 1970 to 80 per cent in 2010, with further falloffs to 71 per cent in 2014. Even so, 2020 projections still cite the United States as the single country with the largest number of Christians: 263 million. Revealingly, most of the membership losses have occurred among theologically liberal ‘mainline’ churches including those churches belonging to the Old Dissent. Mainline denominations counted 19 per cent of the total population in 1990, but only 13 per cent in 2008. That same year, 36 per cent of all Americans identified as ‘Pentecostal’ and 34 per cent as ‘born again’ or ‘evangelical’. Of African American Protestants, 19 per cent identified as ‘evangelical’, 21 per cent called themselves ‘Pentecostal’, and 38 per cent preferred the moniker ‘Charismatic’. As immigration has ²¹ Robert Mapes Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (New York, 1979), pp. 223–6; David Bebbington, ‘Evangelicalism in Its Settings: The British and American Movements since 1940’, in Noll, Bebbington, and Rawlyk, eds., Evangelicalism, p. 370; Jacobsen, World’s Christians, p. 134; Mark Hutchinson and John Wolffe, A Short History of Global Evangelicalism (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 213, 258. ²² Peter Stanford, ‘Holy Trinity Brompton, the evangelical HQ that claims the new primate as one of its own’, The Guardian 11 November 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/ 10/justin-welby-archbishop-canterbury-holy-trinity-brompton, accessed 30/10/2017.

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accelerated, so too has the pentecostalization of North American Christianity. By 2010, 16 per cent of the US population was Latino; 15 per cent of Latinos identified as evangelical Protestants, and of the 68 per cent who identified as Catholic, 28 per cent considered themselves ‘born again’, and 54 per cent said they were ‘Charismatic’. Although African Americans and Latinos do often form separate congregations, there is considerable and increasing interaction among racial and ethnic groups—influencing many Americans of European descent to adopt pentecostal theology and practices.²³

D O E S M O D E R N I Z A T I O N E XP LAI N D I FFE RE NTI AL C H R I S T I A N GROWTH? These trends provoke the questions: Why is Christian growth fastest in the global South, and what, if anything, does this have to do with modernization? How does it shape ‘dissent’, both in the old traditions known under that term, and the new? Although scholars and media pundits often classify Europe and North America as more ‘developed’ economically and industrially compared with the rest of the world, modernization is a set of globalizing processes that have left few areas of the world untouched. Modernization can, however, generate a variety of responses, and which responses predominate in any given society depends in part on modernization’s specific and local impacts, which in turn can be re-exported from the local to the global.²⁴ In Europe and North America, modernization facilitated the increase of wealth, education, and access to resources, including more effective medical ²³ Pew Research Center, ‘America’s Changing Religious Landscape’, 12 May 2015, http:// www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/, accessed 6/10/2015; Jacobsen, World’s Christians, p. 230; Johnson, Christianity in Its Global Context, p. 62; Dean M. Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion (Macon, 1986), pp. ix–xxii, 21–30, 53; Finke and Stark, Churching of America, p. 9; Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS 2008): Summary Report (Hartford, 2009), p. 5; Barna Group, ‘Is American Christianity Turning Charismatic?’ 7 January 2008, https://www.barna.com/research/is-american-christianity-turning-charismatic/, accessed 6/10/ 2015; Corwin E. Smidt et al., ‘The Spirit-Filled Movements in Contemporary America: A Survey Perspective’, in Edith L. Blumhofer, Russell P. Spittler, and Grant A. Wacker, eds., Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism (Urbana, 1999), p. 120; Candy Gunther Brown, introduction to Candy Brown and Mark Silk, The Future of Evangelicalism in America (New York, 2016); Roberto Suro et al., Changing Faiths: Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Washington, 2007), http://www.pewforum.org/files/2007/04/hispanics-religion07-final-mar08.pdf, pp. 3, 7, 29, accessed 6/10/2015; Juhem Navarro-Rivera, Barry A. Kosmin, and Ariela Keysar, U.S. Latino Religious Identification 1990–2008: Growth, Diversity & Transformation (Hartford, 2010), http://commons.trincoll.edu/aris/files/2011/08/latinos2008.pdf, p. 1, accessed 6/10/2015; Timothy Tseng, ‘The Changing Face of Evangelicalism’, in Brown and Silk, eds., Future of Evangelicalism, pp. 158–202. ²⁴ Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed., Multiple Modernities (Piscataway, 2002).

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treatments, which improved the material conditions of life—and for some, made religion seem less essential to explaining or addressing human needs. The rise and fall of psychologized forms of liberal dissenting Protestantism— such as that which flourished at Marble Collegiate Church (RCA) under Norman Vincent Peale (who was raised as a Methodist)—were an indicator of the health of old liberalism’s faith in human possibility.²⁵ Many poor individuals—and societies—have, by contrast, experienced modernization as spreading economic inequity and insecurity, epidemic disease, social disruption, and political marginalization—making the ‘gospel’, or ‘good news’, of Christianity seem all the more relevant to their modern world. Poor, sick, politically disempowered people welcome a message that God cares about the hungry, sick, and oppressed—and responds with tangible, spiritual power to provide food, heal disease, and set captives free. ‘Positive thinking’, in the risk society, proved overly benign and unaligned for the problems at hand.²⁶ For those who lack worldly wealth, status, and power, it is an empowering, radically equalizing message that the Holy Spirit can work in and through any Christian to establish God’s kingdom ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. Materialistic assumptions of the European Enlightenment have not had the same traction in the two-thirds-world, even as these societies modernized. As the gap between rich and poor, between status quo and migrant, increase, the same discontinuities may be found in ‘Western’ countries. Stereotyped Western expressions of surprise at the persistence of so-called premodern world views reveal more about the critics’ materialistic assumptions than about where the discounted world views fall in a hypothesized evolutionary hierarchy.²⁷ Read in modernizing contexts of pressing human needs, the Bible is easily interpreted as confirming a supernatural world view. For example, in Korea, a Scottish Presbyterian missionary introduced Christianity in 1884. Despite the disenchanted world view and cessationist theology of many Presbyterian missionaries, early Korean converts, who assumed the day-to-day work of evangelism and church planting, read the Bible as a resource for responding to the needs they encountered. They attracted followers as the gospel message was apparently confirmed by healing the sick and the casting out of demons. Although some Presbyterian missionaries rejected the exercise of charismatic

²⁵ Robert S. Ellwood, The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict (New Brunswick, 1997), p. 83. ²⁶ Timothy H. Sherwood, The Rhetorical Leadership of Fulton J. Sheen, Norman Vincent Peale, and Billy Graham in the Age of Extremes (Lexington, 2013), p. 57. ²⁷ Paul Gifford, ‘Healing in African Pentecostalism: The “Victorious Living” of David Oyedepo’, in Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, p. 257; Jenkins, New Faces of Christianity, p. 5; Volf, ‘Materiality of Salvation’, p. 448; Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil, p. 5.

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gifts as ‘shamanistic’ holdovers from Korean folk religion and explained apparent effectiveness in naturalistic terms, others approved or participated, revising their theology in light of experience—particularly when the missionaries themselves witnessed apparent cases of miraculous healing and expulsion of demons. In 1923, the Presbyterian Church in Korea revised its official doctrinal statements to renounce the cessationist theology of the founding missionaries. Over the course of the twentieth century, Koreans experienced ‘modernization’ through global wars, imperial occupation, and widespread impoverishment, all of which produced a climate ripe for more rather than less interest in miraculous healing.²⁸ In China, as in Korea, people experienced modernization as increasing the appeal of supernatural readings of the Bible. The Princeton-educated Presbyterian John Livingston Nevius (1829–93) was one of the first and most influential modern missionaries to China, where he arrived in 1854 and spent the next forty years. Although Nevius started out teaching cessationist doctrine, he became convinced by his experiences in China that deliverance from demonic oppression was a ministry necessary for the modern church. Nevius publicized his conclusions in a book, Demon Possession and Allied Themes (1896), which had been reprinted eight times by 1968, and which continued to influence North Americans throughout the twentieth century. After the Communist Revolution of 1949, Christianity in China grew rapidly despite official repression and the ejection of foreign missionaries. Since missionaries did not teach Chinese Christians to interpret the Bible in any other way, they read its miraculous accounts literally and prescriptively as addressing their practical needs—needs exacerbated as Chinese society experienced the dislocating effects of modernization. Most first-generation Chinese Christians in the twentieth century—as many as 90 per cent by one estimate—converted after experiencing physical healing that they attributed to God’s miraculous power.²⁹ As a reflex influence of this encounter between Western theory and Majority World actuality, Nevius’ reframed approach to mission came to exert a powerful influence on ‘sending’ missionary boards and institutions over the next century.³⁰

²⁸ Sean C. Kim, ‘Reenchanted: Divine Healing in Korean Protestantism’, in Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, pp. 268–9. ²⁹ Andrew Monteith, ‘The Ghosts of the Past: Reflexivity in Missionary-Missionized Relationships and John Livingston Nevius’ Influence on 20th Century Demonology’, unpublished paper, 2013, p. 2; Gotthard Oblau, ‘Divine Healing and the Growth of Practical Christianity in China’, in Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, pp. 319–21. ³⁰ Yong Kyu Park, ‘Historical Overview of Korean Missions’, in J. J. Bonk, ed., Accountability in Missions: Korean and Western Case Studies (Eugene, 2011), p. 5.

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TOWARD A TYPOLOGY O F PROTESTANT RESPONSES TO ENCOUNTERS WITH MODERNITY Even as there are multiple ‘modernities’, dissenting Protestants have responded variously, and certain reactions have created more tension than others with traditional biblical interpretations and values. As will be illustrated in greater depth elsewhere in this volume, at least six categories of response can be identified. These are to reinterpret the Bible in light of modern scholarship; reaffirm the Bible’s authoritative status; recontextualize the Bible in light of modern society and culture; reinterpret medical materialism through the prism of biblical supernaturalism; reassess the Bible’s compatibility with a plurality of spiritual healing resources; and/or reappropriate modern technologies for traditional biblical ends. Let us consider each of these categories in turn.

REINTERPRETING THE BIBLE IN LIGHT OF MODERN SCHOLARSHIP Many European and North American Protestants struggled to adapt Christianity to a rapidly modernizing world that looked very different from the premodern cultures described in the Bible. Intellectual elites experienced growing tension between the Bible’s authoritative claims and the rising authority of the new learning spawned by Enlightenment rationalism, scientific discoveries, and university-generated knowledge. Scholars in European, and especially German, universities pursued new lines of scholarship that called into question the Bible’s uniquely authoritative status as the revealed Word of God. Theologians proposed a ‘higher’ biblical criticism that approached the Bible much like any other historical or literary text, investigating cultural contexts, characteristics of human authors, and stylistic choice.³¹ The German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) has been called the ‘Father of Modern Liberal Theology’ for his efforts to reconcile Enlightenment reason with biblical truth claims—emphasizing religious ‘feeling’ and pursuit of the ‘highest good’. Theologians also grappled with the implications of new scientific findings, particularly regarding evolutionary development, following publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of ³¹ Jenkins, New Faces of Christianity, p. 6; Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York, 2014), pp. 199, 253. See also Mark Noll’s Chapter 13 in Volume III of this series, ‘The Bible and Scriptural Interpretation’, in T. Larsen and M. Ledger-Lomas, eds., The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2017), pp. 317–47.

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Species (1859). Where biblical texts appeared to conflict with reason or science, modernist theologians concluded that either the biblical text or interpretations of the text must be in error. Of particular note, the German Lutheran theologian Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) ‘de-mythologized’ the gospel for modern audiences, attempting to strip it of a premodern ‘mythical world picture’ that seemed naïve in light of modern scientific thinking. Up until the 1980s, the World Council of Churches global theological training programmes relied heavily on German state church funding, thereby exposing majority world missionaries and theologians to Bultmann and other purveyors of liberal theology.³² ‘Neo-Orthodox’ theologians, such as the Swiss Reformed Karl Barth (1886–1968) and the American Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), concluded that the Modernists had gone too far in jettisoning biblical revelation. They sought to resolve tensions between the findings of human scholarship and traditional interpretations of biblical texts by reinterpreting the Bible, without jettisoning modern research. Although profoundly influential in the global North, such modern theological approaches have attracted relatively little interest in the global South, despite the cultural and intellectual exchanges facilitated by globalization.³³ Whilst it is not uncommon to find complaints from African or Asian scholars about the ‘poverty’ of theology in such locations, the energy of local theologizing had largely to do with the lived experience of Christians.³⁴

R E A F F I R M I N G TH E B I B L E’ S AUTHORITATIVE STATUS Even within the global North, modernization has not inevitably undermined biblical authority. To the contrary, theological conservatives vigorously rejected liberal onslaughts. Early twentieth-century ‘Fundamentalists’—prominently the American Presbyterian theologian John Gresham Machen (1881–1937) —responded to the perceived threat of Modernism by rearticulating those historic Christian doctrines (such as the divinity and personal return of Christ) which they considered fundamental to the Christian faith. Where ³² John E. Wilson, Introduction to Modern Theology: Trajectories in the German Tradition (Louisville, 2007), pp. 84–93, 196–203. For German funding of WCC theological training/ influence on indigenous missionaries, see Noel Davies and Martin Conway, World Christianity in the 20th Century (London, 2008), p. 19. ³³ Wilson, Introduction to Modern Theology, pp. 172–87, 228–32; Jenkins, New Faces of Christianity, p. 1. ³⁴ e.g. Emmanuel Martey, African Theology: Inculturation and Liberation (Eugene, 2009), pp. 2–3; Sebastian C. H. Kim, Christian Theology in Asia (Cambridge and New York, 2008), pp. 8–9.

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biblical texts appear to conflict with reason or science, Fundamentalists concluded that human reason and science are in error, because the Bible must be true by virtue of the fact that it is God’s revealed Word. The ‘neoevangelical’, later simplified to ‘evangelical’, movement that emerged in the 1940s (most famously represented by the American Southern Baptist Billy Graham, 1918–2018) rejected both Modernist theological compromises and Fundamentalist cultural withdrawal. Still today, most evangelicals—including intellectually sophisticated ones thoroughly versed in modern scholarship— are biblical literalists, who affirm the doctrines of plenary inspiration (though not always, outside the USA, verbal inerrancy): that all Scripture is Godbreathed (2 Timothy 3:16), and every word reliably free from error. Other evangelicals allow room for stylistic decisions by human authors or errors in textual transmission and translation. For both groups, the Bible is unparalleled as the authoritative guide to faith and practice.³⁵ Evangelicalism in the global North is notable both for its periodic seasons of revivalistic ‘heart religion’—during which Christians expect emotionally intense experiences of divine love and grace, resulting in conversion and possibly baptism with the Holy Spirit—and its everyday, intellectualized faith. This faith strains to preserve the Bible’s credibility against modern challenges by emphasizing belief in the facticity of biblical narratives over validation through personal experiences of comparably miraculous events. Pentecostals in the global South, by contrast, either seek to validate the facticity of biblical narratives through experiential demonstrations of miracles such as those described in the Bible, or integrate indigenous ways of ‘reading’ narratives as another form of truth.³⁶

RECONTEXTUALIZING THE BIBLE I N L IGHT OF MODERN SOCIETY AND CULTURE While European and North American theologians struggled to interpret the biblical text, pastors and laity sought to apply biblical principles to new social problems. The Social Gospel and Settlement House movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected the goal of making the

³⁵ George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of TwentiethCentury Evangelicalism: 1870–1925 (New York, 1980), p. 14; Mark A. Noll, American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction (Malden, 2000), p. 18; Roger E. Olson, ‘The Emerging Divide in Evangelical Theology’, in Brown and Silk, eds., Future of Evangelicalism, pp. 92–123. ³⁶ Chris R. Armstrong, ‘Sound, Style, Substance: New Directions in Evangelical Spirituality’, in Brown and Silk, eds., Future of Evangelicalism, pp. 54–91; Worthen, Apostles of Reason, p. 2; Jenkins, New Faces of Christianity, p. 4.

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gospel relevant to urban, industrial societies.³⁷ From the 1960s, increasing numbers of Christians drew inspiration from the Bible to join campaigns against violations of civil rights, homelessness, and world hunger, and for protection of the unborn, universal health insurance, immigration reform, and environmental sustainability. Even so, European and North American Protestants—evangelicals as well as liberals—increasingly view certain biblical rules as out of date and hard to apply in modern cultural contexts, or the very concept of ‘rules’ as inconsistent with how they construct a personally plausible biblical message of ‘grace’. In particular, twenty-first-century public opinion polls reveal liberalizing views on premarital sex and homosexuality, whereas previous generations read the Bible as unequivocally prohibiting sex outside of heterosexual marriage.³⁸ Christians in the global South, by contrast, continue to find the Bible’s moral, as well as its social, teachings relevant—and criticize Christians in the global North for failing to live up to biblical standards. For example, African Anglicans supported a 1998 resolution on ‘Human Sexuality’ passed by leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion at Lambeth, England; the resolution defined marriage as a ‘life-long, monogamous and unconditional commitment between a woman and a man’. After the Episcopal Church in the United States consecrated a gay bishop in 2003, Anglican bishops from Africa, joined by some bishops from Australia, Canada, England, and the United States, boycotted the 2008 Lambeth Conference and organized a rival Global Anglican Futures Conference that met in Jerusalem.³⁹ This division continues to shape global Anglicanism, and to push its evangelical expressions more into association with evangelical (d)issenters than with those in their own communion.⁴⁰ Many Churches in the global South can be classified as ‘Progressive Pentecostals’—conservative in theological and moral teachings based on literal readings of the Bible, emphasizing charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit, but also

³⁷ Christopher H. Evans, The Social Gospel in American Religion: A History (New York, 2017), pp. 38–40. ³⁸ Hutchinson and Wolffe, Short History, pp. 12, 184, 271; Amy E. Black, ‘Evangelicals, Politics, and Public Policy: Lessons from the Past, Prospects for the Future’, in Brown and Silk, eds., Future of Evangelicalism, pp. 124–57; Robert P. Jones, Daniel Cox, and Thomas Banchoff, A Generation in Transition: Religion, Values, and Politics among College-Age Millennials (Washington, 2012). ³⁹ Jenkins, New Faces of Christianity, p. 102; Lambeth Conference, ‘Section I.10: Human Sexuality’, 1998, http://www.anglicancommunion.org/resources/document-library/lambethconference/1998/section-i-called-to-full-humanity/section-i10-human-sexuality?author=Lam beth+Conference&year=1998, accessed 6/10/2015; Lambeth Conference 2008; Donald M. Lewis, ed., introduction to Christianity Reborn: The Global Expansion of Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, 2004), p. 4; Jacobsen, World’s Christians, p. 151; Hutchinson and Wolffe, Short History, pp. 258–9. ⁴⁰ e.g. Peter Herriot, Warfare and Waves: Calvinists and Charismatics in the Church of England (Cambridge, 2017), p. 76; and Caroline J. Addington Hall, A Thorn in the Flesh: How Gay Sexuality is Changing the Episcopal Church (Lanham, 2013), p. 229.

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actively engaged in social ministries that range from humanitarian relief to community development. Although often viewed as an experiential movement, pentecostalism is, more precisely, a restorationist movement. This implies restoring gifts of the Holy Spirit perceived as lost by the modern Church, but also ‘reforming’ local communities and even nation states into conformity with gospel principles or health and public probity. Pentecostal churches founded by and among poor people in the global South both pray for supernatural transformation of their societies and also engage in social service and political activism—sharing food, clothing, and shelter; responding to emergencies; distributing medicine; providing education, training in the arts, and counselling services; running for political office and working for economic development and policy change.⁴¹ As Freston notes, they are often underprepared for the tensions which such engagements bring. Nevertheless, the influence of such movements in societies where civic structures are devolved or denatured, has been significant.⁴²

REINTERPRETING MEDICAL MATERIALISM THROUGH THE P RISM OF BIBLICAL SUPERNATURALISM By contrast to the naïve supernaturalism of the premodern era, the materialist premises and measurable achievements of modern medical science have challenged Protestants in Europe and North America in particular to more reflective interpretations of biblical supernaturalism. Certain Protestants (especially Calvinists) have embraced modern medicine as a replacement for miraculous healing, and some (notably early twentieth-century Pentecostals) reject modern medicine as contrary to faith. Many others accept medical treatment as one means by which God heals, while also affirming God’s power and willingness to intervene in the material world to heal supernaturally; these Protestants sometimes wield medical science as evidence of non-medical healing.⁴³ Many evangelists in the 1980s Healing Revival (A. C. Valdez Jr, for

⁴¹ Miller and Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism, pp. 212–13; Jenkins, New Faces of Christianity, p. 8. ⁴² Paul Freston, ‘Pentecostalism and Global Politics: Three Questionable Approaches’, Key Issues in Religion and World Affairs, Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, Boston University, p. 4, https://www.bu.edu/cura/files/2013/10/freston-paper.pdf, accessed 30.10.2017; and Paul Freston, Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 35–6. ⁴³ Brown, Testing Prayer, pp. 66, 102.

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example) would ensure a goodly number of medical professionals were sitting in the front rows of their campaigns.⁴⁴ Pentecostals have, since the early twentieth century, often envisioned the Holy Spirit’s role in healing in strikingly modern terms, ‘riffing’ (to use a musical phrase suitable to this form of ‘jazz spirituality’)⁴⁵ on scientific ideas of matter and electricity. For example, the Canadian-American John G. Lake (1870–1935) exerted a formative influence in early Pentecostalism and remains a hero among many twenty-first-century pentecostals. Originally ordained a Methodist, Lake rejected conventional medical treatment after eight of his fifteen siblings died while attended by doctors, followed by three remaining siblings and his wife experiencing healing through prayer alone. Lake nevertheless appropriated medical ideas and language, gleaned from coursework at Northwestern University, to argue for the scientific rationality of divine healing. A self-styled ‘doctor’ of divine healing, Lake operated a Divine Healing Institute, popularly known as Healing Rooms, in Spokane, Washington, from 1914 to 1920, staffed by divine healing ‘technicians’. Lake envisioned the Healing Rooms as a laboratory for demonstrating not only ‘that God healed’, but also ‘how God healed’. Lake asserted that Jesus had used ‘scientific’ methods to heal: namely, the prayer of faith, the prayer of agreement, the anointing of the elders, and the laying on of hands. Lake defined ‘pneumatology’ as a ‘science of Spirit’, by which one could empirically identify ‘laws of the Spirit’ involved in healing. Fascinated by the recent invention of the dynamo, or electrical generator, Lake compared prayer to a dynamo that attracts the Holy Spirit. Lake’s conception of the Holy Spirit as a ‘tangible substance’ powerful enough to ‘impregnate’ any ‘material substance’ reflected then current ideas of electricity. He conjectured that during prayer for healing the Holy Spirit flows through every cell in the human body, producing chemical interactions sensed as ‘waves of heat’, in certain cases ‘dematerializing’ tumours in a kind of supernatural ‘surgical operation’. In a form of (D)issent from modern medicine’s cooption of the language of healing as ‘the real’, Lake reputedly sent Healing Rooms’ clientele to a nearby x-ray lab before and after prayer to chart their progress. He claimed to have staged demonstrations for medical faculty from Northwestern: attaching electrical monitoring devices that measured ‘vibrations of the brain’ and reductions in inflammation, and challenging doctors to look under a microscope while bubonic plague cells died on contact with Lake’s Holy Spirit-charged hand.

⁴⁴ See Mark Hutchinson and Jane Hull, ‘Healing and Hurting: Mainline Relationships with Australian Pentecostalism, and the 1952 Valdez Crusade’, CSAC Working Papers no. 8 (1992), pp. 1–28. ⁴⁵ Mario Dunkel, ‘Marshall Winslow Stearns and the Politics of Jazz Historiography’, American Music 30.4 (Winter 2012), pp. 468–504; and see Franya J. Berkman, Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane (Middletown, 2010), p. 25.

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Lake allegedly ‘documented’ 100,000 healings, many of them from medically incurable conditions.⁴⁶ By way of contrast to early twentieth-century Pentecostals such as Lake, Charismatics of the 1960s and 1970s were more comfortable envisioning medical treatment and prayer for healing as complementary—while retaining an interest in medical validation of supernatural healing. Many of them, after all, came from mainstream traditions in which medical missionary practice was prominent, and reflected in the ‘missionary doctor’ stories of writers such as Paul White and John Macky Hercus.⁴⁷ Kathryn Kuhlman (1907–76), the daughter of Methodist and Baptist parents, regularly attracted overflow crowds of thousands to her ‘miracle services’ in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities across the United States and Canada. Kuhlman invited medical doctors to attend her miracle services in order to evaluate healing claims, and publicized—making extensive use of print, radio, and television technologies—only those testimonies that could be medically corroborated. Alongside Kuhlman, Oral Roberts (1918–2009) played an important role in making divine healing accessible to mainstream Protestants, an effort aided by his personal move from the Pentecostal Holiness Church to the Methodist Episcopal Church. Roberts symbolically bridged the gulf between prayer and medicine by building the $250 million City of Faith Medical and Research Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma (opened in 1981, though closed in 1989 as a financial failure), where, he claimed, the ‘healing streams of prayer and medicine must merge’. Roberts also represents a shift toward the psychological and self-help focus of modern therapeutic culture: over the years (and, in part, pressured by the financial demands of sustaining a television ministry), he progressively downplayed physical healing and deliverance from demons in preference for financial prosperity and wholeness (often defined in terms of modern psychology).⁴⁸ The third-wave Signs and Wonders and neo-pentecostal movements of the 1980s and 1990s reinfused North American healing practices with a supernatural orientation self-consciously borrowed from the global South. The founder of the Vineyard movement, John Wimber (1934–97, long an evangelical Quaker) credited his emphasis on miraculous ‘signs and wonders’

⁴⁶ James J. A. Smith and Amos Yong, eds., Science and the Spirit: A Pentecostal Engagement with the Sciences (Bloomington, 2010); Brown, Testing Prayer, 71–3; Kemp Pendleton Burpeau, God’s Showman: A Historical Study of John G. Lake and South African-American Pentecostalism (Oslo, 2004), p. 27. ⁴⁷ See Justin Livingstone (Chapter 11 in this volume) on the depiction of missionaries in novels; and also see ‘Dr John Mackey Hercus’, The Baptist Recorder 123 (October 2013), p. 1; Paul White, Alias Jungle Doctor: An Autobiography (Exeter, 1977). ⁴⁸ Brown, Testing Prayer, p. 32; David Edwin Harrell, Oral Roberts: An American Life (San Francisco, 1985), pp. 102, 262, 333; Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York, 2001), p. 149.

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in ‘power evangelism’ to learning from missionaries returning to the United States from the Majority World. Randy Clark (born 1952, Baptist), was a catalyst for the Toronto Blessing revivals (1994–2006), which attracted an estimated three million international visitors and impacted tens of thousands of churches worldwide. He avowedly emulated the healing and deliverance practices of successful Argentinian revivalists such as Claudio Freidzon, Carlos Annacondia, Pablo Bottari, and Omar Cabrera. One of the many North Americans influenced by the Toronto Blessing, retired real-estate developer Cal Pierce, moved from California to Spokane, Washington in order to ‘reopen’ the John G. Lake Healing Rooms at their original location. As healing testimonies (published through modern communications media, including the Internet) attracted international visitors, Pierce established the International Association of Healing Rooms (IAHR), which has grown to several thousand affiliates worldwide. Healing Room leaders urge visitors to follow up with their physicians after prayer and warn clients against discontinuing medications without medical advice—reflecting the post-Lake rapprochement between pentecostal prayer and modern medicine, as well as modern worries about legal liability.⁴⁹ The twenty-first-century pentecostal armamentarium for addressing material maladies of modernity—epidemic disease, urban poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, domestic turmoil, and racism—still includes ‘spiritual warfare’, practices such as prayer, fasting, and taking authority over demonic spirits in Jesus’ name. Pentecostals in many parts of the world commonly envision the ‘anointing’ of the Holy Spirit as a tangible substance that can imbue physical objects such as prayer cloths or be especially thick in particular geographical locations, transfer from one person to another through skin to skin contact, or travel across space through cellphone, fax, or television waves. Rather than making miracles obsolete, then, modern medical science has seemingly made identification of miracles more precise—by establishing medical rules to identify disease, determine survival rates, and document the unlikeliness of recovery through natural history or medical intervention. Protestants in the global North share both modern and ‘postmodern’ sensibilities; esteeming the authority of medical science, they also want more than technology can deliver—experiences of the spiritual world that are immediately accessible through the physical senses. In certain cases, this longing for sensate experiences of supernatural power ironically leads Protestants who eschew theological pluralism toward therapeutic pluralism.⁵⁰

⁴⁹ Brown, Testing Prayer, pp. 34, 46–7, 73–4. ⁵⁰ Hutchinson and Wolf, Short History, p. 235; Jenkins, New Faces of Christianity, p. 105; Währisch Oblau, ‘Material Salvation’, in Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, p. 37; Brown, introduction to Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, p. 9; Jacalyn Duffin, Medical Saints: Cosmas and Damian in a Postmodern World (New York, 2013), p. 29; Wade

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REASSESSING THE BIBLE’ S COMPATIBILITY WITH A PLURALITY OF S PIRI TUAL HEALING RESOURCES Since the 1960s, Protestantism in Europe and North America has become more pentecostal and also more pluralistic. For instance, the US ‘counterculture’ and ‘holistic healthcare’ movements of the 1960s and 1970s reflected growing dissatisfaction with traditional religious and medical institutions and hunger for deeper spirituality. The US Immigration Act of 1965 removed national origins restrictions. Although most of the new immigrants were Christians, some introduced Americans to spiritual healing practices gleaned from other religious traditions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism (Taoism)—for instance yoga, meditation, and acupuncture. Until the late twentieth century, most Christians rejected such practices as idolatry. But by the end of the century, savvy marketers overcame religious objections by claiming to ‘secularize’ such practices, replacing traditional religious language with a vocabulary of ‘natural’, ‘universal’, and above-all ‘scientific’ techniques to promote ‘holistic’ health of ‘body, mind, and spirit’. Part of the appeal is that members of high-tech societies may yearn to replenish spiritual resources perceived as lost by modern materialism and rationalization by borrowing from ‘ancient’ cultures idealized as unpolluted by the ‘toxins’ of modernity. Moderns worry not only about obvious drug side effects, but also about the invisible menaces of processed foods depleted of nutrients and poisoned by chemical additives, artificial fertilizers, and pesticides, as well as the technological pollution of electromagnetic radiation, for instance from microwave ovens, electrical wiring, and cellphones.⁵¹ The ‘risk society’ has also, by extension, become the paranoid society. Modern Protestants share the fears and longings of others in their culture. As a result, there has been relatively little theological reflection about the implications of ‘integrative’ medicine that promises to combine the best of modern and ancient healing wisdom. Protestants ask the same question of complementary and alternative therapies as do other moderns: Do they work? (And they often answer this question not by citing systematic medical reviews, but rather by pointing to anecdotal narratives of positive personal experiences and by noting their own physical sensations during practice.) It is less common to ask how the world views undergirding unconventional therapies fit with a biblical world view. Some Protestants who do ask this latter question

Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco, 1993), p. 120. ⁵¹ Berger, Many Altars of Modernity, p. 19; James C. Whorton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America (New York, 2002), p. 245; Jenkins, Next Christendom, pp. 104–5; Brown, Healing Gods, pp. 10, 166–70; John Naisbitt, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives (New York, 1982), p. 48.

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reject alternative therapies that aim to restore balance with impersonal, universal life-force energy or unite individuals with a divine principle that indwells the cosmos. More commonly, reflective Protestants engage in cognitive bargaining to stave off dissonance, either by insisting that, regardless of religious origins, their intent is to participate only in ‘secularized’ versions that produce ‘physical’ benefits, or else to participate in ‘Christian’ versions that, in being rededicated to Jesus, avowedly benefit them both physically and spiritually.⁵²

REAPPROPRIATING MODERN TECHNOLOGIES FOR TRADITIONAL BIBLICAL ENDS Protestants have by and large responded to technological advances by appropriating modern resources to serve purposes envisioned as traditionally Christian. The sixteenth-century Reformers availed themselves of the printing press to disseminate vernacular Bibles and other godly print. Revivalists of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century awakenings travelled extensively and attracted publicity by means of the periodical press. As globalization accelerated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the relative cheapness and speed of communication (through radio, television, satellites, Internet, and cellular phones) and travel (by car and airplane) facilitated multi-directional cultural flows of people, ideas, and wealth.⁵³ Although modernization theorists often narrate a transition from social to individual identity, modern technologies also facilitate a new kind of social identity, rooted in translocal community membership. Individuals can more easily imagine themselves as members of global religious communities—or the universal body of Christ—when local churches host visiting preachers and worship leaders, and lay members consume globally disseminated worship and teaching media or engage in short-term, long-distance travel to attend conferences or work with partner ministries.⁵⁴ Korean Presbyterians sitting in a rented hall in Sydney or Boston can worship together, receive ‘church news’ via video link from Seoul, and then connect directly to the wider Korean Presbyterian world of preaching and teaching at home or in their cars via ⁵² Brown, Healing Gods, pp. 1, 4, 17; Berger, Many Altars of Modernity, p. 2. ⁵³ Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill, 2004), pp. 2, 34, 243. ⁵⁴ Taylor, Secular Age, p. 157; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York, 1991), p. 10; Susan O’Brien, ‘A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735–1755’, The American Historical Review 91.4 (1986), pp. 811–32; Währisch Oblau, ‘Material Salvation’, in Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, p. 64.

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podcast. Global network churches such as Hillsong use technological instantaneity to extend brand, restrain costs, and maintain a sense of common belonging.⁵⁵ Dissenting Protestants tend to envision themselves as a set-apart people with a mission to the world that technology can help fulfil. The early phases of technological developments typically provoke anxiety that new technologies may be corrupting. Thus, many Protestants at first worried about novels, rock music, and movies. By the end of the twentieth century, they wrote and published bestselling novels, contributed to a multi-billion dollar global music industry, and produced a thin, but growing stream of blockbuster films. Protestants have not merely followed broader cultural trends, but have often led the way as innovating entrepreneurs. What motivates this (D)issenting innovation is the goal of balancing maintenance of purity from a corrupt world with an imperative to create a transformative presence within the world. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this has led (d)issenting Protestants to appropriate technological means to facilitate megachurches, missions, and marketplace evangelism.⁵⁶

Megachurches The rise of the modern ‘megachurch’ (with over 2,000 weekly attendees) and ‘Hyperchurch’ (with over 50,000 attendees) provides an example of how (d)issenting Protestants reappropriate modern technologies for traditional biblical ends. Urbanization is a precondition for gathering large congregations on a regular basis. A few such large congregations formed in nineteenthcentury urban centres, but the number skyrocketed by the end of the twentieth century. The number of documented megachurches grew from 150 in 1986 to 1,700 in 2009, with over 1,600 of those in the United States.⁵⁷ An analysis of ⁵⁵ Robbie Goh notes that, even prior to the expansion of the network, megachurches thrived on the aesthetic of the mega: this is expanded even further through global networking, where the mega becomes synonymous with oikumene: see ‘Hillsong and “Megachurch” Practice: Semiotics, Spatial Logic and the Embodiment of Contemporary Evangelical Protestantism’, Material Religion 4.3 (2008), pp. 284–304. ⁵⁶ Kate Netzler Burch, ‘Jesus Freaks, Sacred Ink, Holy Yoga, and Other Tales from the Margins of Pop Culture: A Theory of Evangelical Identity Construction’, unpublished paper, 5 May 2010; Michael S. Hamilton, ‘American Evangelicalism: Character, Function, and Trajectories of Change’, in Brown and Silk, eds., Future of Evangelicalism, pp. 18–53; Brown, Word in the World, pp. 6, 243. ⁵⁷ Hamilton, ‘American Evangelicalism’, in Brown and Silk, eds., Future of Evangelicalism; Hutchinson and Wolffe, Short History, 262; in some settings the term ‘Hyperchurch’ has been used for aggregations of over 50,000 members, as these are clearly in another category. Interestingly enough, the term has entered vernacular language as a form of superlative. (Urban Dictionary, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hyperchurch, accessed 27/8/ 2016). Scott Thumma’s database has shown the number of megachurches in the USA is slowing,

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800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 n no w

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Fig. 1.1. North American megachurches Source: Thumma, ed., ‘Database of Megachurches in the U.S.’, http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/database.html

Scott Thumma’s database of North American megachurches (curated at Hartford Seminary) indicates the distinction between the continuing influence of the vast American evangelical hinterland, and developments elsewhere in the world. In the USA, the vast majority of megachurches are Baptist or Baptistlike (‘independent’ churches built around charismatic individual ministries, or ‘unknown’) (Fig. 1.1). As noted in Fig. 1.2, however, the vast majority of megachurches in the Majority World are Pentecostal/charismatic in nature. Willow Creek Community Church, in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, is one of the most influential US megachurches. The evangelical former Lutheran, Bill Hybels, started the church in 1975, with the goal of making church appealing to suburban non-churchgoers. Willow Creek’s ‘seeker services’ replaced hymnals, liturgy, and expository preaching, with high-tech, fast-paced music, drama, and messages of practical relevance to suburban life. As the church grew in size, it offered a wide variety of activities and services tailored to the needs of every demographic group. By 2014, Willow Creek had 24,000 weekly attendees, and the Willow Creek Association gathered into its network some 13,000 churches in forty-five countries. As the example of Willow Creek illustrates, megachurches typically employ modern organizational strategies,

but not their membership growth. In 2017, there were 1,667 US-based churches listed in this category. S. Thumma, ed., ‘Database of Megachurches in the U.S’, http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ megachurch/database.html, accessed 30/10/2017.

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Fig. 1.2. Majority World megachurches Source: Bird, ‘Global Megachurches—World’s Largest Churches’, http://leadnet.org/world/

state-of-the art buildings, cutting-edge media (for use during local services and for broadcasting over radio, television, and the Internet, alongside dissemination of messages through print and DVDs), and contemporary styles.⁵⁸ As globalization radically diminishes geographic barriers to transmission of influence, physically isolated churches can influence developments worldwide. Such is the case with Hillsong Church in Sydney, Australia. The pentecostal husband and wife team Brian and Bobbie Houston founded Hillsong in 1983. They have since used television to broadcast services to more than 150 countries and widely distributed contemporary worship albums to such an extent that Hillsong music has become something of a lingua franca across a range of diverse churches around the world.⁵⁹ Hillsong Sydney’s annual conference attracts 35,000 attendees, many of whom are international visitors. By 2014, Hillsong had sixteen regional campuses and international congregations in major cities on several continents: London, Kiev, Cape Town, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Paris, Los Angeles, and New York City.⁶⁰ Many of the very largest churches can be found in the megalopolises formed by rapid urbanization in the global South. One of the most influential Hyperchurch models globally is in Seoul, Korea’s Yoido Full Gospel Church, founded by Assemblies of God pastor David Yonggi Cho (Pentecostal) in

⁵⁸ Hamilton, ‘American Evangelicalism’, in Brown and Silk, eds., Future of Evangelicalism. ⁵⁹ See Daniel Thornton, ‘On Hillsong’s Continued Reign over the Australian Contemporary Congregational Song Genre’, Perfect Beat 17.2 (2016), p. 169; and Tanya Riches and Tom Wagner, ‘The Evolution of Hillsong Music: From Australian Pentecostal Congregation into Global Brand’, Australian Journal of Communication 39.1 (2013), pp. 17–36. ⁶⁰ Hutchinson and Wolffe, Short History, p. 262; Jacobsen, World’s Christians, p. 263.

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1958. The church grew from a tiny handful of attendees to 8,000 members by 1968, 200,000 by 1977, and 800,000 by 2007, and has been credited as the single largest Christian congregation in the world. Cho popularized the ‘cellgroup’ (note the modern biological metaphor) model of church growth. The number of cell groups multiplies as each group constantly recruits new members and divides in half once there are fifteen to twenty participants. As gatherings of the entire church outgrew one building after another—even with seven Sunday services—by the 1980s, Yoido (drawing on a modern technological metaphor) established ‘satellite’ churches where members could meet closer to their homes.⁶¹ Modern communication and travel technologies contributed to Yoido’s global influence. Hearing of the church’s overwhelming numerical success, visitors travelled to Yoido and sought to apply principles learned there to their local situations. For instance, César Castellanos visited from Bogotá, Colombia in 1983. Upon returning home, Castellanos developed the ‘G12’ approach to cell-based church growth at his pentecostal church, Misión Carismática Internacional. Each G12 leader follows Jesus’s example of training twelve disciples, each of whom trains twelve others. Castellanos’s church grew to 200,000 members by the 2000s, and in turn inspired churches elsewhere. England’s largest English-originated church, the Pentecostal Kensington Temple in London, adopted the G12 model. In addition to attracting 5,000 weekly attendees to its central campus, Kensington Temple has planted dozens of smaller churches, and hundreds of cell groups, across London and has spread its ‘apostolic network’ throughout Europe. Another globally influential Latin American church is the Brazilian Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, or the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. Pentecostal pastor Edir Macedo founded the church in 1977 in a large urban centre, Rio de Janeiro. The main building, or ‘temple’, seats 11,000, and there is an extensive media outreach programme and numerous, smaller affiliated temples. By 1999, the church reported 1.8 million Brazilian members and 4 million additional members in other countries.⁶² By 2010, global membership was estimated to have topped 7 million.⁶³ Although modernizing processes have impacted Africa negatively in many respects, urbanization and transnational migration facilitated the rise of globally influential megachurches and celebrity pastors. David Oyedepo (from a mixed Muslim/AIC background) started the pentecostal Living Faith Church Worldwide, popularly known as Winners’ Chapel, in Lagos, Nigeria in 1983.

⁶¹ Kim, ‘Reenchanted’, in Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, pp. 267–8; Jacobsen, World’s Christians, pp. 190–1. ⁶² Hutchinson and Wolffe, Short History, pp. 235, 263; Jenkins, Next Christendom, p. 64. ⁶³ Allan H. Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge, 2013), p. 82.

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Winners’ has the largest church auditorium in the world, seating 50,400, as well as hundreds of branch churches in other cities and countries throughout Africa. As African out-migration has accelerated so too has African influence on church growth worldwide. For instance, the Nigerian Matthew Ashimolowo (a Muslim convert to Pentecostal Christianity), founded the Kingsway International Christian Centre in London, England in 1992. The church has a weekly attendance of 10,000 (many of whom are West Africans), as well as branches in several African countries. In similar fashion, the Nigerian Sunday Adelaja founded the pentecostal Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for all Nations, in Kiev, Ukraine in 1994. The home church, which is one of the largest congregations in Europe, grew from seven members to 20,000 within a decade. The church has started affiliated congregations in other countries and sent missionaries to Western Europe, the United States, and India. It has a particular focus on itinerant preaching, print, newer media, and social outreach programmes (for instance, a large ministry to drug and alcohol addicts—reflecting modern social problems, particularly in Eastern and Southern Europe) to pursue world evangelization.⁶⁴ As they have grown, not a few of these large social institutions (some of which are large enough to factor in regional economic considerations) have drawn negative attention, particularly in countries such as the Ukraine, Singapore, and Korea, where they compete for space in recent or restricted democratic cultures, or against established national church structures (such as the Russian Orthodox Church).

Missions Much as megachurches exemplify Protestant appropriation of modern technology to serve traditional biblical ends, so too do modern mission strategies. Christian missionaries have sought to preach the gospel worldwide since the first century, but modern travel and communication technologies have greatly facilitated this project. In the year 1800, scarcely one hundred Protestant missionaries were named in church records as being active anywhere in the world. In 1910, the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference counted thirtythree regions that each had at least one hundred Protestant missionaries. By 1920, US Protestant missionaries numbered 12,000, or 40 per cent of the total missionary workforce.⁶⁵

⁶⁴ Gifford, ‘Healing in African Pentecostalism’, in Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, p. 253; Jacobsen, World’s Christians, pp. 107–8, 153; Hutchinson and Wolffe, Short History, pp. 4, 265. ⁶⁵ Mark A. Noll, ‘Identity, Power, and Culture in the “Great” Nineteenth Century’, in Lewis, ed., Christianity Reborn, pp. 31–2.

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Prevailing attitudes toward cross-cultural missions became more negative following the post-Second World War collapse of colonial empires, itself a product of modernization. Postcolonial critics indicted foreign missionaries as cultural imperialists who imposed Western culture at the expense of rich indigenous cultures. Twentieth-century Euro-Americans did not, however, abandon evangelism or cross-cultural missions, but drew on diversity within mission practices (particularly in the ‘faith mission’ tradition) to develop innovative cross-cultural procedures. Accepting the validity of certain modern critiques, a new generation of missionaries largely replaced the earlier ideal of ‘Western Christian civilization’ with the goal of ‘inculturation’—incarnating the gospel into local cultures, while introducing these cultures into global Christian life.⁶⁶ For example, the American Pentecostals T. L. Osborn (1923–2013) and Daisy Osborn (1924–95) started out as missionaries to India, eventually holding meetings across Latin America, Asia, and Africa that attracted as many as 300,000 people at a single gathering. In addition to face-toface preaching and prayer en masse for healing, the Osborns emphasized training and networking of indigenous missionaries, producing large quantities of print and audio training materials and ‘DocuMiracle’ films, some of which have been translated into seventy to eighty languages. The Osborn National Missionary Assistance Program also sponsored 30,000 indigenous full-time missionaries and established over 150,000 self-supporting churches.⁶⁷ These practices were widely adopted, first, in the American Healing Revival of the 1950s, and increasingly through (D)issenting mission practice generally. The American Billy Graham (1918–2018), ordained Southern Baptist, is the best known international evangelist of the twentieth century. After the Second World War, Graham conducted evangelistic tours across the United States and Europe. When Graham visited Australia and New Zealand in 1959, 3.25 million people, or 25 per cent of the region’s population, attended, and 150,000 filled out cards indicating their decision to follow Christ. Graham visited Africa in 1960; India, Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, and Korea in 1966; ‘Iron Curtain’ countries in the 1960s—and during a 1992 Moscow crusade, a quarter of the 155,000 attendees responded to Graham’s gospel invitation. All in all, Graham conducted 400 evangelistic crusades in 185 counties and territories on six continents, preached to live audiences numbering 215 million, and an estimated three million people responded to his altar calls for salvation. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, founded in 1951, opened international offices in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand, networking among churches ⁶⁶ See A. R. Holmes, ‘Evangelism, Revivals and Foreign Missions’, in Larsen and LedgerLomas, eds., The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume III. ⁶⁷ Stanley, ‘Twentieth-Century World Christianity’, in Lewis, ed., Christianity Reborn, p. 76; Hutchinson and Wolffe, Short History, p. 188.

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and making extensive use of print (notably, publication of Decision Magazine), radio (Hour of Decision), television, film, and the Internet to reach an estimated two billion people with the gospel.⁶⁸ The German evangelist Reinhard Bonnke (1940–), although less famous in the West than Graham, has by some measures exerted an even greater influence on world Christianity. Educated at The Bible College of Wales in Swansea, United Kingdom, and ordained in a Pentecostal church in Germany, Bonnke has conducted most of his evangelistic work in Africa, largely through open-air services (facilitated by state-of-the art equipment that projects sound for miles) attracting as many as 1.6 million people at a time. Funded through a transnational, bureaucratic fundraising machine, Bonnke has preached to an estimated 120 million people, 74 million of whom filled out ‘decision cards’ distributed to local churches for follow up after conversions (emulating Billy Graham’s model). Bonnke’s organization, Christ for all Nations, opened offices in Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Nigeria, South Africa, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and distributed 185 million copies of evangelistic literature, translated into 103 languages, and printed in 55 countries, as well as making use of films and the Internet.⁶⁹ By contrast to Graham (but not unlike the Osborns), Bonnke characteristically combines presentation of the gospel message with demonstration of the gospel’s power by praying for physical healing, deliverance from demonic oppression, and infilling with the Holy Spirit. Many have attended Bonnke’s services after hearing reports of miraculous healing—which do not strain credibility in cultures saturated by belief in the supernatural. Whereas less than two per cent of those who attended Graham’s services filled out decision cards, half of those attending Bonnke’s services have done so—at least in Africa. Relocating his ministry base to Orlando, Florida, United States in 2013, Bonnke commenced a programme of North American crusades, at which his decision-card response rates have paralleled Graham’s. Explicitly acknowledging the challenge of preaching in a ‘secular’ cultural climate marked by ‘drug addiction, alcoholism, immorality’, Bonnke and his protégé, Daniel Kolenda, nevertheless prophesy that ‘America shall be saved’ through the same supernatural power that has been transforming Africa, a ‘massive outpouring of the Holy Spirit’. Countering the scepticism of Euro-American audiences, Bonnke produced the film Raised from the Dead (2003). The film wields modern medical evidence—including a death certificate and interviews with an examining physician and a mortician—to persuade Westerners that a Nigerian

⁶⁸ Hutchinson and Wolffe, Short History, pp. 182–5. ⁶⁹ Marko Kuhn, Prophetic Christianity in Western Kenya: Political, Cultural and Theological Aspects of African Independent Churches (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), 244; Jenkins, Next Christendom, p. 74; Christ for All Nations, ‘History’, http://us.cfan.org/History.aspx, accessed 8/10/ 2015.

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man, Daniel Ekechukwu, died and spent three days in a mortuary before being raised from the dead through prayer at a Bonnke crusade. The need for such a film reflects the secular conditions explained by Charles Taylor, in which Western forms of modernity have fundamentally altered the conditions of belief—supernatural interventions must be proven rather than being assumed,⁷⁰ and in the process of proving are stripped of their normativity. Although such missionaries from the global North continue to evangelize the global South, in fact many of the fastest-growing churches worldwide are indigenous movements founded by local peoples, culturally contextualized, and financially and administratively independent of foreign missionaries. As is further explored in later chapters in this volume, when members of such churches migrate, often transnationally, in search of employment, many of them maintain ties to family, friends, and church communities, and seek to establish churches in their host countries that serve the needs of fellow migrants and also influence their surrounding cultures. Many analysts now speak of ‘reverse missions’ from the global South to re-evangelize secularizing European and North American cultures (for problematic aspects of this conceptualization, see Hutchinson, Chapter 14 in this volume). As of 2010, the United States still sent more missionaries than any other country, but Brazil, South Korea, and India ranked among the top ten missionary-sending countries, and South Africa, the Philippines, Mexico, China, Colombia, and Nigeria had joined the top twenty. The chief missionary-receiving countries now include the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.⁷¹

Marketplace Evangelism Alongside megachurches and missions, (d)issenting Protestants seek to re-evangelize the public sphere by engaging in marketplace evangelism— contrary to modernization theory accounts of ‘secularization as privatization’. As an example, Mark Marx launched Healing on the Streets (HOTS) out of a ⁷⁰ Shawn A. Akers, ‘Reinhard Bonnke: God “Will Shake America” ’, CharismaNews, https:// www.charismanews.com/us/41172-reinhard-bonnke-god-will-shake-america, accessed 8/10/2015; Brown, Testing Prayer, p. 111; Taylor, Secular Age, p. 19. ⁷¹ Lamin Sanneh, ‘Mission and the Modern Imperative—Retrospect and Prospect: Charting a Course’, in Joel A. Carpenter and W. R. Shenk, eds., Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1980 (Grand Rapids, 1990), pp. 315–16; Webb Keane, Christian Modern: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley, 2007), pp. 4–5; Juan Francisco Martínez, ‘Remittances and Mission: Transnational Latino Pentecostal Ministry in Los Angeles’, in Donald E. Miller, Kimon H. Sargeant, and Richard Flory, eds., Spirit and Power: The Growth and Global Impact of Pentecostalism (New York, 2013), p. 204; Währisch Oblau, ‘Material Salvation’, in Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, p. 63; Johnson, Christianity in its Global Context, pp. 77–8.

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Vineyard Church in Northern Ireland in 2005. Within a few years, HOTS teams formed across the UK and Europe, as well as North America, Africa, and Australia. HOTS brings pentecostal prayer for healing out of the church building into the modern urban marketplace. Marx describes HOTS as ‘a gentle, non confrontational way of connecting with people on the streets of our cities and introducing them to Jesus’. Teams head to their city’s most trafficked urban shopping corner during the peak hours of Saturday afternoons and—regardless of the weather (volunteers often get cold and wet)— attract passersby with a colourful banner labelled ‘Healing’ and unobtrusive offers of tracts explaining the ministry. HOTS volunteers assure shoppers that God loves them and wants to heal their bodies as well as their souls—thereby ‘re-enchanting’ late modernity’s heightened esteem for bodily well-being. Volunteers invite those who stop to talk to sit in a folding chair and receive prayer then and there for healing or other needs. Marx explains the HOTS vision in terms indicative of a postmodern bricolage of Desert Fathers and Celtic spirituality: We create a thin place on the streets where heaven and earth meet . . . a spiritual oasis where stillness falls, full of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. . . . Amongst the hustle and bustle of busy shoppers, walks the Prince of Peace. Passers-by begin to slow and stop, as the presence of God draws their hearts.

Rather than critique consumerism, modern pentecostals seek to create a spiritually transformative space within modern markets—a ‘thin place’ where heaven changes earth.⁷² With the rise of ‘moral panics’ associating religion of all types with extremism, this practice has met with hardening attitudes from the forces of public order and a globalized commercial class which has tied corporate power to the enforcement of privatization. The depth of the disconnect between the mediated secular public present and the culture of the West could be seen in the trivial events of life. When, in October 2017, a passenger on the Shepperton to London Waterloo train line began reading apocalyptic verses from the Bible, other passengers (who could clearly not tell the difference between Christian and other scriptures more commonly in the news of the early twenty-first century) forced open the train doors and began leaping to ‘safety’. The event caused transport chaos for nearly twelve hours, sparking a welter of comments about the ‘nutter’ quoting scripture, but almost none about public biblical illiteracy.⁷³ Public demonstrations such as the March for Jesus, however, continue to illustrate the continuing (D)issenting search for a public voice. ⁷² José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994), p. 5; Mark Marx, ‘Healing on the Streets’, http://www.healingonthestreets.com/, accessed 8/10/2015; Naisbitt, Megatrends, p. 48. ⁷³ ‘Wimbledon station commuters flee train in “Bible” panic’, BBC News, 2 October 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-41466140, accessed 30/10/2017.

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While some Protestants target the marketplace as a crucible for shaping public life, others focus their evangelistic overtures on the burgeoning field of higher education. In a globalizing world economy, there is enormous demand for higher education. As national governments struggle to keep pace with demand, Christian-founded universities fill some of the gap—though such institutions typically become less distinctively Christian over time. This is not because modernization is inherently secularizing, but because (in the West at least) political and intellectual agents engage in concerted efforts via rationalizing bureaucracies to nationalize and financially profit from private education.⁷⁴ The tendency for Pentecostal/charismatic churches, in particular, to flow into the gaps left by underservicing in the majority world, on the other hand, is readily visible as a form of reverse sacralization through modern tools. As Hittenberger notes of Barnabas Mtokambali (founder of Bethel Revival Temple in Morogoro, Tanzania) and Kingsley Larbi (founder of Central University College in Accra, Ghana), in the foundation of schools, bible institutes, and universities, the driver is a distinct, spirit-led attempt to ‘liberate the laity’.⁷⁵ Between 1980 and 2000, Joel Carpenter estimated that forty-one new evangelical Protestant universities had been founded in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.⁷⁶ In the period since then (2000–17), Nigeria alone has chartered some thirty-one Christian universities.⁷⁷ As an alternative or supplement to the founding of Christian universities, Protestants also seek to establish an evangelistic presence in self-consciously secular institutions of higher learning. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, founded at the University of Cambridge, England in 1877 for Bible study and evangelism among college students, had by 2014 expanded to thousands of college campuses in 150 countries worldwide, under the organizational umbrella International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, founded in 1947. As noted elsewhere in this volume by Andy Lord (Chapter 7), InterVarsity played a significant role in the upsurge of pentecostalism in such countries as Nigeria and Ghana. InterVarsity USA has, since 1946, hosted a triennial foreign missions conference, known as Urbana (after the US city where it met from 1948 to 2003), which inspired similarly themed conferences in Europe and Australia. The North American conference attracted 575 students ⁷⁴ Perry L. Glanzer and Joel Carpenter, ‘Conclusion: Evaluating the Health of Christian Higher Education around the Globe’, in Joel Carpenter, Perry L. Glanzer, and Nicholas S. Lantinga, eds., Christian Higher Education: A Global Reconnaissance (Grand Rapids, 2014), pp. 279–80. ⁷⁵ Jeffrey S. Hittenberger, ‘Globalization, “Marketization,” and the Mission of Pentecostal Higher Education in Africa’, Pneuma 26.2 (Fall 2004), pp. 182–3. ⁷⁶ Hittenberger, ‘Globalization, “Marketization,” and the Mission of Pentecostal Higher Education’, p. 184. ⁷⁷ Joel Carpenter, ‘What Lies Behind the Rise of Christian Universities in Africa’, The Conversation 9 July 2017, https://theconversation.com/what-lies-behind-the-rise-of-christianuniversities-in-africa-79850, accessed 30/10/2017.

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in its first year (when it met in Toronto), with a high of 22,500 in attendance in 2006. Although a majority, 56 per cent, of Urbana 2012 attendees were white/Caucasian, a remarkable 40 per cent were Asian and Pacific Islander Americans (up from 24 per cent in 2009), in addition to 8 per cent black/ African American, 6 per cent Hispanic/Latino, 1 per cent Native American/ Native Alaskan/First Nations, and 0.6 per cent Middle Eastern.⁷⁸ Similar to InterVarsity, the American Bill Bright (1921–2003) founded Campus Crusade for Christ in 1951 to evangelize higher education. The organization adopted a new name, ‘Cru’, in 2011 to minimize negative connotations overseas of military crusades to coerce conversion. Cru had evangelized college students on tens of thousands of campuses in 191 countries by 2014. Although beginning with higher education, Cru’s vision extends to transforming all of public life. Bright’s simple Four Spiritual Laws (1956) tract has been printed in 200 languages, with 2.5 billion copies distributed. Bright also produced the evangelistic Jesus film (1979), which had by 2014 been translated into 766 languages, screened in 236 countries, and viewed by an estimated five billion people from all walks of life.⁷⁹

CONCLUSIO N Modernity does not inevitably reshape religion in any single, merely homogeneous way. The responses among (D)issenting Protestant traditions are therefore also various. There are particularly significant differences in how modernization has played out in the global North and South. Indeed, pentecostal Christianity is expanding most rapidly in societies where primary effects of modernization include the exacerbation of disease, inequitable wealth distribution, and social dislocation. Theorists from Europe and North America have until recently assumed that the ‘developing’ world will eventually follow after patterns set by more ‘advanced’ societies. The past century’s developments challenge this assumption. Relatively few Southern Christians have exchanged supernaturalistic for materialistic world views, whereas Christians in the global North increasingly look to their Southern neighbours for spiritual resources— from pentecostalism and non-Christian religions—that seem lacking in their

⁷⁸ Hutchinson and Wolffe, Short History, p. 195; Tseng, ‘Changing Face of Evangelicalism’, in Brown and Silk, eds., Future of Evangelicalism. ⁷⁹ PR Newswire, ‘Campus Crusade for Christ Adopts New Name: Cru’, http://www. prnewswire.com/news-releases/campus-crusade-for-christ-adopts-new-name-cru-125862368.html, accessed 8/10/ 2015; Hutchinson and Wolffe, Short History, p. 191; ‘Jesus on DVD’, https:// crustore.org/jesus-on-dvd.html, accessed 8/10/2015.

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materialistic culture. As a result, even as the Bible figures prominently in any Protestant encounter with modernity, tendencies toward both pentecostalization and pluralization can be observed. This chapter has explored six categories of encounter, but this is not meant as an exhaustive schema. What this typology does suggest is that, in a rapidly globalizing world, pentecostals from the global South may progressively set the agenda for religious change in the twenty-first century.

S E L E C T B I BL IO G R A P H Y Anderson, Allan H., An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge, 2013). Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi, 1993). Brown, Candy Gunther, Testing Prayer: Science and Healing (Cambridge, 2012). Brown, Candy Gunther and Mark Silk, The Future of Evangelicalism in America (New York, 2016). Burpeau, Kemp Pendleton, God’s Showman: A Historical Study of John G. Lake and South African-American Pentecostalism (Oslo, 2004). Butticci, Annalisa, African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe: The Politics of Presence in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, 2016). Casanova, José, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994). Corten, André and Ruth Marshall-Fratani, eds., Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America (Bloomington, 2001). Evans, Christopher H., The Social Gospel in American Religion: A History (New York, 2017). Freston, Paul, Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America (Cambridge, 2001). Gampiot, Aurélien M., Kimbanguism: An African Understanding of the Bible (Philadelphia, 2017). Goh, Robbie, ‘Hillsong and “Megachurch” Practice: Semiotics, Spatial Logic and the Embodiment of Contemporary Evangelical Protestantism’, Material Religion 4.3 (2008), pp. 284–304. Herriot, Peter, Warfare and Waves: Calvinists and Charismatics in the Church of England (Cambridge, 2017). Hittenberger, Jeffrey S., ‘Globalization, “Marketization,” and the Mission of Pentecostal Higher Education in Africa’, Pneuma 26.2 (Fall, 2004), pp. 182–3. Hutchinson, Mark and John Wolffe, A Short History of Global Evangelicalism (Cambridge, 2012). Jenkins, Philip, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York, 2011). Johnson, Todd M. et al., Christianity in Its Global Context, 1970–2020: Society, Religion, and Mission (South Hamilton, 2013). Kim, Sebastian C. H., Christian Theology in Asia (Cambridge and New York, 2008).

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Kuhn, Marko, Prophetic Christianity in Western Kenya: Political, Cultural and Theological Aspects of African Independent Churches (Frankfurt am Main, 2008). Martin, David, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Malden, 2002). Miller, Donald E. and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley, 2007). Miller, Donald E., Kimon H. Sargeant, and Richard Flory, eds., Spirit and Power: The Growth and Global Impact of Pentecostalism (New York, 2013). Park, Yong Kyu, ‘Historical Overview of Korean Missions’, in J. J. Bonk, ed., Accountability in Missions: Korean and Western Case Studies (Eugene, 2011). Riches, Tanya and Tom Wagner, ‘The Evolution of Hillsong Music: From Australian Pentecostal Congregation into Global Brand’, Australian Journal of Communication 39.1 (2013), pp. 17–36. Ruthven, Jon, On the Cessation of the Charismata: The Protestant Polemic on Postbiblical Miracles, JPTS Series 3 (Sheffield, 1993 and 1997). Sherwood, Timothy H., The Rhetorical Leadership of Fulton J. Sheen, Norman Vincent Peale, and Billy Graham in the Age of Extremes (Lexington, 2013). Smith, James K. A. and Amos Yong, eds., Science and the Spirit: A Pentecostal Engagement with the Sciences (Bloomington, 2010). Thumma, Scott, ed., ‘Database of Megachurches in the U.S.’ http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ megachurch/database.html.

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2 Dissenting Traditions and Politics in the Anglophone World Gordon L. Heath

During the thanksgiving services that followed Germany’s defeat in 1918, Protestant clergy across the world played a role in forging a national vision that was distinctly Christian. The church services were, to use H. V. Nelles’ expression, ‘acts of self-invention’. In order to form a national consciousness, nations need occasions which bring people together. It was definitional to the role of Churches at the beginning of the century that they were given licence to act as ritual arbiters. The instruments of nation-building are items such as flags, anthems, statues, and monuments; events such as coronations or national services of thanksgiving are thus ‘acts of self-invention’ of a national consciousness.¹ Benedict Anderson writes: ‘In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.’² The post-war services were certainly an opportunity to console the grieving and celebrate the end of years of horror, but they were also a platform to forge a distinctly Christian imagination for the future. It was a vision that would be challenged in the coming years. The Reverend John Clifford believed that the Free Church thanksgiving service at the Albert Hall (with the King and Queen present) was the ‘beginning of a new day in the relations of the State to “Dissent”’.³ He was right about new developments in Church–state relations, but not perhaps in the way he intended. While his optimistic nation-building aspirations were

¹ H. V. Nelles, The Art of Nation-Building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Quebec’s Tercentenary (Toronto, 1999). ‘Commemoration as an act of self-invention’ is Nelles’ expression (p. 12). ² Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York, 1991), p. 6. ³ David Thompson, Nonconformity in the Nineteenth Century (London and Boston, 1972), p. 273.

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common among post-war dissenters, in the following decades they would increasingly be seen as a vision of a bygone era. Dissenters lived with a perpetual tension in their relationship with the state.⁴ On the one hand, they wanted to preserve their religious freedom and the right to worship according to their conscience without state—or state Church—coercion. As Michael Watts notes, what united dissenters from the sixteenth century through to the twentieth century was their refusal to submit their conscience to the whims of the state.⁵ Yet there remained within the movement a desire to partner with the state to forge a distinctly Christian identity of town, city, nation, or empire. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, that tension between being political insiders and outsiders remained, though much of that conflict had been resolved in favour of being actively engaged in the nation-building enterprise. The conclusions of David Bebbington, Laurie Guy, Stuart Piggin, Ken Manley, and Phyllis Airhart with regard to Churches and nation-building provide a helpful template for understanding the aspirations and activities of dissenters at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth century. All five note how such Churches were imbued with a similar national dream.⁶ While nation-building meant many things, at the very least it meant building a united, democratic, distinctly Christian (hopefully Protestant) nation. Commitment to nationbuilding meant that dissenters, imbued with pre-Great War enthusiasm (and a keen awareness of what it cost their communities), marshalled significant resources to accomplish just that. It was a move away from the margins of public life. As will be teased out below, the South African context was an exception in many cases: dissenters there were initially a racial and religious minority, and notions of nation-building were in the context of a racialized Afrikaner national vision. By the end of the twentieth century much had changed. In ways which few—if any—could have imagined a mere two generations earlier, the trajectories of society and the Churches had shifted dramatically. The Western world increasingly became a world of posts: post-colonial, post-modern, post-white, and post-Christian. Dissenters were forced to alter the way in which they engaged in the public square. By the end of the century, old notions of nation-building had

⁴ In this chapter the terms dissenter, free church, and nonconformist are used interchangeably. ⁵ Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978), p. 3. ⁶ David Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–1914 (London, 1982); Laurie Guy, Shaping Godzone: Public Issues and Church Voices in New Zealand, 1840–2000 (Wellington, 2011); Stuart Piggin, Evangelical Christianity in Australia: Spirit, Word and World (Melbourne, 1996); Ken Manley, From Woolloomooloo to ‘Eternity’: A History of Australian Baptists, Vol. 1 (Milton Keynes, 2006); Phyllis D. Airhart, ‘Ordering a New Nation and Reordering Protestantism, 1867–1914’, in George A. Rawlyk, ed., The Canadian Protestant Experience, 1760–1990 (Burlington, 1990), pp. 98–138.

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been refashioned or abandoned. Dissenters were increasingly discouraged and divided, trying to survive the tsunami of post-world war changes, and found themselves inexorably moving (back) to the margins. This chapter traces dissenters and politics throughout much of the twentieth century. By ‘politics’ is meant the direct involvement with government, or engagement in the public square. Along with those in Britain, it includes dissenters in what were the ‘White Dominions’ of the British Empire (later Commonwealth): Australia, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand. Those predominantly English-speaking nations shared a linguistic, familial, cultural, and imperial heritage that allows for such a sweeping survey to be possible.⁷ It will also intersect at times with developments in the United States. Dissenters in the global South are examined elsewhere in this volume. The possible range of people, movements, and events over a century means that this chapter will only be able to sketch broad patterns and trajectories running from conclusion of the First World War to the end of the century. While dissenters were united in their opposition to state coercion of conscience, and committed to nation-building, rarely was there uniformity when it came to political views. Alliances were forged, organizations formed, statements released, and even political parties established, but local circumstances, national identities, party loyalties, class consciousness, denominational politics, and dominant personalities meant that the dissenting political tradition was anything but monochrome. As a result, any brief history covering such a wide variety of groups in multiple nations across four continents must (by its very nature) make generalizations. It is still possible, however, to detect two important trajectories over the course of the century that had a direct bearing on the nation-building efforts of dissenters. The first relates to changes within culture, the ‘exogenous factors’ that remained relatively out of the control of the Churches but which had a direct bearing on their growth or decline;⁸ the second relates to changes within D/dissent. The first trajectory that significantly shaped the nation-building aspirations of Dissenters was the secularization of much of the West; the twentieth century saw a shift to a post-Christendom world whereby the Churches’ traditional engagement with the state was increasingly considered anathema. Dissenters, whose nation-building enterprise was predicated on the idea of a Christian nation, were required to adapt to a context which, as Keith Robbins describes, had become multi-faith, multi-ethnic, secular, and marginalizing of

⁷ For an examination of such common bonds, see Gordon L. Heath, The British Nation Is Our Nation: The BACSANZ Baptist Press and the South African War, 1899–1902 (Milton Keynes, 2017); Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, 2007). ⁸ Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert, and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), ch. 5.

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religion.⁹ Dissenters, both new and old, continued to embrace some notion of nation-building, but the nature and vision of that engagement had to evolve to reflect social and political realities. The South African experience was unique in that the telos was in many ways towards Christendom rather than away. The second trajectory could be seen in the changing post-war composition of D/dissenters. Dissenting bodies such as Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists were joined by new movements on the margins. As John Briggs notes, the growth of the Pentecostals and charismatics, various restoration and house church movements, black majority and diaspora churches, led to new voices and perspectives joining the older Dissenting bodies.¹⁰ Those new movements have been coined the ‘new Nonconformity’¹¹ or the ‘New Dissenters’.¹² The new groups may have shared with the older denominations similar views on moral issues and even political engagement, but they also did not necessarily share long-held relationships such as those between earlier dissenters and labour, or political parties.

BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD W ARS In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Dissenters in general experienced relief from legal disenfranchisements dating back to the seventeenth century. Benefiting from the evangelical revivals, Dissenting growth in Britain was remarkable, and, by the census of 1851, they comprised almost half of churchgoers. At the end of the century the ‘Nonconformist Conscience’ had been pricked by the impact of rapid social change on human suffering and public licentiousness. Dissenters were actively involved in the nation-building enterprise, engaging issues such as temperance, Sabbath keeping, gambling, war and peace, as well as filling the ranks of political parties and parliamentarians. Bebbington argues that by 1910 zeal for political engagement among British Dissenters had begun to wane due to the divisiveness and secularizing effects of such engagement.¹³ Nevertheless, by the time the War began in August 1914, Dissenters had been committed nation-builders for decades. ⁹ Keith Robbins, ‘Nonconformity and the State, ca 1750–2012’, in Robert Pope, ed., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (London, 2013), pp. 75–88. ¹⁰ John H. Y. Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity, 1662–2000’, in Pope, ed., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity, pp. 3–26. ¹¹ David Bebbington, ‘Evangelism and Spirituality in Twentieth-Century Protestant Nonconformity’, in Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport, eds., Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1997), pp. 184–215. ¹² Walter Schwarz, The New Dissenters: The Nonconformist Conscience in the Age of Thatcher (London, 1989). ¹³ Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience, p. 159.

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Their efforts during the War were in many ways a continuation and acceleration of previous efforts to work for righteousness and the security of the nation and empire. For those church leaders imbued with the often radical ideals of the social gospel, the War was an opportunity to apply greater state control of industry for the Christianization of the nation. It was anticipated that the sacrifice of sons and wealth would lead to a renewed and reinvigorated Christianity and nation, and usher in a new world order. But that would not be the case. The total cost of human life during the Great War was astonishing: over eight million dead and twenty-one million wounded, out of the sixty-five million mobilized.¹⁴ In many respects the First World War ushered in the end of the long nineteenth century. The horrors that followed in the wake of the First World War have led historians to portray it as the ‘opening of an age of catastrophe’¹⁵ and the beginning of the ‘bloodiest century in modern history’.¹⁶ In order to win the gruelling slugfest, governments had eventually taken control of all aspects of industry, economy, agriculture, and, with conscription, choice. As a result, the relationship between the Churches and the state also underwent significant wartime developments. Alan Wilkinson argues that Dissenters’ support for the war was contrary to their ‘deepest instincts’ and that they denied ‘almost all their most cherished principles’ in doing so.¹⁷ In similar fashion, Alan Ruston sees the ways in which Dissenters responded to the War effort as a seminal turning point in the relationship between Dissenters and the state. He argues that the ‘cherished and long established positions which Nonconformity held in the early years of the century, like voluntarism, were swept away by the actions of the government, and the churches had no option but to follow with their support’.¹⁸ That endorsing of the war effort led to a compromising of the defining characteristic of Dissenters, a compromise that he claims was a ‘cathartic event’ from which dissenters in the twentieth century never recovered. Wilkinson’s and Ruston’s points are perhaps overstated, for the changes they refer to are better understood as a change in degree rather than in kind. Dissenters had long been actively engaged in nation-building before the War and, to use Ruston’s language, had already

¹⁴ John Bourne, ‘Total War I, The Great War’, in Charles Townshend, ed., The Oxford History of Modern War (Oxford, 2005), pp. 117–37. Figures of casualties vary considerably. ¹⁵ David Stevenson, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War (London, 2004), p. 503. ¹⁶ Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (London, 2007), p. xxxiv. ¹⁷ Alan Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform? War, Peace, and the English Churches, 1900–1945 (London, 1986), pp. 54, 57. ¹⁸ Alan Ruston, ‘Protestant Nonconformist Attitudes towards the First World War’, in Alan P. F. Sell and Anthony R. Cross, eds., Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century (Carlisle, 2003), p. 241.

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been ‘compromised’ by their zealous support for state and imperial initiatives. The war was more confirmation than initiation. There was a dizzying array of social and political problems in the post-war years, for the War had ‘swept away a whole world and created a new one’.¹⁹ Besides a deadly global flu pandemic, the War birthed unrest, rebellion, and revolution throughout Europe. The League of Nations seemed impotent in the face of increasingly intractable problems. Labour tensions had been present during the War, sparking the Australian General Strike (1917), and strikes and riots in the Winnipeg General Strike (1919).²⁰ Workers were disgruntled, returning soldiers distressed, and the solution for many was some form of socialism. The post-war loosening of Sabbath observation and social mores was also considered to be scandalous, and the unravelling of prohibition—a fusion of patriotic sacrifice and religious piety—was alarming for those nationbuilders intent on preserving a Christian nation.²¹ Dissenters reacted to the unrest and uncertainty with familiar methods and assumptions, although, as will be noted below, circumstances eventually forced a change in tactics. One such approach to political change was through preaching. Revivalism’s pre-war preaching had ‘spilled over’ into political debates by providing a critical mass of voters who would support a particular political platform.²² Hoping for a similar effect, post-war preachers launched into jeremiads against sin with the aim of rallying support against such ills as alcohol or Sabbath-breaking. The famous American revivalist Billy Sunday’s flamboyant pulpit style was entertaining, and his thunderous denunciations of sin—especially the sin of ‘booze’—were mirrored by countless dissenting preachers in congregations large and small. For instance, those committed to traditional Sabbath observance in New Zealand were distressed in 1932 to hear that ‘Mystery Trains’ would operate on Sunday in order to take people out of the city to surprise destinations for rest and relaxation.²³ Trains had operated on Sundays for decades, but the new service created solely for pleasure seekers was deemed to be a flagrant disregard of God’s command to keep the Sabbath holy. Distressed preachers fulminated at the change, and, while some concern was expressed over the plight of employees who had to work on Sunday, the chief argument marshalled against the trains was that God would rain down judgement on the nation if it continued to flaunt his will. Some even conjectured that the Depression had been brought on by Sabbath desecration. In similar fashion, in the post-war battles against ‘booze’, pulpits were an important platform for ¹⁹ Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State, p. 193. ²⁰ Robert Bollard, ‘The Active Chorus: The Mass Strike of 1917 in Eastern Australia’, PhD dissertation, Victoria University, 2007; David Bercuson, Confrontation at Winnipeg: Labour, Industrial Relations, and the General Strike (Montreal and Kingston, 1990). ²¹ Guy, Shaping Godzone, pp. 126–37, 162–74. ²² Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience, p. 156. ²³ Guy, Shaping Godzone, ch. 6.

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denouncing what was deemed by New Zealand Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Baptist leaders to be a ‘battle . . . of the servants of God against representatives of the principalities and powers of evil’.²⁴ Confidence was high among preachers about their ability to motivate and sway public opinion, and itinerant preachers were enlisted to engage in public campaigning for prohibition.²⁵ However, vehement denunciations against social sins earned New Zealander and Australian Christians the derisive title of ‘wowsers’. Pulpits were used in similar fashion by other Dissenting preachers, such as the one filled by Thomas Todhunter Shields at Jarvis Street Baptist Church, Toronto, Canada. While Shields’ oratorical skills were unmatched in Canada in his day, his use of the pulpit (though perhaps not the degree of vitriol) was a fairly standard dissenting tactic. In 1934, in response to provincial premier Mitchell Hepburn’s amendments to the Liquor Control Act, Shields preached to a packed auditorium of over 3,000 congregants—as well as to others listening outside the building by amplifiers and over the radio—on the evils of the ‘present deluge of liquor’.²⁶ Along with his preaching campaign he gathered 40,000 signatures to pressure the government to backtrack. For months Hepburn and Shields exchanged vitriolic comments, with plenty of uncharitable ‘zingers’ coming from Shields: ‘If it were possible to reduce this remarkable person [Hepburn] to a chemical analysis to show what he is composed of, I think we would find 5 per cent ability and 95 per cent conceit.’²⁷ Such examples are evidence that the moralistic approach which had marked pre-war Dissenting political engagement remained alive and well. The foundational assumption of such a tactic was relatively simple; sin was sin, an abomination to God that had no place in a Christian nation and it needed to be roundly denounced. It was a markedly simple and negative approach that, framed in such a manner, could broach no room for compromise. However, that approach marked by ‘aggressive moral certitude’ was gradually abandoned over the course of the twentieth century due the complexity of social problems.²⁸ As Robert Pope notes, ‘Nonconformists generally recognized the need for the specialist study of the social problem characterized by considered

²⁴ Guy, Shaping Godzone, p. 167. ²⁵ Guy, Shaping Godzone, pp. 166–7. ²⁶ Doug A. Adams, ‘The War of the Worlds: The Militant Fundamentalism of Dr. Thomas Todhunter Shields and the Paradox of Modernity’, PhD dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2015, p. 500. See also Doug A. Adams, ‘Fighting Fire With Fire: T.T. Shields and His Confrontations with Premier Mitchell Hepburn and Prime Minister Mackenzie King, 1934–1948’, in Gordon L. Heath and Paul R. Wilson, eds., Baptists and Public Life in Canada (Eugene, 2012), pp. 53–104. ²⁷ Adams, ‘The War of the Worlds’, p. 502. ²⁸ Peter Catterall, Labour and the Free Churches, 1918–1939: Radicalism, Righteousness and Religion (London, 2016), p. 210.

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and expert comment rather than an ethical verdict and moral campaigning.’²⁹ ‘To their credit,’ he concludes, Dissenters ‘adapted . . . and even compromise[d] in order to achieve improvement.’ Besides addressing seemingly intractable social and political problems from the pulpit, dissenters formed church committees and strategic alliances to address political concerns. Such initiatives, and the official statements generated by such organizations, were intended to provide education for churchgoers, consolidate resources by partnering with like-minded groups, and broaden support in order to increase political clout. Denominations formed committees to address vexing issues, and ideally such bodies drew on those with expertise on the matter in order to provide a more thoughtful and balanced response than was available to the impassioned preacher alone. Their statements provided guidance to the faithful who were seeking direction from their leaders, and, formalized as they were by Church leaders and official decision-making bodies such as synods or associations, they also provided the appearance of a unified constituency when confronting government. It is not possible to provide a detailed examination of such organizations, but a cursory examination of the Year Book (1928) of the Congregational Union of England and Wales provides a glimpse of a type of organization common among post-war dissenting Churches. Besides having a committee focused solely on the issue of temperance, the Congregationalists had a Social Service Committee, chaired by the Reverend W. J. McAdam. That committee had an ambitious seven-point programme for the ‘guidance and stimulation of the Congregational Churches’. The committee had initiated around forty conferences/meetings with ministers, encouraged county activities, recruited local and district representatives, solicited news and suggestions for the committee, worked with other denominations through the Joint Social Service Council, developed future plans, and distributed the Social Service Bulletin. The Bulletin was to be circulated three times annually, and over the year covered by the Yearbook it included material entitled ‘The Issues Involved in the Coal Dispute’, ‘The Need for Voluntary Housing Schemes under Christian Auspices’, and ‘The Call to the Study of Industrial Issues from a Christian Standpoint’. Those types of concerns were ubiquitous among Dissenters in Britain, in the colonies, and among evangelical churches in America. Concerns expressed in such committees between the two world wars reflect the issues of the day, be it post-war reconstruction, labour unrest in the 1920s, or responses to the Depression in the 1930s. They were also the result of a confluence of factors, such as evangelical piety, social gospel beliefs, labour movement engagement, and socialism. Fears among some Dissenters over the spread of Bolshevism meant that socialism was frowned upon, including the ²⁹ Robert Pope, ‘The Nonconformist Conscience’, in Pope, ed., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity, pp. 437–58.

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social gospel which often drew heavily upon a Marxist critique of industry and labour. Others were more open to the social gospel vision of a Christianized social order, whether or not it had become fused to a socialist critique of capitalism. Those tensions were not resolved, and Dissenters remained divided. For instance, Canadian Methodists were ardently supportive of the social gospel, Presbyterians less so, and Baptists even less.³⁰ That said, even passionately anti-Bolshevist Canadian Baptists managed to release statements addressing social issues.³¹ As will be discussed, the issue of socialism and a Christian engagement in politics was particularly germane to relationships with unions and political parties. There were a number of strategic ecumenical alliances entered into by Dissenters: the first was that of involvement in ecumenical organizations, the second that of denominational unions. In both cases, a core concern was increasing political effectiveness in the nation-building enterprise. Nonconformists had been ‘at the heart of initiating and developing ecumenical relationships from the last decades of the nineteenth century onwards’.³² While the impulse to share the gospel locally and abroad was most often at the heart of the ecumenical enterprise, evangelical ecumenical alliances often also had a political raison d’être. Baptists, Congregationalists, or Presbyterians often had little compunction about joining forces in organizations that shared their fears and aspirations, and hoped that organizations would be able to fulfil their promises to bring much needed political and social change. For instance, the Anglican-initiated conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship (COPEC) in Birmingham (1924) was praised by Methodist minister Samuel Keeble, joined by eighty-six Congregational representatives, and led by Deputy Chairman Alfred Ernest, a leading Congregationalist minister.³³ Dissenters in the Australian Victorian Protestant Federation (anti-Catholic, anti-Bolshevist), the New Zealand Alliance (proprohibition), or the plethora of other similar organizations that sought to educate, motivate, alleviate, and agitate, also found ecumenical ventures a suitable venue to engage public life outside of strictly denominational structures. The need for such ecumenical ventures would accelerate in the coming decades.

³⁰ Richard Allen, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914–28 (Toronto, 1971). ³¹ Darrell Feltmate, ‘ “The Help Should Be Greatest Where the Need Is Most”: The Social Gospel Platform of the United Baptist Convention of the Maritime Provinces, 1921’, MDiv. thesis, Acadia University, 1993. ³² Noel A. Davies, ‘Nonconformists and Ecumenical Relationships’, in Pope, ed., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity, p. 473. ³³ Kenneth Hylson-Smith, The English Protestant Churches since 1770: Politics, Class and Society (Oxford, 2017), pp. 250–1.

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Strategic alliances within and between denominations were forged in a variety of national contexts, with some contexts more amenable to Christian alliances than others. For instance, the situation for white (D)issenters in South Africa was especially difficult, and marked with a troubling history of racism among white Churches in the decades before the Great War.³⁴ Throughout the 1920s and 1930s white (D)issenters were ‘caught between Afrikaner and African nationalism. They continued to seek good relations with the Dutch Reformed Church (NGK), but the NGK’s alignment with the interests of Afrikaner nationalism and its advocacy of racial segregation, increasingly during the 1920s and 1930s, made such an entente increasingly difficult.’³⁵ In fact, the ‘native question’ vexed the nascent South African ecumenical movement despite the arrival and work of John Mott in 1934 and the establishment of the Christian Council of South Africa in 1936.³⁶ Tensions were also present between white Churches, black Churches, and black liberation movements such as the African National Congress (ANC), for many in the black community believed that the prophetic voice of the white Churches had been too muted.³⁷ As the colonies moved to Dominion status, various denominations united to form national Church bodies. The formation of those bodies was the result of a confluence of various factors: a consolidation of resources, the influence of the growing ecumenical movement, and a desire to strengthen their nationbuilding influence and present a unified voice on public matters.³⁸ Presbyterians (1875) and Methodists (1884) in Canada, and Presbyterians (1900) and Baptists (1926) in Australia, all overcame their regional and theological divisions in order to form national denominations. The resulting unions led to extraordinary investment and growth in the resources available to respond to growing social ills. They also required the construction of new buildings in strategic locations, for it was believed that having a nation-building vision required a church building in close proximity to the halls of power. For Australian Baptists with national aspirations it necessitated constructing a church in the nation’s capital, Canberra. On land donated by the government, a Baptist ‘cathedral’ was constructed which would, in the words of one Baptist ³⁴ Richard Elphick, The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa (Charlottesville, 2012). ³⁵ John W. De Gruchy, ‘Grappling with a Colonial Heritage: The English-Speaking Churches under Imperialism and Apartheid’, in Elphick and Davenport, eds., Christianity in South Africa, pp. 155–72. ³⁶ De Gruchy, ‘Grappling with a Colonial Heritage’, pp. 155–72. ³⁷ De Gruchy, ‘Grappling with a Colonial Heritage’, p. 158. ³⁸ The strikingly successful ecumenical movement in South India predated many union attempts in the Dominions. It also had an additional aspect to it; it was ‘part of a search by Asian Christians for autonomy and authentic national experience’ outside of Anglo-Saxon strictures. See George Oommen, ‘Challenging Identity and Crossing Borders: Unity in the Church of South India’, Word and World 25.1 (Winter 2005), p. 60.

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minister, be ‘an assurance to all present and future politicians that the people called Baptists watch and labour and pray’.³⁹ Church union between different denominations was, however, an entirely different matter. Some had even more grander visions of unity, and sought to forge more formal unions of denominations. Attempts by Baptist Union general secretary J. H. Shakespeare to move the National Council of the Evangelical Free Churches (in England and Wales) to form a Free Church Union failed, but a partnership was formed with the formation of the Federal Council of the Evangelical Free Churches (1917).⁴⁰ Union movements were afoot in the empire as well. There had been discussions among Australian Congregationalists, Churches of Christ, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists over the possibility of Church union, but they were interrupted by the war. Baptists, Congregationalists, and Churches of Christ had further discussions after the war, but denominational loyalty ensured no unions took place until much later.⁴¹ Union attempts were more successful in Canada. The largest and boldest Church union was between Canadian Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, with the formation of the United Church of Canada (UCC) in 1925.⁴² There were a variety of reasons for the union, one of them being to increase the nation-building reach of the Churches. In the words of one UCC report, it was a denomination for ‘the friendly service of the whole nation’.⁴³ It was that impulse to shape the nation that led Phyllis Airhart to title her history of the UCC A Church with the Soul of a Nation.⁴⁴ And it was the concern for the soul of the nation that led to the expenditure of enormous personal and financial resources in social service and welfare projects, home missions, official statements on moral issues, as well as political lobbying. The UCC was not formally an established church, but due to its national vision and size (it was the largest Protestant denomination in Canada) it sought to act as one. Of course, for the three Dissenting traditions that merged to form the UCC that meant a permanent shift away from the margins; but the anticipated gains made with regard to political clout justified (for the moment) the transition. While preaching, developing organizations, and forming alliances within and between denominations were ways in which (D)issenters engaged political ³⁹ As quoted in Ken Manley, From Woolloomooloo to ‘Eternity’: A History of Australian Baptists, Vol. 2 (Milton Keynes, 2006), p. 460. ⁴⁰ Noel A. Davies, ‘Nonconformists and Ecumenical Relationships’, in Pope, ed., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity, pp. 473–94. The National Council and the Federal Council eventually merged in 1940 to form the Free Church Federal Council. ⁴¹ Manley, From Woolloomooloo to ‘Eternity’, Vol. 2, pp. 444–61. ⁴² Only two thirds of Presbyterians joined. The Presbyterian Church in Canada continued with one third of its former numbers. ⁴³ As quoted in Phyllis Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation: Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada (Montreal and Kingston, 2014), p. 5. ⁴⁴ Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation.

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issues, there was a tradition of having direct links with political parties. Despite diversity of opinion over socialism, there was a significant history of relations with unions and the Labour/Labor Parties.⁴⁵ One way in which (D)issenters sought to respond to the plight of workers and unemployed was to support the labour movement’s identification of the causes of economic ills and the Marxist cure. Labour itself was shaped by a symbiotic relationship with Dissent, often assimilating the practices and rhetoric of dissenters.⁴⁶ British Dissenters had a history of supporting the Labour Party, and, while other parties had Free Church members, the Labour Party had the largest contingent of Dissenters as MPs; just below or above 50 per cent of Labour Members in the 1920s and 1930s identified as Dissenters.⁴⁷ Methodists were well known to be significant supporters of the labour movement, but, as the example of Baptist John Clifford rallying for electing the Labour government in 1918 indicates, other Dissenters also found what they considered to be the interests of the gospel best looked after in the Labour ranks. Throughout the 1920s the majority of Free Church MPs belonged to the Labour Party.⁴⁸ Dissenters outside of Britain were also convinced that biblical injunctions relating to justice and care for the needy were best implemented through the labour movement. For instance, in post-war New Zealand, while Methodists and Catholics—closely identified as working-class Churches—were most commonly identified with labour, a number of Baptist pastors too were enamoured with the movement. The Reverend J. K. Archer, president of the Baptist Union in New Zealand, sought four times to be elected as a Labour Member of Parliament, served as mayor of Christchurch for six years, and was president and vice-president of the New Zealand Labour Party (1922–31).⁴⁹ Another Baptist minister, the Reverend Knowles Kempton, was an outspoken advocate for Bolshevism in the immediate post-war years; his comments provoked a vigorous backlash among New Zealand Baptists—but sympathy from Auckland workers.⁵⁰ A considerable number of Dissenters in Canada were also convinced that the exploitation and alleviation of the suffering of workers could best be accomplished through the labour movement. The Reverend Salem Bland was an outspoken Methodist critic of capitalism, supporter of the social gospel,

⁴⁵ David Bebbington, Congregational Members of Parliament in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2007). ⁴⁶ Catterall, Labour and the Free Churches, p. 211. ⁴⁷ Catterall, Labour and the Free Churches, see appendices. ⁴⁸ David Bebbington, ‘Conscience and Politics’, in Lesley Husselbee and Paul Ballard, eds., Free Churches and Society: The Nonconformist Contribution to Social Welfare, 1800–2010 (London, 2012), pp. 45–64. ⁴⁹ Guy, Shaping Godzone, pp. 204–7. ⁵⁰ Guy, Shaping Godzone, pp. 204–7.

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and an advocate for worker’s rights.⁵¹ His theological liberalism expressed in The New Christianity, or The Religion of the Age (1920)⁵² made him suspect among conservatives, but his advocacy for the radical application of the social gospel to labour concerns found willing listeners in the interwar years, and such concerns carried over into the ethos of the UCC. One of the most radical and innovative developments was the birth of the ‘Labour Church’—a collection of Churches that were devoted to the plight of the working class.⁵³ By 1921, six Canadian cities (the majority of which were located in western Canada) reported at least one ‘Labour Church’, and there were a number established among Christian socialist circles in Australia. While the Churches eventually died out, Methodist engagement in politics continued, the most well-known personage in Canada being former clergyman J. S. Woodsworth. His career as a Member of Parliament spanned roughly two decades, with a legacy of developing social policy and founding the new socialist (although avowedly not Marxist) political party Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a precursor to the modern New Democratic Party (NDP). While Canadian Baptists tended to be conservative and not identified with the social gospel like their Methodist co-religionists, Tommy Douglas (Member of Parliament for the CCF) and William Aberhart (founder of Alberta Social Credit Party), were popular Baptist preachers as well as innovative politicians who were in the vanguard of social and political reform in the Depression years. (Douglas was to be awarded the title ‘Greatest Canadian’ for his implementation of universal healthcare.⁵⁴) As already noted, the fusion of socialism with social reform was problematic to some, reflecting similar divisions within the United States. For instance, popular revivalist D. L. Moody opposed preaching on social issues as he considered it to be a distraction from evangelism. Billy Sunday (Presbyterian) was generally opposed to unionized labour, but Walter Rauschenbusch (Baptist) was a famous advocate of Christianizing the social order, a process that relied heavily on a socialist assessment of societal ills.⁵⁵ Tensions revolved around fears of a spreading communist revolution, and confidence in the benefits of capitalism. Even Rauschenbusch and Woodsworth had reservations with socialism: Rauschenbusch was leery of the ‘class pride and class

⁵¹ Richard Allen, The View from Murney Tower: Salem Bland, the Late Victorian Controversies, and the Search for a New Christianity (Toronto, Buffalo, and London, 2008). ⁵² Salem Bland, The New Christianity, or The Religion of the Age (Toronto, 1920). ⁵³ Richard Allen, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914–28 (Toronto, 1971), ch. 10; J. S. Woodsworth, The First Story of the Labor Church and Some Things for Which It Stands: An Address in the Strand Theatre, Winnipeg, April 5th, 1920 (Winnipeg, 1920). ⁵⁴ http://www.canadashistory.ca/Explore/Politics-Law/History-Idol-Tommy-Douglas. ⁵⁵ Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order (New York, 1912).

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contempt’ imbedded within socialism,⁵⁶ and Woodsworth made a clear distinction between being socialist (which he was) and Marxist (which he was not).⁵⁷ In Australia, concerns over socialism and labour included a potent mix of anti-Catholicism, anti-communism, and pro-Anglo Saxonism.⁵⁸ The Depression only exacerbated such fears, with even Italian and Nazi fascism initially being praised for their suppression of communism.⁵⁹ It should be noted that not every attempt to mitigate the exploitation of workers was through the labour movement, nor did workers always appreciate Church-based efforts. For instance, in the 1920s and 1930s missionaries in South Africa were successful in establishing a Christian presence among Africans in the gold mining compounds. One of the aims of the missionaries was to ameliorate the plight of workers who endured a gruelling routine in the mines. The establishment of schools and choirs was embraced by many, but efforts at reforming Sabbath behaviour met with opposition by workers. Missionary attempts to impose a Sabbath rest for miners were resented due to the need for miners to use their only day off for recreation and socializing.⁶⁰ The years leading up to the Second World War were taxing for social and political engagement. Theological divisions had fractured evangelicals, leading fundamentalists to withdraw from the public square and leave it to the ‘liberals’ or ‘modernists’, in what David Moberg coins ‘the great reversal’.⁶¹ Not only did the Great Depression swamp the Churches’ ability to respond adequately to the daily needs of unemployed parishioners, the sheer complexity of economic and social issues bedevilled unified attempts to formulate public policy and coordinate political engagement. Radical Marxist visions threatened to overturn the social order. Fear of another global war led to a surge of pacifism, while the rising threat of Japanese aggression and German fascism had also led to an abandonment of liberal optimism, which conditioned post-war responses for decades. The pattern of Church responses to the conflict was much like that of the First World War, albeit without the same

⁵⁶ Ken Estey, ‘Protesting Classes through Protestant Glasses: Class Labor, and the Social Gospel in the United States’, in Joerg Rieger, ed., Religion, Theology, and Class: Fresh Engagements after Long Silence (New York, 2013), pp. 121–42. ⁵⁷ Allen George Mills, Fool for Christ: The Political Thought of J. S. Woodsworth (Toronto, 1991). ⁵⁸ Ken R. Manley, ‘Defending “the freest land in the world”: Australian Baptists and Political Protestantism’, in Geoffrey R. Treloar and Robert D. Linder, eds., Making History for God: Essays on Evangelicalism, Revival and Mission: In Honour of Stuart Piggin, Master of Robert Menzies College, 1990–2004 (Sydney, 2004), pp. 133–50. ⁵⁹ Manley, From Woolloomooloo to ‘Eternity’, Vol. 2, p. 439. ⁶⁰ Tshidiso Maloka, ‘The Struggle for Sunday: All-male Christianity in the Gold Mine Compounds’, in Elphick and Davenport, eds., Christianity in South Africa, pp. 242–52. ⁶¹ David O. Moberg, The Great Reversal: Evangelism versus Social Concern (Philadelphia, 1972).

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degree of enthusiasm; it was deemed a ‘messy but necessary job’⁶² and entered into ‘soberly and rather sadly’.⁶³ However, despite the diversity and uncertainty of political opinions among dissenters, throughout all those traumatic events the commitment to nation-building remained steadfast; denominations marshalled their resources to engage in social and political activities that encouraged the formation and protection of a Christian nation. Forces unleashed by government intervention in the Depression, and a command economy during the War itself, however, meant the rise and increasingly total reach of a welfare state. This inevitably led to a secularization of those spheres once considered to be the specific domain of the Churches.

AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR In 1945, across the Allied world, victory celebrations ensued with the announcement of the surrender of Germany (8 May) and Japan (15 August). Discourse during the Second World War had often emphasized the conflict as a defence of Christian civilization,⁶⁴ and at the end of the conflict Church leaders were front and centre at thanksgiving services once again, in ‘acts of self-invention’, attempting to forge a distinctly Christian national vision. What they did not know was that the Second World War had accelerated trajectories already in place, and within a few generations familiar notions in the West of a Christian nation were in tatters. There were earlier pre-war signs that things were awry and that the success of the late nineteenth century was going to be difficult to replicate.⁶⁵ Yet few if any could have foreseen the boom–bust pattern of the 1960s. The post-war boom that some denominations experienced was quickly followed by a widespread bust. For instance, post-war efforts in evangelism and church construction were marked by rapid numerical growth among almost all denominations in Canada (Baptists, crippled by division, remained stagnant), but by the end of the 1960s that onward and upward trajectory had started to ⁶² Robert A. Wright, ‘The Canadian Protestant Tradition, 1914–1945’, in Rawlyk, ed., The Canadian Protestant Experience, 1760–1990, p. 188. ⁶³ Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–1985 (London, 1986), p. 373. ⁶⁴ Stephen G. Parker and Tom Lawson, eds., God and War: The Church of England and Armed Conflict in the Twentieth Century (Farnham, 2012); Charles Thomas Sinclair Faulkner, ‘For a Christian Civilization: The Churches and Canada’s War Effort’, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1975. ⁶⁵ David Bebbington, ‘Evangelism and Spirituality in Twentieth-Century Protestant Nonconformity’, in Sell and Cross, eds., Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century, pp. 184–215; David Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief 1850–1940 (Toronto, 1992).

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reverse itself—somewhat precipitously in some cases.⁶⁶ While some trace the waning of Christianity in Britain and the West back a century, and perhaps even to 500 years earlier, Callum Brown argues that what happened in the 1960s was a dramatic and sudden decline and shift. The end of the traditional status of Christianity in Britain also meant an evolution in national identity— much as it did in other Western nations. It was, in Brown’s words, ‘a short and sharp cultural revolution’ which made Britons living in 2000 ‘fundamentally different in character from those of 1950 or 1900 or 1800, or from people in many other countries’.⁶⁷ Regardless of the precise dating of origins, the reality was that post-1960s dissenters had to deal with increasingly secularized nations.⁶⁸ Christians remained the majority when it came to a national census, but the zeitgeist was increasingly shifting away from notions of Christendom and Christian identity, and increasingly embracing a secularized and pluralistic national vision. Such a context was a challenge for the Churches, for not only did it undermine the ‘plausibility of religious dogma’ and move sectors of society away from ‘religious institutions and symbols’, but it made the Churches’ engagement in the public sphere a challenge; no longer could the Churches operate on the familiar assumptions once related to political engagement and building a Christian nation.⁶⁹ A reimagining of ministry from the margins was needed.⁷⁰ A reimagining of how to engage the public square was also required, reconsidering theology outside the Christendom model,⁷¹ and taking into account local and national contexts that shaped the evolution of Church–state relations.⁷² Most post-war Dissenting political engagement can best be understood with this telos in mind. As will be noted shortly, the exception to this trajectory was South Africa. A national crisis was certainly a time when Dissenters rallied around the security of the nation, and Cold War calls for the defence of ‘Christian civilization’ against ‘godless Communism’ were a continuation of nation-building engagement on pressing political matters. The war against communism led to ⁶⁶ For example, see Canadian statistics in Brian Clarke and Stuart Macdonald, Leaving Christianity: Changing Allegiances in Canada since 1945 (Montreal and Kingston, 2017). ⁶⁷ Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London, 2001), p. 2. ⁶⁸ The nature and pace of secularization varied by country. For instance, see David Bebbington, ‘Evangelicalism and Secularization in Britain and America from the Eighteenth Century to the Present’, Post-Christendom Studies 1 (2016), pp. 5–30. ⁶⁹ Peter Berger, Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, 1967). ⁷⁰ Lee Beach, ‘New Models of Ministry in Canada as a Response to the Decline of Western Christianity’, in Gordon L. Heath and Steven M. Studebaker, eds., The Globalization of Christianity: Implications for Christian Ministry and Theology (Eugene, 2014), pp. 31–51. ⁷¹ Craig A. Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective (Grand Rapids, 2006). ⁷² J. Christopher Soper, Kevin R. Den Dulk, and Stephen V. Monsma, The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and State in Six Democracies (Lanham, 2017).

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intractable tensions and troubling compromises, such as support for the white South African government’s repression of the ANC (which had ties to communist regimes), and support for Majority World dictators.⁷³ Moral issues had long been at the core of dissenting engagement in politics, and that motivation to see Christian mores encapsulated in law remained into the post-war years. Vigorous decades-long Sabbath and temperance battles had been waged and, for the most part, lost.⁷⁴ However, new moral issues related to human sexuality, such as abortion and gay rights, led to vigorous responses by alarmed Church leaders. Pressing issues of justice related to race and civil rights also spurred the Churches to political engagement. In dealing with the whirlwind of changes D/dissenters reacted with the familiar pattern of preaching from the pulpit, developing church committees and organizations, working with political parties, entering government, and uniting with other denominations. But, as will be seen shortly, such political engagement met with minimal success, required a shifting of allegiances and alliances, and necessitated a reimagining of the nation-building identity that had been so formative in earlier dissenting engagements with the state. The changing nature of dissent itself also added a new component to entering the public square. The following provides a brief sketch of such post-war developments. Sensing a post-war spiritual dryness, Dissenters engaged in vigorous evangelism, often alongside established or mainline denominations; such efforts, it was hoped, would lead to a reinvigorated Christian national identity. As Australian evangelicals discovered, the rapid demise of ‘Christian’ (and British) Australia required new ways of engaging the public square, with such attempts often revealing fault lines in the ranks.⁷⁵ The ‘crusading decades’ of the 1940s and 1950s in Britain were a fusion of traditional British models of evangelism with new technology (such as radio) and American revivalism.⁷⁶ A rising star among conservative Christians in America, Billy Graham was invited to preach a crusade in London (1954), and, while his arrival was looked upon with disdain by some Church leaders and politicians, over 2 million people went to hear him preach.⁷⁷ The following year he was in Glasgow, the next back in London. In the coming decades he returned over a dozen times to ⁷³ Evangelical Witness in South Africa: A Critique of Evangelical Theology and Practice by South African Evangelicals (Grand Rapids, 1986), p. 34. ⁷⁴ Temperance did not disappear easily or quickly. In New Zealand, for example, the tensions over the issue remained into the 1960s. With the Methodists disbanding their temperance committee in 1970, the battle was basically over. See Allan K. Davidson, Christianity in Aotearoa: A History of Church and Society in New Zealand (Wellington, 1991), p. 156. See also Guy, Shaping Godzone, pp. 162–74. ⁷⁵ Hugh W. Chilton, ‘Evangelicals and the End of Christian Australia: Nation and Religion in the Public Square, 1959–1979’, PhD dissertation, University of Sydney, 2014. ⁷⁶ Callum G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow, 2006), ch. 5. ⁷⁷ Frank Colquhoun, Harringay Story: The Official Record of the Billy Graham Greater London Crusade, 1954 (London, 1955).

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Britain. Despite waning interest in Canada for visits of American revivalists in the early decades of the century,⁷⁸ Graham was invited to Toronto in 1955. A few years later he preached in Australia (1959) and New Zealand (1959). Graham did not preach in South Africa until 1973. Evangelicals in Australia were by then especially enamoured with all things American, including American models of ministry.⁷⁹ The growing influence of American neoevangelicalism revealed a left–right divide among dissenters, for, as will be discussed, not all were enamoured with its social and political conservatism. On the other hand, the ecumenical nature of Graham crusades—especially with regard to the inclusion of Catholics and non-Anglo-Saxons—bolstered a trajectory towards ecumenism and social justice that had already been birthed among Dissenters. As in pre-war decades, denominations formed committees and formulated statements to address the perplexing array of social and political issues. In a fashion similar to other Dissenters, the Presbyterian Church in Canada National Assembly (PCCNA) declared in 1965 that ‘Christian Social Action is the Church’s business . . . because it is God’s business’.⁸⁰ Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, the PCCNA published a number of statements on a wide range of political issues: condemning anti-Semitism, supporting the liberalizing of divorce laws, and advocating the censorship of pornography. It also addressed issues related to adequate housing, poverty, and proper treatment of indigenous peoples. It spoke out against the death penalty and, in a decision that vexed conservatives, supported therapeutic abortions. The denomination’s Board of Evangelism and Social Action also published a Manual on Christian Social Action (1966) to guide its members in a time of uncertainty. Not all decisions were shared by rank-and-file members and, as in the case of other dissenting denominations, there were a range of opinions on political issues. In similar fashion, the New Zealand Churches’ reaction to moral and political issues—especially changes to traditional views on sexuality—revealed ⁷⁸ Eric R. Crouse, Revival in the City: The Impact of American Evangelists in Canada, 1884–1914 (Montreal and Kingston, 2005). Influences could also flow south across the border. For instance, see David R. Elliott, ‘Knowing No Borders: Canadian Contributions to American Fundamentalism’, in George A. Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll, eds., Amazing Grace: Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States (Montreal and Kingston, 1994), pp. 349–74. ⁷⁹ Stuart Piggin, ‘The American and British Contributions to Evangelicalism in Australia’, in Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George Rawlyk, eds., Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990 (New York and Oxford, 1994), pp. 290–309; Manley, From Woolloomooloo to ‘Eternity’, Vol. 2, ch. 9. Hugh W. Chilton argues that growing resistance to American cultural imports and a rising new Australian nationalism required Graham to adapt his presentation to Australian sensibilities in his later visit. See Hugh W. Chilton, ‘Just As I Am?: Preaching and Politics in Billy Graham’s 1968–1969 Australian Crusades’, unpublished paper presented at St Mark’s National Theological Centre, Canberra, 2013. ⁸⁰ John S. Moir, Enduring Witness: A History of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (Toronto, 1974), pp. 270–1.

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fissures in Dissenters’ political positions. For instance, the formation of the Coalition for Concerned Citizens in the 1980s, a group influenced by the Moral Majority in the United States, led to a counter coalition of Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Catholics called Christian Action.⁸¹ That division, too, revealed the spectrum of views among New Zealand Dissenters.⁸² The development of the welfare state proceeded apace after the Second World War, and areas that once were under the purview of the Church were increasingly the responsibility of the state. Some see that as a waning of Church power and a furtherance of secularization. Others argue that the shifts that took place were the high point of the Churches’ influence and authority in society and that, in fact, the impulse and expertise for social change came from the Churches.⁸³ Regardless of how one settles that particular debate, Churches responded to rapid social changes by engaging local and national governments to ensure just and compassionate reforms. Grass-roots local Church ministries (often in partnership with local governments) were a hallmark of British Church responses to post-war reconstruction.⁸⁴ Developments in medical and long-term care, and education, also meant that Churches entered into formal arrangements with government. For instance, in the post-war years, Baptist partnership with the state on some projects such as education and care for the elderly became a ‘distinctive feature of Baptist work in every state of Australia’.⁸⁵ In the 1950s and 1960s the issue of aid for schools became a political issue, and in 1951 Victorian Baptists established an inquiry into Church–state relations. It noted many areas where Baptists received assistance (e.g. exemption from rates for churches and manses, building grants for kindergarten halls, and subsidies for running day kindergartens) and where they cooperated with the state (in areas such as indigenous community work, the location of the Canberra Church, and in chaplaincy). Partnerships continued, with Whitley College (opened 1965) benefiting from government money. The New South Wales Assembly established a commission in 1966— which reported in 1968—on Church–state relations, with a similar debate in Queensland in 1972. In both cases, the issue revolved around churches agreeing to take state money, but not relinquishing control of ministries in ⁸¹ Allan K. Davidson, Christianity in Aotearoa: A History of Church and Society in New Zealand (Wellington, 1991), p. 176. ⁸² Guy, Shaping Godzone, ch. 22. ⁸³ Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 (Montreal and Kingston, 1996), pp. 51–2. ⁸⁴ Lesley Husselbee, ‘The Welfare State and Beyond: The Reshaping of Community Work’, in Lesley Husselbee and Paul Ballard, eds., Free Churches and Society: The Nonconformist Contribution to Social Welfare, 1800–2010 (London, 2012), pp. 161–83. ⁸⁵ Ken R. Manley, ‘Australian Baptists and the State: Partner or Peril?’ in David Bebbington and Martin Sutherland, eds., Interfaces, Baptists and Others: International Baptist Studies (Milton Keynes, 2013), pp. 201–15.

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any way. The constant resort to commissions indicated an uneasy conscience with such partnerships. Ecumenical relationships with other denominations became increasingly essential if any significant Christian voice was to be brought to bear on pressing political issues. Church unions were one expression of the blossoming ecumenical movement, as well as a necessity in the face of declining numbers and loss of political influence. Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the United Kingdom joined forces in 1972, forming the United Reformed Church. Formal Church union in Australia finally occurred with the formation of the Uniting Church in 1977, a fusion of most Presbyterians, and all Methodists and Congregationalists. Union efforts in New Zealand throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were fruitless, although by the end of the century the Uniting Congregations of Aotearoa New Zealand were seeking to bring the dream of union to fruition. Ironically, during the same time, the United Church of Canada was being forced by the dramatic cultural swings away from traditional notions of faith and national identity to rethink and reimagine its nation-building vision.⁸⁶ Rapid and alarming social changes led to a veritable flood of interdenominational organizations intended to mobilize Christian action and provide a unified political lobby. For instance, the Inter-Church Council on Public Affairs (ICCPA) in New Zealand in the 1940s to 1960s had a degree of influence, and addressed a wide variety of social/public issues.⁸⁷ Its origins were in the National Council of Churches (1941), but it grew to become an independent body embracing Anglicans, Presbyterians, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Churches of Christ, Salvation Army, Quakers, and Lutherans. It addressed a wide range of wartime and post-war concerns/ issues: conscientious objectors, conscription and theological students, youth, children, elderly, birth control, abortion, sexual morality, alcohol, movies, censorship, gambling, education, hospitals, housing, unions/work issues, the 1951 Waterfront Strike, Jews, prisons and penal reform, religious freedom, race and Maori issues, Pacific affairs, refugees, immigrants, international aid, and the status of Churches and ministers. The ICCPA attempted to focus the voices of the Churches in order to create a national and unified front, and in a number of cases it was consulted by government before it acted. Another example of interdenominational cooperation was the Church Leader’s Conference, Birmingham (1972), organized by the British Council of Churches, ⁸⁶ Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation. See also Mara Apostol, ‘Speaking Truth to Power: How The United Church Observer and The Canadian Mennonite Helped Their Denominations Navigate a New Church–State Dynamic during the Vietnam War’, MA thesis, McMaster Divinity College, 2010. ⁸⁷ Peter Lineham, ‘The Inter-Church Council on Public Affairs: An Exercise in Ecumenical Political Influence’, in John Stenhouse, ed., Christianity, Modernity and Culture: New Perspectives on New Zealand History (Adelaide, 2005), pp. 269–310.

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where Free Church, Anglican, and Catholic leaders deliberated over how to respond to the growing crisis facing the Churches, including issues of justice in South Africa and Northern Ireland. Its commission on ‘The Churches and Public Issues’ urged that all Christians be involved in ‘the processes of national and local decision-making which constitute the political life of this country’.⁸⁸ Failed ventures such as Towards Visible Unity: Proposals for a Covenant (1980) were attempts to respond to an increasingly post-Christian Britain, but more recent local or regional ventures indicate just how far the Churches had come: Walton Churches Partnership, for instance, shares a variety of churches in the area of Milton Keynes, England, between Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and the Free Churches,⁸⁹ while many rural towns in Australia have seen shared ministry between various Protestant congregations since the 1950s. Positive relations and actual partnerships with Catholics indicate the extent to which the ecumenical movement had developed, as well as how desperate Churches had become for allies in the face of disquieting moral and legal changes (especially related to abortion). Anti-Catholic rhetoric had long been shared in Britain, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and was ‘very deeply rooted in evangelical identity and ideology. It was not a mere negative prejudice but an impulse at the heart of the movement’s spiritual aspirations and religious activity.’⁹⁰ Shifts towards Protestant and Catholic cooperation reflected not only desperation—‘an ecumenism of the trenches’— but also a realization that anti-Catholic rhetoric was counterproductive to the nation-building enterprise.⁹¹ In Britain, Hugh McLeod argues, a shift had begun towards a more generic national identity that was Christian, but not specifically Protestant.⁹² And as John Wolffe notes, by the early twentieth century it was becoming increasingly clear that harsh anti-Catholic rhetoric was ‘too narrow a basis for a cohesive overall imperial Protestant ideology’.⁹³ By the mid-century mark, that was even more the case, though not a trajectory warmly embraced by all D/dissenters, nor American evangelicals.⁹⁴ Religious prejudices in Northern Ireland remained most vexing, and while the Good

⁸⁸ David Edwards, The British Churches Turn to the Future: One Man’s View of the Church Leaders’ Conference, Birmingham 1972 (London, 1973). ⁸⁹ John A. Newton, ‘Protestant Nonconformists and Ecumenism’, in Sell and Cross, eds., Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century, pp. 357–80. ⁹⁰ John Wolffe, ‘Anti-Catholicism and Evangelical Identity in Britain and the United States, 1830–1860’, in Noll, Bebbington, and Rawlyk, eds., Evangelicalism, p. 184. ⁹¹ ‘Ecumenism of the trenches’ is an expression attributed to Timothy George. ⁹² Hugh McLeod, ‘Protestantism and British National Identity, 1815–1945’, in P. van der Veer and H. Lehmann, eds., Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia (Princeton, 1999), pp. 44–70. ⁹³ John Wolffe, ‘Anti-Catholicism and the British Empire, 1815–1914’, in Hilary M. Carey, ed., Empires of Religion (New York, 2008), p. 58. ⁹⁴ Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom, Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism (Grand Rapids, 2005).

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Friday Agreement (1998) brought peace, the threat of sectarian violence— fuelled by religious animosities and distinctly Irish notions of nation-building (north and south of the border)—still hangs over the land.⁹⁵ It is an issue that has re-emerged with the prospect of Brexit. The relationship with labour evolved in the post-war years. There was a long and complex link between the Free Church and British labour, with the righteous tone of labour pronouncements often coming from the chapel influence in provincial cities. Over the course of the 1960s, links between labour and nonconformity were considered by some within Labour to be a liability, for such links kept it from responding to rapidly changing social conditions. Labour also grew increasingly independent of Church connections. As Peter Catterall argues: ‘once established, the Labour Party became its own training ground: it no longer needed the chapels to train its speakers and organizers. Accordingly, the distinctive Nonconformist presence in the Parliamentary Labour Party still so discernible throughout the inter-war years, had virtually disappeared by the end of the twentieth century.’⁹⁶ (Similar observations have been made about the parallels between American political conventions—Republican and Democratic—and evangelical revivalism.⁹⁷) However, shifts away from a labour platform, often portrayed as being influenced by the growing power of American conservatism, could lead to vigorous Church reactions. For instance, in 1991, New Zealand Churches united against government cuts to social welfare, and ‘emerged as amongst the National government’s most vociferous, penetrating and effective critics’. A year later, at the request of the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services, leaders of ten denominations agreed to cooperate on issues of social justice, leading to the 1993 publications Statement of Intent, Social Justice Statement, and Making Choices: Social Justice for Our Times. Sunday, 11 July 1993 was also declared to be ‘Social Justice Sunday’. The initiatives were critical of government, and raised questions over just how vigorously and critically Churches were to engage the state.⁹⁸ The move to the right of the Australian government under John Howard also led to vigorous criticism by various Church leaders,⁹⁹ who were linked by both Church and non-Church agencies such as the Australian Council of Social Services.

⁹⁵ Patrick Mitchel, Evangelicalism and National Identity in Ulster, 1921–1998 (Oxford, 2003). ⁹⁶ Peter Catterall, ‘Nonconformity and the Labour Movement’, in Pope, ed., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity, pp. 459–72. ⁹⁷ Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, 1992), p. 391. ⁹⁸ Jonathan Boston, ‘Christianity in the Public Square: The Churches and Social Justice’, in Jonathan Boston and Alan Cameron, eds., Voices for Justice: Church, Law and State in New Zealand (Palmerston North, 1994), pp. 11–35. ⁹⁹ Marion Maddox, God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics (Sydney, 2005).

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Political engagement motivated and bolstered by ecumenical links also played a role in dealing with the bane of racism, such as in the battle against apartheid in South Africa. In the 1960s, South African ecumenical contacts between Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian theologians led to the growing influence of social justice thought.¹⁰⁰ Yet even up to the 1980s English Churches had ‘failed to offer a prophetic, alternative voice: they condemned apartheid at annual conferences and in pastoral letters, but, in practice these churches were part of the racially oppressive system.’¹⁰¹ Churches were divided over how best to respond, uncertain about civil disobedience, wary of liberation theology, and hesitant to offer a prophetic critique. The Kairos Document (1985) made the issues clearer, but accelerated and exacerbated tensions, as well as helping to forge important ecumenical contacts.¹⁰² In the face of rising government opposition, Church leaders such as the Reverend Khoza Mgojo (president of the Methodist Church of South Africa) were involved in the Defiance Campaign (1988). It was there that the South African dissenting experience was significantly different from the telos in other parts of the Commonwealth, for South African Churches retained powerful constituencies and their support was sought after by a variety of political parties. South African Church leaders were encouraged in their fight against apartheid by those outside of the nation. New Zealand Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians had formally expressed their disgust with apartheid in the 1940s.¹⁰³ The Baptist Canadian Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker, initiated the policy of racial equality as a criterion for membership in the Commonwealth (1961), and Canadian Churches organized and agitated against the oppressive system.¹⁰⁴ However, on the domestic front it was the South African Churches who bore the brunt of work to bring about the downfall of apartheid. And, despite a process of secularization—such as the Bantu Education Act (1953) which extended government control of mission centres and schools¹⁰⁵—the Churches’ engagement was critical, efficacious, and growing. One commentator notes that ‘Christianity features on almost every page of the 1977 four-volume record of African politics in South African history’, and that the influence of the Churches in bringing down apartheid

¹⁰⁰ Eugene M. Klaaren, ‘Creation and Apartheid: South African Theology since 1948’, in Elphick and Davenport, eds., Christianity in South Africa, pp. 370–82. ¹⁰¹ Peter Walshe, ‘Christianity and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle: The Prophetic Voice within Divided Churches’, in Elphick and Davenport, eds., Christianity in South Africa, pp. 383–99. ¹⁰² Willis H. Logan, The Kairos Covenant: Standing with South African Christians (New York, 1988). ¹⁰³ Guy, Shaping Godzone, p. 303. ¹⁰⁴ Renate Pratt, In Good Faith: Canadian Churches Against Apartheid (Waterloo, 1997). ¹⁰⁵ Richard Elphick, ‘The Benevolent Empire and the Social Gospel: Missionaries and South African Christians in the Age of Segregation’, in Elphick and Davenport, eds., Christianity in South Africa, pp. 347–69.

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was ‘profound’.¹⁰⁶ It was a unique expression of the nation-building ethos, and demonstrated how visions of national identity varied from country to country as well as evolved over time. American Churches were deeply divided by race, and racial segregation led to cries for justice among civil rights activists. Baptist minister and activist Martin Luther King Jnr is certainly a positive example of Church political engagement, although for every pastor who supported King there seemed to be a white pastor who opposed him. In Britain, immediate post-war race relations were primarily considered in the context of the peripheries of empire but, by the 1960s, immigration from the peripheries to the metropole led to race increasingly becoming an issue for British Churches.¹⁰⁷ Dissenters’ notions of national identity within the ‘White Colonies’ of empire had also had a troubling relationship with racism, such as the White Australia policy or Canada’s ‘civilizing, Canadianizing and Christianizing’ (considered to be one and the same) of First Nations people. However, the post-war breakup of empire, immigration patterns, and growing civil rights movements (fuelled in no small measure by liberation theology) led to a rethinking of the treatment of indigenous peoples within colonized lands. The old fusion of Anglo-Saxon superiority and national identity did not disappear quickly or easily, but the trajectory was a (slow) move towards reconciliation and justice. Moves to undo racist infrastructures or attitudes led to divisions in denominations, and justice-oriented clergy and committees sometimes found themselves moving too fast for their congregants, such as the Bastion Point Controversy in New Zealand in the 1970s. In that dispute over Maori land, clergy and congregants found themselves divided; there was concern for justice but also uncertainty over radicalized reactions, as well as fears of becoming too politicized and moving away from preaching the gospel.¹⁰⁸ Churches in Australia and Canada faced similar issues related to historic land claims and the dismantling of systemic injustices,¹⁰⁹ though in Australia some Presbyterians took a lead in settlements over mission lands in Queensland. The process was slow. In Canada, the last residential school—established by government but run by Churches to assimilate (forcefully if necessary) First Nations children—closed in 1996. The commentary in this chapter has highlighted the impact of post-war events on the trajectory of dissenter engagement with politics and the public square. Another trajectory alluded to at the beginning of this section was the ¹⁰⁶ Anthony Balcomb, ‘From Apartheid to the New Dispensation: Evangelicals and the Democratization of South Africa’, Journal of Religion in Africa 34 (2004), pp. 5–38. ¹⁰⁷ Kenneth Hylson-Smith, The English Protestant Churches since 1770: Politics, Class and Society (Oxford, 2017), pp. 313–20. ¹⁰⁸ Guy, Shaping Godzone, p. 17. ¹⁰⁹ Graham Paulson, ‘Baptists and Indigenous Australians’, in Bebbington and Sutherland, eds., Interfaces: Baptists and Others, pp. 251–62.

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changing nature of D/dissent itself. Over the course of the twentieth century the older Dissenting denominations—Presbyterian, Baptist, Congregational, Methodist, Quaker—were joined by newer denominations and movements as a result of discontent, revival, and migration. The rapid expansion of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa is well documented elsewhere in this volume, and that growth in South Africa among non-white Africans has contributed to a vibrant Church that demonstrated its willingness to engage prophetically in politics, most notably in the battles over apartheid. The 132 presenters of Evangelical Witness in South Africa (1986), for instance, were drawn from a wide range of denominations and organizations.¹¹⁰ While the telos in Africa has been portrayed as a move towards ‘the Next Christendom’,¹¹¹ the posture of the new Churches with regard to the state has often mirrored the older pre-nineteenth-century Dissenting tradition. Time alone will tell what will happen to the prophetic traditions among dissenting traditions in South Africa as the Churches’ cultural place and power seems to be on the rise, rather than decline. The situation was (and is) quite different in other parts of the Commonwealth. For instance, the formation of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (1964), with membership including Presbyterians, Baptists, Pentecostals, Associated Gospel Churches, Christian and Missionary Alliance, Mennonites, and Christian Brethren, is not only an example of ecumenical partnerships to address pressing social and political issues but also an indication of the range of denominations associated with New Dissent.¹¹² The story is similar elsewhere. The growth of Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement in Britain has changed the demographics of nonconformity. It has also contributed to a rising militancy among Christians in Britain leading to a ‘rising confidence’ in converting the nation’s morals.¹¹³ Recent arrivals of non-European Christian immigrants who do not share Western assumptions about secularization have also led to new Churches quite willing and eager to engage the public square, leading Callum Brown to declare that secularization ‘was an overwhelmingly white experience in Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century’.¹¹⁴ Dissenters have also been joined by unlikely groups, such as Catholics and even atheists. For instance, the 1960s Quiet Revolution in Quebec (a predominately French-speaking Catholic province in Canada) led to rapid

¹¹⁰ Evangelical Witness in South Africa: A Critique of Evangelical Theology and Practice by South African Evangelicals, pp. 45–8. ¹¹¹ Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford, 2002). ¹¹² John G. Stackhouse, Jr, Canadian Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century: An Introduction to Its Character (Toronto, 1993), ch. 12. Today the EFC is now affiliated with over 140 denominations, ministries, and educational institutions, and collaborates with the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops on political lobbying related to moral issues. ¹¹³ Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain, p. 300. ¹¹⁴ Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain, p. 291.

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and revolutionary changes to the Catholic Church’s privileges and political power.¹¹⁵ That separation of the civil sphere from the Church mirrored much of the secularization occurring elsewhere, and symbolized a new order for many Canadians. As a result, Catholic notions of nation-building had to be reimagined, and, as already noted, cooperation with Protestant dissenters became increasingly necessary. Those who belonged to the growing number who identified as ‘no-religion’ or ‘atheist’ in census returns have also been identified as ‘new dissenters’. For instance, Walter Schwartz notes that modern forms of British dissent against the rule of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s were joined by ‘secular militants who base[d] their protest on moral criteria’ and modelled their secular organization on nineteenth-century dissenting patterns.¹¹⁶ Yet another form of New Dissent is really the return of Old Dissent. The United Church of Canada was formed out of three dissenting traditions (Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational). Although the UCC was not the official established church in Canada, it certainly conceived of itself as one. However, by the final decades of the century it began a process of re-evaluating assumptions related to Church–state engagement, and shifted to a more socially ‘prophetic’ role. It was not an abandonment of its nation-building role, but a reimagining of the Church’s engagement with the public square.¹¹⁷ It was, in effect, a return to its Dissenting DNA. Related to New Dissent was the formation of distinctly Christian parties. Dissenters certainly continued to choose to serve in traditional parties, and did not necessarily align the Christian gospel with a specific party. However, disillusionment with government and concerns that radical steps needed to be taken to stem the tide of change led to new political parties such as the Christian Heritage Party (1989) and Christian Democrat Party (1995) in New Zealand.¹¹⁸ The motivation was similar in the formation of the Christian Heritage Party (1987) in Canada, and the Christian Democrats (originally the ‘Call to Australia Party’, 1977) and Family First (2001) parties in Australia. Many of the supporters of the new parties were new dissenters. For instance, in Britain, the Christian parties in England and Wales received most of ¹¹⁵ David Seljak, ‘Resisting the “No Man’s Land” of Private Religion: The Catholic Church and Public Politics in Quebec’, in David Lyon and Marguerite Van Die, eds., Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity: Canada Between Europe and America (Toronto, 2000), pp. 131–48; Gregory Baum, ‘Catholicism and Secularization in Quebec’, in Lyon and Van Die, eds., Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity, pp. 149–65. ¹¹⁶ Walter Schwarz, The New Dissenters: The Nonconformist Conscience in the Age of Thatcher (London, 1989), pp. 5–6. ¹¹⁷ Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation, chs. 8–9. ¹¹⁸ G. A. Wood, ‘Church and State in the Furthest Reach of Western Christianity’, in Stenhouse, ed., Christianity, Modernity and Culture, pp. 207–39; Allan K. Davidson, ‘Chaplain to the Nation or Prophet at the Gate? The Role of the Church in New Zealand Society’, in Stenhouse, ed., Christianity, Modernity and Culture, pp. 311–31.

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their support from Catholics, Pentecostals, charismatics, independents, and Baptists.¹¹⁹ However, such parties were primarily conservative in nature and their ability to influence politics varied by region and nation. For instance, unlike in America, British party control of candidates made it difficult for special interest groups to co-opt the party’s agenda, leading Steve Bruce to conclude that ‘aspects of the structure of American public life create opportunities for interest groups to use electoral politics that are denied their British counterparts’.¹²⁰ It needs to be noted, however, that the rise of Christian parties, often by dissenters or with support of dissenters, is more a mark of a loss of power than a sign of growing power.

CO NCLUSION Much to the chagrin of clergy and politicians, late twentieth-century Western governments could find ‘themselves simultaneously blessed and anathematised by different churches on different policies—or even by different parts of the same church, on the same policy’.¹²¹ While in this case Marion Maddox was referring to a relatively recent example from the Salvation Army in Australia, the reality was that there was now rarely a uniform position among D/dissenters on the plethora of vexing issues, precisely because there was no agreed vision of the state around which to build. However, what many dissenters shared in common was the desire to forge a Christian nation in which the old elitisms and establishments were done away with. The waning influence of the former magisterial Churches—both Catholic and Anglican, through scandal, fragmentation, and numerical decline—will no doubt continue to be a foil against which dissenters define themselves. Dissenter commitment to nation-building motivated and shaped engagement in the public square. Clergy in the early twentieth century had been used to participating in ‘acts of self-invention’, those pivotal moments in a country’s history when all eyes were on the nation’s leaders and national identity was being established. During those times participating clergy used their presence to forge a distinctly Christian imagination for the future, and that national vision shaped all aspects of political engagement. By the 1960s that dream had started to come undone, and that became obvious in further ‘acts of

¹¹⁹ Steve Bruce, Politics and Religion in the United Kingdom (London and New York, 2012), p. 130. ¹²⁰ Bruce, Politics and Religion in the United Kingdom, 120. ¹²¹ Marion Maddox, For God and Country: Religious Dynamics in Australian Federal Politics (Canberra, 2001), pp. 165–6.

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self-invention’ where an exclusive Christian presence and identity was absent. Whether it be the multi-faith identity of Expo ’67 in Canada,¹²² the debate over keeping God in the Australian constitution,¹²³ or the absence of ‘grace’ at the New Zealand Jubilee state banquet (2002),¹²⁴ Churches increasingly became aware that they needed to renegotiate and reimagine life in an interfaith, rather than a distinctly Christian, nation, and rethink the role of religion in state functions. Perhaps the most significant event in Britain’s postChristian experience will be the coronation of the next monarch. Old notions of Christendom continue to unravel, and the distinctly Christian aspects associated with the coronation of British monarchs will not resonate readily with contemporary sensibilities.¹²⁵ The exception to that post-Christian telos was the South African experience. The rise of Christianity in the global South led eventually to a politically engaged and powerful South African Church,¹²⁶ and, as the courting of Church leaders by the ANC indicates, having the visible support of dissenting clergy remains a key ingredient for political success.¹²⁷ One way of envisioning the twentieth-century transitions among dissenters is to see the Churches struggling with their public role. Hans Mol’s paradigm of how religion can perform a ‘priestly (legitimating)’ or ‘prophetic (critical)’ role is helpful in understanding dissenter posture towards and engagement with the state.¹²⁸ While one time acting primarily in a priestly or ‘legitimating’ role, since the 1960s dissenters slowly shifted from a priestly to a prophetic function—a move away from assumed support for the state to a posture of critique, from the assumption of a Christian nation with an (unofficial) established and supportive Church to one whereby the Churches remained more autonomous and critical. Many of the familiar means of engaging the public square remained—preaching, denominational structures, official statements, direct participation in government—but they increasingly required a change of posture and expectation of privilege. As Allan Davidson observes, the Church ‘can no longer demand a place at the top table as of right. If it is invited to be there it needs to be aware of the complex nature of the nation to which it seeks to minister. There will always, however, be room for the church

¹²² Gary Miedema, For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal and Kingston, 2005). ¹²³ Maddox, God Under Howard. ¹²⁴ Davidson, ‘Chaplain to the Nation or Prophet at the Gate?’ in Stenhouse, ed., Christianity, Modernity and Culture, pp. 311–31. ¹²⁵ Norman Bonney, Monarchy, Religion and the State: Civil Religion in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the Commonwealth (Manchester, 2013). ¹²⁶ Tristan Anne Borer, Challenging the State: Churches as Political Actors in South Africa, 1980–1994 (Notre Dame, 1998). ¹²⁷ Dion Forster, ‘Dangerous Echoes of the Past as Church and State Move Closer in South Africa’, 16 October 2016, http://theconversation.com/dangerous-echoes-of-the-past-as-churchand-state-move-closer-in-south-africa-65985, accessed 3/12/2017. ¹²⁸ Hans Mol, Faith and Fragility: Religion and Identity in Canada (Burlington, 1985).

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to stand at the gate.’¹²⁹ In many ways, the move to the margins of political life—as prophets at the gate—is a return to an earlier dissenting tradition. It is also a trajectory fragmented by, but also enriched and bolstered by, new groups that have changed the composition of older dissenting denominations.

S E L E C T B I BL IO G R A P H Y Airhart, Phyllis, A Church with the Soul of a Nation: Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada (Montreal and Kingston, 2014). Bebbington, David W. and David Ceri Jones, eds., Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism in the United Kingdom during the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2013). Bonney, Norman, Monarchy, Religion and the State: Civil Religion in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the Commonwealth (Manchester, 2013). Borer, Tristan Anne, Challenging the State: Churches as Political Actors in South Africa, 1980–1994 (Notre Dame, 1998). Brown, Callum G., Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow, 2006). Catterall, Peter, Labour and the Free Churches, 1918–1939: Radicalism, Righteousness and Religion (London, 2016). Crouse, Eric R., Revival in the City: The Impact of American Evangelists in Canada, 1884–1914 (Montreal and Kingston, 2005). Davidson, Allan K., Christianity in Aotearoa: A History of Church and Society in New Zealand (Wellington, 1991). Elphick, Richard, The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa (Charlottesville, 2012). Guy, Laurie, Shaping Godzone: Public Issues and Church Voices in New Zealand, 1840–2000 (Wellington, 2011). Heath, Gordon L., The British Nation Is Our Nation: The BACSANZ Baptist Press and the South African War, 1899–1902 (Milton Keynes, 2017). Husselbee, Lesley and Paul Ballard, eds., Free Churches and Society: The Nonconformist Contribution to Social Welfare, 1800–2010 (London, 2012). Jenkins, Philip, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (New York, 2014). Lyon, David and Marguerite Van Die, eds., Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity: Canada Between Europe and America (Toronto, 2000). Manley, Ken, From Woolloomooloo to ‘Eternity’: A History of Australian Baptists, Vol. 2 (Milton Keynes, 2006). Miedema, Gary, For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal and Kingston, 2005). Mitchel, Patrick, Evangelicalism and National Identity in Ulster, 1921–1998 (Oxford, 2003).

¹²⁹ Davidson, ‘Chaplain to the Nation or Prophet at the Gate?’ in Stenhouse, ed., Christianity, Modernity and Culture, p. 331.

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Parker, Stephen G. and Tom Lawson, eds., God and War: The Church of England and Armed Conflict in the Twentieth Century (Farnham, 2012). Piggin, Stuart and Robert D. Linder, The Fountain of Public Prosperity: Evangelical Christians in Australian History 1740–1914 (Monash, 2018). Rieger, Joerg, ed., Religion, Theology, and Class: Fresh Engagements after Long Silence (New York, 2013). Schwarz, Walter, The New Dissenters: The Nonconformist Conscience in the Age of Thatcher (London, 1989). Sell, Alan P. F. and Anthony R. Cross, eds., Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century (Carlisle, 2003). Soper, J. Christopher, Kevin R. Den Dulk, and Stephen V. Monsma, The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and State in Six Democracies (Lanham, 2017). Stenhouse, John, ed., Christianity, Modernity and Culture: New Perspectives on New Zealand History (Adelaide, 2005). van der Veer, P. and H. Lehmann, eds., Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia (Princeton, 1999). Wolffe, John, ‘Anti-Catholicism and the British Empire, 1815–1914’, in Hilary M. Carey, ed., Empires of Religion (New York, 2008), pp. 43–63.

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3 The Bible in the Twentieth-Century Anglophone World Mark P. Hutchinson

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Bible—so long a source of authority in the West—had become a sparring ground for traditionalists, rationalists, Darwinians, feminists, evangelicals, liberals, and many others beside. It was, for starters, physically omnipresent. For instance, it was claimed that during his period as editor of the Christian Herald, Louis Klopsch never passed a year when he distributed less than 60,000 copies of the Bible (in whole or part). Klopsch was celebrated by the American Bible societies as ‘the one man above all others who helped to make the Bible the most widely read book on the North American continent’.¹ Quite apart from any intrinsic authority, the Bible was a medium for influence performing many of the functions co-opted in later periods by leading radio or television programmes. The publication of The Woman’s Bible in the USA from 1895 was indicative: drawing on feminist, anthropological, and higher critical approaches, its editors (chief amongst which was Elizabeth Cady Stanton) sought to respond to what they saw as Protestant biblical ‘fetishism’ and (particularly in the formation of the Revised Standard Version) its domination by masculinist power cliques. In that particularly American twist on reality, this anti-fetishist materialization of feminist aspiration was, ironically, a distinctly material bestseller.² The background of the editors spoke to the impact that America would have on Christianity in the twentieth century: these included Augusta Jane Chapin (Universalist minister); Lillie Devereux Blake (connected to the liberal Dwight family, which included multiple presidents and scholars at Yale College/University); Matilda Joslyn Gage (who grew up in a prominent Baptist ¹ Charles M. Pepper, The Life-Work of Louis Klopsch: Romance of a Modern Knight of Mercy (New York, 1910), p. 325. ² Christiana de Groot, ‘Contextualizing the Woman’s Bible’, Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 41 (December 2012), pp. 564–77.

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abolitionist family, before becoming a trenchant anti-Christian); Olympia Brown (a graduate of the non-denominational Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and Universalist minister); Alexandra Gripenberg (noted Fennoman and women’s rights activist from Lutheran Finland); Ursula Mellor Bright (raised and married into British mercantile ‘radical liberal’ Quaker circles); and Irma von Troll-Borostyáni (the Austrian suffragist who revolted against a narrow Catholic background). Stanton, from a relatively privileged Quaker background, drew on ‘inner light’ and higher critical traditions to describe the Bible as ‘a book like any other book’.³ In reformist, youthful America, this ageing activist’s call to ‘clear away the debris of the centuries’ and to overthrow ‘the belief in women’s subordination rooted in the Bible and taught by the Christian Church and clergy’ was of a piece with the revolutionary selfconception of a nation which had, since its own beginnings, been ‘rooted in the Bible’.⁴

BAPTISTS, UNIVERSALISTS, A ND LAPSED CATHOLICS The Woman’s Bible was an artefact of a rights-based plural nation engaged in a mobile international ‘space of flows’.⁵ The victory of dissent in the United States projected Free Church traditions into a global prominence with a strong sense of the centrality of the Bible, but with no cohering ecclesiology to moderate between Bible and culture. ‘Biblical realists’, such as A. T. Pierson, were clear in their distinction between world mission and European imperialism, even to the point of condemning its outworkings. Their world was filtered through the sacred text, however, which enabled them to see some things (the evils of the opium trade, or racist immigration restrictions) better than others. As Dana Robert points out, such champions of the Bible were so spiritualized that they did little to critique ‘European-American imperialism itself ’.⁶ Defined by their relationship (or opposition) to regional establishments, dissenting traditions also faced the difficult tension of maintaining their own distinctives while defending their independence from ecclesiastical elites. This often meant forging broader alliances within which the impulse to effectiveness, I/independence and reform meant perhaps more change than ³ de Groot, ‘Contextualizing’, p. 567; and see Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Woman’s Bible (Ithaca, 2001), pp. 99–100. ⁴ Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, pp. 1–2. ⁵ For which, see Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford, 1996); and Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in M. Featherstone, ed., Global Culture (London, 1991). ⁶ D. L. Robert, ‘Occupy Until I Come’: A. T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World (Grand Rapids, 2003), p. 218.

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the protagonists had at first proposed. A study of the use of biblical texts in public debates (such as those left to us in parliamentary records) in the anglophone world unveils two things: the Bible was still a prominent, though now contested, source of authority and teaching and, secondly, nonconformists and dissenters played a role disproportionate to their numbers in producing a secularized sphere in which the Old World elites had little more than ceremonial power. In that sphere, the Bible was to be reinterpreted by successive ‘new knowledge elites’⁷ in ways which suited the current epistemological challenges: first, against the challenge of the hard sciences (via philology and history), then against the background of the social sciences (via psychology and sociology), then against the literary ‘sciences’ (via the literary turn, and postmodernism), and finally, leading up to our own day, via anthropological understandings with the aim of seeking greater fit between transcendence and embodiment (feminist, black, liberationist, and other revisions of the text). The Bible moved in the West from an ancient book in search of modern grounding to disembodied texts seeking embodiment. At the turn of the century, the great question was the body of the geographically defined nation. In many British dependencies, previously separated dissenting Churches and denominations began to re-map themselves against the outlines of the new nations.⁸ The Reverend A. J. Webb (Methodist), secretary to the 1896 Bathurst Convention so important for the Australian Federation, for example, preached a ‘Federal Lord’ who raised up nations. The Federation, he proclaimed, ‘was a mighty fact in God’s universe’ which ‘should not be left to a few professional politicians and nobodies; . . . they wanted men of character and religion to go into them, and carry them on in a noble spirit’.⁹ Not only was Webb preaching towards the political and ecclesial federations which were forming one nation out of a congeries of colonies, but the federation which he was not preaching was the previously popular idea of Imperial Federation, a solution to the problem of empire which would have simply entrenched the established church dominance of people such as Anglican Archbishop St Clair Donaldson, who declared, ‘I cling to my conviction that the Empire is ⁷ The term is originally Peter Berger’s; for a more recent treatment, see W. T. Coombs and C. W. Cutbirth, ‘Mediated Political Communication, the Internet, and the New Knowledge Elites: Prospects and Portents’, Telematics and Informatics 15.3 (August 1998), pp. 203–17. Kennedy points to the press and the professions building a new pragmatic order: Robert Charles Kennedy, ‘Crisis and Progress: The Rhetoric and Ideals of a Nineteenth-Century Reformer, George William Curtis (1824–1892)’, PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1993, p. 32. ⁸ Although Canada was founded in 1867, it was not a complete national unit until the adhesion of Newfoundland in 1949; the six Australian colonies federated in 1901, though it was a close run thing that Western Australia would be ‘in’, and New Zealand not; the four South African colonies formed a Union in 1910. ⁹ Quoted in Richard Ely, Unto God and Caesar: Religious Issues in the Emerging Commonwealth, 1891–1906 (Clayton, 1976), ch. 1.

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of God.’¹⁰ In the Canadian, New Zealand, and Australian settlements, there was an unusual number of key public actors from dissenting backgrounds. The leaders of the major parties, naturally, tended to be Anglicans who led unstable coalitions of highly varied religious stripes. Interestingly, both first prime ministers for Australia and Canada (Edmund Barton and John A. McDonald) were Anglicans who had been raised Presbyterian (a sign of class shift), and the first head of a cabinet in New Zealand was James FitzGerald, an Anglican raised in the Church of Ireland. Barton’s successor was Alfred Deakin, who went from nominal Anglicanism, via the influence of liberal churchmen such as Dr John Bromby (who ‘believed fervently that religious belief had nothing to fear from the advances in scientific knowledge’, and ‘seemed prepared to surrender too much ground to the critics of holy writ’)¹¹ to becoming Australia’s most famous Spiritualist: ‘In his radical liberal heritage and his colonial selfassertion Deakin embodied the commitment to independence of judgement and belief which he regarded as man’s defining virtues.’¹² Nonconformism in the colonies was on the way to becoming an established mindset. Its influence in carving out a secular space for independence of judgement was heavily inflected by Roman Catholic resistance to the common Protestant solution to religious diversity, which took the shape of opposition to various ‘bible in schools’ campaigns.¹³ In such fin de siècle settings, the public status of ‘holy writ’ was bound to be a contested issue. For federated denominations with an external standard—such as the Presbyterian Churches’ constitutive relationship to the Westminster Confession—the changes were slower. The heresy trials and conflicts which had typified the last thirty years of the nineteenth century continued. For Presbyterians, the sense of core standards being ‘under attack’ from Higher Criticism or methodological naturalism or historicism was sharpened by the delayed formation of shared peak theological institutions and the generational effect of ‘the German theology’ on cohorts of graduates who spread out into the anglophone world in order to populate new staff positions. While William Robertson Smith (associated with Edinburgh, Berlin, Bonn, Gottingen, and thence Aberdeen) was ‘libelled’ for heresy in a widely covered trial which ran for several years from 1879 in Scotland, Charles Briggs (Virginia, New York, Berlin) of Union Theological Seminary in New York was not tried until 1892–3, and the great parting of the ways over Samuel Angus (Belfast, Princeton, and ¹⁰ Quoted in Ian Breward, A History of the Churches in Australasia (Melbourne and Oxford, 2001), p. 264. ¹¹ Manning Clark, ‘Bromby, John Edward (1809–1889)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ bromby-john-edward-3063/text4517, published first in hardcopy, 1969 (accessed 19/3/2015). ¹² Judith Brett, The Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard (Cambridge, 2003), p. 42. ¹³ Breward, A History of the Churches in Australasia, p. 264.

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Berlin) in Australia did not occur until the 1930s. While communications were linked to the speed of ships, there were inevitable delays in the spread of ideas in the early part of the century, and the minority status of many religious traditions placed a brake on hermeneutical innovation. ‘Higher criticism’ was self-limiting, and fairly rapidly out of favour in the great centres of thought in Europe and the USA. By the 1920s it was being discarded as too simplistic and amorphous in comparison to emerging hermeneutical insights drawn from history, literary criticism, modern philosophy, and science. State-funded, majority tradition German research scholars could brawl merrily over the relative virtues of ‘the higher criticism’ without breaking the fellowships within which their scholarship took place. The smaller institutional footprints of dissenting traditions in Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia, however, inevitably meant that German-trained or -influenced professors were directly involved in ministry training, and thus much more subject to sharp responses from their supporting congregations. Disputes, when they broke out, were bitter and consequential, made worse by the fact that there was nowhere to go. Denominations in England, Scotland, and the USA fell somewhere in between. The meliorism of the former two and the sheer size of the latter meant that there was latitude for opinion, either by tacit agreement, migration, or the establishment of new denominations. Congregationally based laymen split along class lines—wealthy, growing congregations (such as New York Presbyterians and Baptists, or established Australian Congregationalists)¹⁴ adopted the innovative approaches to the Bible into local practice, often in the form of the ‘social gospel’. Evangelicals hunkered down in their working-class congregations, and began to organize themselves into defensive organizations (or publications, such as The Fundamentals); while other dissenters drifted towards Unitarianism or spiritualism. Dickson describes the more general trend in talking about his particular subject, Thomas Whitelaw of Kilmarnock: At a time when under the influence of Romanticism many of his fellow-ministers within Scottish Presbyterianism were adopting more diffuse expressions of their faith or under the influence of German theology were accepting radical critical theories, [Whitelaw] maintained doctrinal precision and felt that the higher critic used ‘unwarranted assumptions, and rarely supplies convincing demonstrations’. He called for resistance from Elijah-like prophets.¹⁵

The gathering of such conservative scholars around the Fundamentals from 1910 was indicative of the breadth of anglophone evangelical approaches to the biblical text. First, it was still at this stage a primarily scholarly response to ¹⁴ See, for instance, E. Sidney Kiek’s The Modern Religious Situation (Edinburgh, 1926), and W. Phillips, Edward Sidney Kiek: His Life and Thought (Adelaide, 1981). ¹⁵ Neil T. R. Dickson, ‘A Scottish Fundamentalist? Thomas Whitelaw of Kilmarnock (1840–1917)’, in D. Bebbington and David Ceri Jones, eds., Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism in the United Kingdom during the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2013), p. 35.

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a series of primarily scholarly problems. There were enough of older generation evangelicals still in the dissenting and more broadly nonconformist academies to make such statements of significance. Secondly, while Britain had its Recordites,¹⁶ the fact was that on the one hand many High Church ministers were theological conservatives, while on the other a growing number of younger evangelicals were of a liberal persuasion (they would later combine to form the Anglican Evangelical Group Movement). British meliorism, divisions within the Islington Conference, and rising concerns about international issues, at least prior to the 1920s, and the dominance of Anglo-Catholicism through the 1920s, meant that conservative reactions to innovation in biblical interpretation were repressed. For Methodists, the key issue was mission, rather than biblical interpretation. As the pioneer city minister, W. G. Taylor chided his conference colleagues, Methodism had begun as a protest against the tendency to ‘intellectualize’ the gospel: the substitution of ‘words of man’s wisdom’ for ‘the offence of the Cross.’ If you want to know what was the Pauline mind on this strange tendency, pray study the early words of his first letter to the Corinthian Church. Answer me, are we free from this tendency even in these days? Are not some of our pulpits given over largely to the mere intellectual presentation of abstract truth? Where is our passion? Where our emotion? Where our power of appeal? Where our overmastering conviction? Where our restlessness for spiritual results?¹⁷

For older Congregationalists, such as James Jefferis, the ability to maintain fellowship across denominational lines was not undermined by the fact that he did not believe in the verbal inspiration of Scripture. He still considered himself orthodox and evangelical, ‘deeply’ moving the South Australian Congregational Union ‘with his testimony to the divinity of the Saviour, delivered in “awe-stricken accents”’.¹⁸ For most anglophone dissenters, prior to the First World War, then, the Bible remained an inspired, authoritative text essential to faith and constitutive of the Church. There were, of course, variants on this theme. Clergy in well-educated suburban parishes, or in close proximity to universities, were inevitably pushed to engage with the new scholarship. Stanton and her co-editors of The Woman’s Bible were distinctly privileged and well-connected. London-based Congregationalist, R. J. Campbell, first established his name as a fashionable, progressive preacher at the resort town of Brighton before building higher

¹⁶ D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989), p. 182. ¹⁷ W. G. Taylor, ‘Restore the Fellowship of the Church’, Sermon Preached 6 March 1912, in The Life-Story of an Australian Evangelist (London, 1920), pp. 338–9. ¹⁸ Walter Phillips, ‘Jefferis, James (1833–1917)’, in B. Dickey, ed., Australian Dictionary of Evangelical Biography (Adelaide, 1994), http://webjournals.ac.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ADEB/article/ view/1084/1081, accessed 5/4/2018.

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criticism and socialist politics into his teachings at the City Temple. By 1906, this had taken on ‘a marked and definite content’¹⁹ under the title of ‘The New Theology’: it was an expression of Campbell’s own search for authenticity under the pressures of celebrity, the pluralism of the great City, and trends in scholarly interpretation of the text. ‘It is a man’s duty’, he wrote, adverting to the shift of authority away from literal text and towards an interpretative experiential basis, ‘to make his theology as nearly as possible an adequate and worthy expression of his religion.’²⁰ Theology was ‘never more than speculation. It always stumble[s] along in the wake of spiritual experience.’²¹ The Bible was presently taught, Campbell proposed, in ways which were most regrettable, for in after years it leads them to doubt and distrust the foundations of Christianity. If the teachers only had a little more intelligent acquaintance with the sources of the scriptures, this danger would be avoided and the Bible would become a far more interesting and helpful book both to young and old.²²

While popular in his circles, others doubted Campbell’s approach could be supported within a Christian framework—the organicist autodidactic public servant, Arthur Boutwood (writing under the pen name ‘Hakluyt Egerton’), for instance, thought it essentially non-theistic in direction,²³ an observation somewhat borne out when Campbell began to feature universalists and syncretists (such as the Ba’hai leader `Abdu’l-Bahá’) in the City Temple’s pulpit. On the other side of the Atlantic, the public fame of ‘the greatest preacher of the century’, Harry Emerson Fosdick, was translated through radio, books, and pamphlets into real cultural influence from his pulpits in First Presbyterian and then at Riverside Church, New York.²⁴ He was as popular as Morris K. Jessup Professor of the English Bible at Union Seminary, so much so that entry to his lectures had on occasions to be constrained by the issuing of tickets.²⁵ His many books included contemporary redefinitions of the value of the biblical text (e.g. The Modern Use of the Bible, 1925) based on the grand narrative of nineteenth-century liberals and experientialists such as Albrecht Ritschl, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Adolf von Harnack, and William

¹⁹ R. J. Campbell, The New Theology (New York, 1907), p. iv. ²⁰ Campbell, The New Theology, p. 1. ²¹ R. J. Campbell, ‘Personal Immortality’, The Methodist (Sydney), 20 June 1903, p. 2. ²² Campbell, The New Theology, p. 257. ²³ Hakluyt Egerton, Is the New Theology Christian? (London, 1907); see also E. H. H. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York, 2002), pp. 45–7. ²⁴ M. F. Camroux, ‘Liberalism Preached: Harry Emerson Fosdick’, The Expository Times 106.2 (1994), p. 44. ²⁵ B. L. Harbour, ‘The Christology of Harry Emerson Fosdick’, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, Baylor University, PhD dissertation, 1973, p. v.

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Newton Clarke.²⁶ Living in the last age when biblical Christianity could sit comfortably within a broadly accepted Western sense of public ‘religion’, in the pre-First World War affluence and self-satisfaction of the United States, there was a freedom to experiment in what Fosdick variously called ‘adventurous’ or ‘progressive’ Christianity. Theologians had not just the right, but the duty, to tie Christianity to the seemingly unstoppable progressivism which seemed to be taking the world by storm. The job of the theologian was to express ‘abiding experiences in changing categories’, so that the Bible was ‘made intelligible to modern men’.²⁷ Such a freedom to reframe Christianity around personal religious experience did not merely answer the ‘scientific’ questions about biblical witness that Fosdick had experienced at Colgate University, but was an essential element of how he dealt with his own emotional and professional life. His understanding that theologies are conditioned by the social and cultural contexts of their times was, ironically, conditioned by the social and cultural context of his time. The rise of psychology, sociology, and other human disciplines made theological liberalism seem simply a matter of logic. He could even make common cause with liberal evangelicals such as John Mott, leader of a Student Volunteer Movement which was steadily morphing into formal Protestant ecumenism. For Fosdick, the Bible was a historical text, the ideas of which developed across time. While foreswearing chronological determinism,²⁸ he understood the Bible ‘to be the progressive unveiling of God’s revelation to man climaxed in Jesus Christ’,²⁹ as subject to evolutionary assumptions as H. L. Mencken’s monkeys. Contemporary reviewers, even those such as John Flight of Haverford College,³⁰ who admired Fosdick as religious impresario and synthesizer of scholarly debates, pointed to the overly facile incorporation of the ‘messy’ biblical materials into the self-satisfied Whiggism of modernist improvers. Others were less impressed, seeing in Fosdick’s modernism a direct attack on the unique claims of Christianity and surrender to secular respectability.³¹ Fosdick would become a key figure in the conflicts over biblical interpretation after the First World War, and a significant voice in the liberal Protestant internationalism which sought to restrain international conflict through the 1920s.

²⁶ Harbour, ‘The Christology of Harry Emerson Fosdick’, 1. ²⁷ Quoted in R. M. Miller, Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet (New York and Oxford, 1985), p. 349. ²⁸ Kenneth Cauthen, The Impact of American Religious Liberalism (New York, 1962). ²⁹ Harbour, ‘The Christology of Harry Emerson Fosdick’, p. 30. ³⁰ John W. Flight, ‘Harry Emerson Fosdick, A Guide to Understanding the Bible (Book Review)’, Journal of Bible and Religion 7.1 (February 1939), p. 38. ³¹ George H. Dowkontt, ‘Deadly Parallel’: A Comparison of Thomas Paine’s ‘Age of Reason’ with Harry E. Fosdick’s ‘Modern Use of the Bible’ in Parallel Columns, Showing their Striking Likeness (New York, 1926).

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Not all the great dissenting centres, however, were inclined to flow with the spirit of the age. Others responded to the flows of modernism, secularism, and pluralism by establishing counter-cultural entrepôts. The major forums for late nineteenth-century biblical literalism—the bible conference movement, with its centres at Sea Cliff, Niagara, Northfield, and the like, leading up to the World Bible Conference in Philadelphia in 1919;³² the Keswick Convention with its outliers in India, China, Australia, and throughout the world; and the growing number of bible institutes and colleges which followed H. G. Guinness’s model in East London in separating from the mainstream denominations—remained the backbone of conservative biblical interpretation, their speakers drawn from missions agencies and conservative congregations. As Scott Gibson has noted with regard to Guinness and A. J. Gordon, these institutions formed a global network of biblical hermeneutical influence which bypassed the public interface of academic institutions, and kept in circulation attitudes to the Bible which elsewhere were being pushed to the margins.³³ Both Guinness and Gordon read the text through premillennial lenses: it was a source (among futurists) for explaining the present, for predicting the future, and (among historicists) for explaining the place of the gospel in the course of human history. Counter to postmillennialist presuppositions of an earlier age, it motivated them to good works and missions, to save a world hanging in a brief moment of God’s mercy before the Judgement. It would take a further three decades until this worked its way out in the separation from mainstream mission agencies, but most scholars agree that a foundational period falls in the 1910s, across the turmoil and bloodshed of the First World War. This period opens, conveniently, with the emergence of a major statement of evangelical positions on various Christian doctrines. Funded by two wealthy Texan oilmen, the ninety articles gathered in the twelve volumes of The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, were authored by a wide range of Protestant scholars, laymen, and clergy. While the first volume focused on those doctrinal issues most under attack from rationalist and modernist readings of the text (it opens with James Orr’s piece on ‘The Virgin Birth of Christ’, a matter which would become a flash point at Princeton Seminary with J. Gresham Machen’s volume of the same title), the underlying unity throughout relates to the place of the Bible in Protestant interpretation. Noll, among others, points to this as a key indicator of a rolling eclipse of evangelical scholarship which had commenced prior to 1900, and

³² Mark Sidwell, ‘ “Come apart and rest awhile”: The Origin of the Bible Conference Movement in America’, Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 15 (2010), p. 75. ³³ S. M. Gibson, ‘A. J. Gordon and H. G. Guinness: A Case Study of Transatlantic Evangelicalism’, in B. R. White, W. H. Brackney, P. S. Fiddes, and J. H. Y. Briggs, eds., Pilgrim Pathways: Essays in Baptist History in Honour of B.R. White (Macon, 1999), pp. 303–5.

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which lasted until the 1940s.³⁴ The fact that the volume closes on Dyson Hague’s ‘History of the Higher Criticism’ and Howard Atwood Kelly’s personal reflection on ‘A Scientific Man and the Bible: A Personal Testimony’ demonstrates the widely held concern that the appropriation of the Bible by scholars had divorced its interpretation from the common man. To evangelicals, perspicuity of the text, in the common-sense tradition, was a marker of its authenticity. Scholarly obfuscation undermined perspicuity, and pursued vain projections as to a ‘modern man’ hypothesized by the social sciences and far removed from the life-locations of actual people. Hence the appeal of an article entitled ‘Tributes to Christ and the Bible by Brainy Men not Known as Active Christians’. A division between the Western academy and evangelical populism—sundered by the massification of professionalized institutions of higher learning³⁵—thus rotated around the status of the biblical text. On the one hand were professional orientalists and technical philologists; on the other, often pastorally engaged scholarly generalists, for whom the Bible was ‘the Church’s book’.³⁶ The fact that the Fundamentals was produced in the USA supported this appeal to the common man (not yet reduced from ‘citizen’ to mere ‘consumer’), and emphasized interpretations drawn from the dissenting tradition. As Noll notes, the story in Anglican-majority Britain had resonances with, but was ultimately quite different to the explosive separations and denominational innovation among their American cousins in the 1920s and 1930s. Most of the entries in the Fundamentals were written by authors rooted in the Old Dissent (Baptists and Congregationalists, 28 per cent) or by technical Nonconformists (particularly Presbyterians, 47 per cent). The former were constitutionally inclined to local self-determination, the latter (numbers of whom were directly connected by family or teaching to the Covenanting tradition) to championing the supremacy of a divine Christ (as confessionally defined in the Westminster Confession) over the Church, or even the state. The academic reduction of the Bible to a work of mere literature was a threat not only to the theology of such traditions, but to their identity and their polity. The First and Second World Wars were weighty contributors to the progressive differentiation between British and American dissenting traditions over the next three decades. As Bob Linder has pointed out with regard to Australian evangelical traditions in the first war, for example, expansive dissenting traditions (such as the Methodists) volunteered for war service in

³⁴ M. A. Noll, Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America (San Francisco, 1986), p. 33. ³⁵ G. M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York, 1996), p. 155. ³⁶ Noll, Between Faith and Criticism, p. 34.

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disproportionate numbers.³⁷ Even pacifistic traditions, such as the Salvation Army, contributed large numbers to non-combat roles which took them into danger: as chaplains, health workers, and aid and comfort suppliers.³⁸ The ‘great crusade’ proved too tempting for most dissenting traditions, and while it wrapped mystical properties around the Bible in evangelical folklore, it also became the ground of profound doubt. For soldiers on the front line, such as Wilfrid Bush, Harry Taylor, Elvas Jenkins, and others,³⁹ the habit of carrying a Bible in their breast pocket proved life-saving, deflecting or even stopping bullets cold. For troops in Palestine, and those more generally who invested Jerusalem with special significance in prophetic history, the stories of Allenby capturing David’s city by means of prophetic fulfilment or a mere close reading of Old Testament geography⁴⁰ proved its validity over all scholarly criticism: pragmatic religionists [i.e. social gospellers] and shallow critics [i.e. theological liberals] could not stand this kind of Bible. They desired a Scripture suitable for a primary school, and for that alone. So they skipped one-half of the Bible, explained away two-thirds of the other half, and were left with only one-sixth quite in accordance with their ideas of revelation. Even then they were hard put to it. But the war has changed all that.⁴¹

After the war, popular interpretation would co-opt such events as ‘the hand of God’—it would continue to feed into radical, prophetic forms of dissent into the next century.⁴² A writer in the Cairns Post of 1916 proved a better prophet than many when he wrote: Christianity is more a religion for adversity than for prosperity; and those who are really feeling the war are finding healing in the Bible. Warfare and victory, chivalry and kindliness, consolation and comfort these three are coming to readers of the Bible as they catch a glimpse of its message about God. After the war, and when things settle down again, perhaps there will remain with them a

³⁷ viz. Robert D. Linder, The Long Tragedy: Australian Evangelical Christians and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Adelaide, 2000), pp. 20–1. ³⁸ Duff Crerar, Padres in No Man’s Land: Canadian Chaplains and the Great War (Montreal and Buffalo, 2014), p. 217. ³⁹ ‘The Great War soldiers saved by a pocket Bible, a whistle and a camera’, Daily Mail (1 September 2014), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2739338/The-Great-War-Soldierssaved-pocket-Bible-whistle-camera-Incredible-stories-three-heroes-cheated-death-revealed-time. html; ‘Son reveals “Hand of God” Bible that saved WWI soldier father from being shot dead’, Sunday Express (29 March 2014), http://www.express.co.uk/news/world-war-1/467542/ Hand-of-God-Bible-that-saved-my-WWI-soldier-father-from-being-shot-dead; John Harris, ‘The Bible and the bullet’, Eternity News (April 2012), https://www.eternitynews.com.au/in-depth/ the-bible-and-the-bullet/, all accessed 16/3/2015. ⁴⁰ See, for instance, The Times (London) 19 August 1916, p. 6; Cairns Post 23 October 1916, p. 7; Gosford Times and Wyong District Advocate 23 April 1925, p. 14. ⁴¹ ‘War and the Bible’, Cairns Post 23 October 1916, p. 7. ⁴² For example, Col Stringer, 800 Horsemen: God’s History Makers (Robina Town Centre, 1998).

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new idea of what inspiration means. Of all theological terms, that has been most abused in the past. One of the post-war gains may be that new ways of looking at church and Bible and inspiration shall be added to the religious consciousness of the West.⁴³

The ‘new’ approaches to the concepts of ‘inspiration’ and ‘revelation’ were not long in coming, though how ‘new’ they were is debatable. On the one hand, liberal modernists, who saw the Jesus of the Bible as an archetype of humanity, continued to see the mandate ‘semper reformanda’ as a basis for adapting biblical interpretation to ‘the modern’. At Park Avenue Baptist Church, Harry Emerson Fosdick bewailed the mass slaughter of the First World War, and called for a new emphasis on collective security against the militarization of ‘the gigantic paraphernalia of modern science’.⁴⁴ The energetic liberal Protestant campaigns of the 1920s resulted in a new internationalism, a codification of ‘universal’ human rights, the establishment of the World Council of Churches and (after the failure of the League of Nations in the yet greater furnace of the Second World War) the establishment of the United Nations. The Great War had transformed modernist scholarly preference into the moral certainty that there was no room in ‘the Church spiritual’ for atavistic Old Testament particularism, and therefore for the forms of biblical literalism which still claimed these as revelation. Many went still farther, rejecting the definitional role of the Church altogether. The brief biblical references to the afterlife were poured over in the midst of grief, debated, and finely sliced. The parlour games of the nineteenth century became, after the catastrophic loss of so many young men in the War, a pathway for some out of organized Christianity altogether. In his 1918 book The New Revelation, Arthur Conan Doyle (raised a Catholic) declared: In the presence of an agonized world, hearing every day of the deaths of the flower of our race in their first promise of their unfulfilled youth, seeing around one the wives and mothers who had no clear conception whither their loved ones had gone to, I seemed suddenly to see that this subject with which I had so long dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the rules of science, but that it was really something tremendous, a breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction.⁴⁵

For a much larger group of previously conservative Protestants through the 1920s, the wind seemed to drop out of the sails of biblicist Christianity. Some,

⁴³ ‘War and the Bible’, Cairns Post 23 October 1916, p. 7. ⁴⁴ H. E. Fosdick, ‘Christianity and War’, in Joseph Fort Newton, ed., Best Sermons, 1924 (New York, 1924). ⁴⁵ Quoted in A. Smith, ‘The Mists which Shroud these Questions’: Mabel St Clair Stobart, the First World War and Faith’, Literature & History 20.2 (2011), pp. 1–15.

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such as the uncrowned ‘Cardinal’ of Sydney Presbyterianism (R. G. McIntyre), had spent so much in promoting enlistment that, standing among the wreckage of decimated families and churches, they had to ask whether it was all worth it. His defence of ‘conditional immortality’ in The Other Side of Death: A Study of Christian Eschatology (1920) ‘gained him a D.D. from the University of Edinburgh, and the censure of conservative churchmen, who questioned his orthodoxy and “loyalty to Christ”’.⁴⁶ McIntyre was clear as to his motivation. The War had left [t]he minds of many within and without the Church . . . urgently asking for guidance on these matters, and it is due to these troubled souls to tell them as clearly and definitely as possible what the Bible has to say, and what are the principles it enunciates. . . . The world-war from which we are now emerging has called forth many books on the Second Advent and Future Destiny, but too many of these, intended for the general public, are either dominated by a literalism which ignores the historical conditions in which New Testament doctrine took shape, or they proceed so independently of Scripture teaching that they more or less fail to appeal to Christian faith.⁴⁷

This was to be essential to British dissenting approaches to biblical interpretation between the wars. What seemed to be a neutering of the ‘liberal evangelicals’ shifted the balance inside denominations. Through the 1920s, conservatives were increasingly pushed to the edges of denominational politics—in Britain, this meant the rise of ritualists and modernists, in the USA it meant dominance by liberal interpretations of the text. In part it was a polarization between professors and pastors: the theological institutions (particularly Auburn and Union Theological Seminaries in the eastern USA, and Chicago Divinity School in the centre)⁴⁸ had absorbed the ‘German theology’ and were replicating their own convictions among their graduates, while local pastors of an older generation despaired at the influence this fed into the pulpit and the Assembly. The older generation, such as Henry Sloane Coffin or R. G. McIntyre, with their exalted conception of the Church spiritual and common Scottish roots, were able to hold in tension a broader view of the Church with an inspired text. By the early 1920s, however, liberal and orthodox interpretative schools were in open conflict in many denominations and church conferences. Without the ability to speak ‘ex cathedra’, many Churches in the dissenting traditions lurched from one pole to the other. The 1923

⁴⁶ Susan Emilsen, ‘Macintyre, Ronald George (1863–1954)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/ biography/macintyre-ronald-george-7374/text12813, published first in hardcopy 1986, accessed 16/3/2015. ⁴⁷ R. G. McIntyre, The Other Side of Death (London, 1920), p. vii. ⁴⁸ Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York, 1997), p. 38.

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General Assembly of the Northern Presbyterian Church, for example, reinforced the key orthodoxies of the Westminster Confession; in 1924, the staff of Auburn Seminary issued their dissent under an ‘Affirmation’ which defended the liberties necessary to an inclusive Church (the Declaratory Statement, for instance, permitted ‘liberty of conscience and the right of private judgment’), and rejected ‘verbal inspiration’ as an adequate means of interpreting the Bible.⁴⁹ Attitudes to the biblical text thus came to define the field of battle over understandings of the Church. The ‘literalism which ignores the historical conditions in which New Testament doctrine took shape’, so feared by McIntyre, was of course happening in his own city. A futurist, prophetic Bible which could prove itself against world events was also a handy wall behind which local revivalists and evangelists could shelter as they gathered the ‘remnant’ before the soon coming of the Lord. This sort of vision was not rare among dissenters— millenarian trends had played a significant part in the Reformation,⁵⁰ in the settlement of the USA,⁵¹ and in the English Civil War,⁵² in ways which helped define the ‘establishment/dissenting’ divide. Observing Anglicans were constantly reminded of the fact in their Thirty-Nine Articles, in ways which also reflected tensions over the social gospel: as Article XXXVIII notes, looking backwards to the radical millenarian communalism which had periodically bothered the state: The Riches and Goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast. Notwithstanding, every man ought, of such things as he possesseth, liberally to give alms to the poor, according to his ability.

In the wreckage of war and the crises of Church and society which followed it, dispensational premillenarianism gained in power as an interpretative framework.⁵³ While himself coming to rest on a historicist foundation, the reading of the bible—by people such as H. G. Guinness—as a predictive text found powerful affirmation in the 1910s and 1920s. The prophecy of ‘the ruin of the church’, for instance, seemed to be borne out in the rise of ‘the German theology’, in liberal theological support (in Germany) for the rise of fascism ⁴⁹ Charles E. Quirk, ‘Origins of the Auburn Affirmation’, Journal of Presbyterian History 53.2 (1962–85), 07/1975, p. 122. ⁵⁰ See Klaus Deppermann, Melchior Hoffman: Social Unrest and Apocalyptic Visions in the Age of Reformation (Edinburgh, 1987). ⁵¹ See W. Clark Gilpin, The Millenarian Piety of Roger Williams (Chicago, 1979); Donald Burke, ‘New England New Jerusalem: The Millenarian Dimension of Transatlantic Migration. A Study in the Theology of History’, PhD diss., Wayne State University, 2006. ⁵² See Richard L. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford, 2002). ⁵³ Markku Ruotsila, The Origins of Christian Anti-Internationalism. Conservative Evangelicals and the League of Nations (Washington, 2007), pp. 172–3.

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and (outside Germany) for new, controlling internationalist bodies. Both affronted the fusion of premillenialism and American exceptionalism which were identity markers for populist evangelical dissenting congregations in the USA.⁵⁴ To hold a German theology in wartime was not just heresy, but a betrayal of the nation. British nationalism also worked against wholesale absorption of higher criticism: as John Taylor (Anglican, Winchcombe) noted as early as 1900 with regard to the critical work of Bertholet, ‘An Englishman may perhaps be forgiven if he adds that something very nearly approaching the ideal commentary on Deuteronomy has already been produced by one of our own scholars.’⁵⁵ In the pre-Second World War British sphere, likewise, British Israelism was not uncommon (though often rejected as a direct competitor in the process of religious revitalization)⁵⁶ in premillennialist subcultures.⁵⁷ Not far from where McIntyre taught theology and apologetics at St Andrew’s College, in the University of Sydney, the Baptist William Lamb built a significant congregation around premillennialist interpretations of the War, and the fervent preaching of the soon coming of the Lord. Lamb went from being a local pastor, to a national name as a Bible teacher, and eventually to becoming one of the many ‘advent preachers’ released onto the global preaching network. John Ridley, a First World War veteran who made a name for himself as the most successful revivalist preacher of his generation, pointed to the shape of this populist, international fundamentalist hermeneutical network: He [Lamb] has visited the United States, Canada, Egypt, Palestine and New Zealand, and has invitations to go to India, China and Japan after his present tour in Great Britain is completed. He has lately arrived from America, where he has addressed crowded meetings, hundreds being turned away. He has spoken at least twelve times, and on some occasions as many as 20 times a week. He has written a dozen books, and in addition to this over a million pamphlets, of which he is the author, have been circulated. Among the subjects with which Mr. Lamb deals are the following: The Fate of the Jews; The Rise and Fall of the Anti-Christ; The World’s Great Distress and The Only Sure Way Out.⁵⁸

Out of these incipient networks, the models which had commenced with Guinness’s East London Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in the ⁵⁴ Carpenter, Revive Us Again, p. 38. ⁵⁵ ‘Recent Foreign Theology: Bertholet’s Deuteronomium’, The Expository Times 11.4 (January 1900), p. 180. ⁵⁶ J. Wilson, ‘British Israelism: A Revitalization Movement in Contemporary Culture’, Archives de sociologie des religions, 13e Année, No. 26 (July–December 1968), pp. 74–5. ⁵⁷ In numbers of pentecostal movements, such as the National Revival Crusade (later the Christian Revival Crusade) in New Zealand and Australia, it became a central tenet. See Barry Chant, The Spirit of Pentecost: The Origins and Development of the Pentecostal Movement in Australia, 1870–1939 (Lexington, 2011). ⁵⁸ John G. Ridley, William Lamb: Preacher and Prophet (Sydney, 1944), p. 60.

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1870s in England began to spread as the fundamentalist/modernist debate turned bitter. The need arose to replace the functions previously performed by the institutions of mainstream denominations. The centrality of the Bible to these emerging networks was evident in the proliferation of ‘bible colleges’, ‘bible institutes’, ‘bible training institutes’, and the like. In this new environment, hostile to the Bible (as they saw it), the new institutions promoted ‘unity among the various strands of Fundamentalism in the battle against “Modernism”’ and socialized ‘new generations of young people into Fundamentalist beliefs’, so ensuring the survival of the movement.⁵⁹ While most of the literature has concentrated on institutions such as Wheaton College, Moody Bible Institute, Fuller Theological seminary, and the like, the same impulse could be seen in the thousands of short-lived projects which popped up in almost every city where there was a fundamentalist church, as well as in many rural areas which had previously been visited by revivalists. Wheaton was founded to provide ‘faith and learning in order to produce a biblical perspective needed to relate Christian experience’ to ‘the needs of contemporary society’.⁶⁰ Moody was more directly oriented towards producing ‘bible workers’: preachers, teachers, colporteurs, missionaries, and the like. The ‘separation’ provoked by doctrinal controversy and the consolidation of a professional bureaucratized ‘knowledge class’ in the mainstream institutions advantaged the ‘separationist’ and Free Church tendencies within dissenting movements. The ‘Presbyterian solution’, of organizing the church around its teaching institutions (rather than an episcopacy, for example) was thus more than simply a reflection of the centrality of the Bible to teaching: it was a reflection of its constitutive ecclesiology. The experiences of three key popularizers of the Bible in mid-century North America illustrate the divergence in attitudes to the Bible between old, new, and contemporary dissent. Charles Bradley ‘Chuck’ Templeton (b. 1915, Toronto, Canada); William Franklin ‘Billy’ Graham, Jr (b. 1918, North Carolina), and Oral Roberts (b. 1918, Oklahoma) were all near contemporaries, well known to one another across their careers. Each was an enormously influential religious entrepreneur, whose ‘inner fire’ (a term coined by Pierre Berton in his obituary for Templeton)⁶¹ attracted a ‘vast popularity’ from North Americans based ‘not just [on] a desire for “easy security” among believers but also an openness to the true Gospel of judgment and mercy’.⁶² Templeton was a

⁵⁹ Richard W. Flory, ‘Development and Transformation within Protestant Fundamentalism: Bible Institutes and Colleges in the United States, 1925–1991’, University of Chicago, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2003, p. 3. ⁶⁰ Flory, ‘Development and Transformation’, p. 7. ⁶¹ Pierre Berton, ‘Charles Bradley Templeton’, The Globe and Mail 6 September 2001, A.24. ⁶² Andrew S. Finstuen, Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety (Chapel Hill, 2009), p. 29.

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self-made man who made, and remade, himself, multiple times. In each remaking, the Bible played a critical role. With only two years of high school education, Templeton had made a success of himself first as a newspaper cartoonist, then, after an early self-conversion experience, as a church planter, founding member of Youth For Christ, and evangelist. In his preaching, he ‘generat[ed] the kind of electricity that, in the end, jammed Maple Leaf Gardens and made Chuck Templeton, next to Billy Graham, the biggest religious drawing card in North America’.⁶³ Desiring affirmation and ordination, he enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he started with Tillich’s dictum that ‘Serious doubt is confirmation of faith’,⁶⁴ and ended with no faith at all. Graham, by way of contrast, was born into a Presbyterian family, converted in a Baptist revival, and sent off for education in the world of fundamentalist bible institutes (Bob Jones College, Florida Bible Institute, Wheaton College). Templeton’s searching hermeneutic and encounter with Princeton led him to disbelieve in verbal inspiration of the text. It matched his disappointment in the inspiration of the verbal as he preached: somehow, while he preached certainty, he concluded that ‘Evangelism is not for me’. Graham, however, found power in the literal text which was essential to his success in preaching. Echoing Henrietta Mears, Graham responded to the doubting Templeton, ‘When I stand on the platform and say, “God says,” or “The Bible says,” the Holy Spirit uses me. There are results.’⁶⁵ A third form of American spiritual pragmatism was represented by Oral Roberts. Brought into ministry in the Pentecostal Holiness Church, education was also an issue for Roberts (he completed neither of the two degrees he started at Oklahoma Baptist University and Phillips University, respectively). At Phillips, he had discovered doubt in the biblical narrative: was Eve truly created from Adam’s rib?⁶⁶ Unlike Templeton, however, Roberts’ lifelong fascination and frustration with education was resolved not by turning to the scholars, but by redefining his relationship to doctrine, and so the Bible. At the age of 29, Roberts chanced across III John 2: ‘I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.’ It struck him like lightning: God was a good God, and could resolve his poverty, and create a new ministry for him. He bought a Buick, left the Pentecostal Holiness Church, and began the development of what became a worldwide healing ministry. As with Graham, the biblical text rendered power which resolved doubt: it was, however, not the power to point towards salvation, but the much more material outcome of physical healing and prosperity.

⁶³ Berton, ‘Charles Bradley Templeton’, A.24. ⁶⁴ Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen (New York, 1956). ⁶⁵ Quoted in C. B. Templeton, Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith (Toronto, 1996), p. 7. ⁶⁶ D. E. Harrell, Jr, Oral Roberts: An American Life (Bloomington, 1975), p. 66.

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All three figures represented forms of pragmatism, each man’s technologyof-life and cultural origins reinforcing his attitude to the inspiration of the text and its relationship to the material world. Indeed, the text was the means for each to remake themselves with apparent seamlessness as the arcs of their careers encountered changing contexts. Graham at the end of his career seemed to many to be much less fundamentalist in his attitude to the Bible than he had at the beginning: and yet his message and appeal seemed the same.⁶⁷ This careful balancing act by ‘America’s pastor’ required a certain willing ignorance. He was not a scholar, he would say, but a preacher who stood at the door and appealed to people to ‘enter in’. His personal story, recounted many times in Graham hagiography, was based on his decision to ‘trust that Your Word is true’. The story begins with the admission ‘God, I can’t understand all this. I don’t know it all. I can’t figure it all out.’⁶⁸ Constructed naïveté (the hermeneutical parallel to Graham’s ‘formidable double canonry of humility and charm’)⁶⁹ was the foundation of his ability to say, ‘The Bible Says’, and so to appeal to the spiritual hunger of christianized societies under pressure of change. Roberts, though directed towards different ends, maintained a similar hermeneutic: ‘I may use different words’, he explained to a theology class in 1971, ‘I want to talk in the now, but I want to be saying the same things that the Bible teaches.’⁷⁰ As he moved out of classical pentecostalism, Roberts’ approach provided some impetus to middleAmerican Methodism, but his greatest contribution (apart from his central place in the Latter Rain-Influenced Healing Revival)⁷¹ was to provide a biblicist link between Pentecostalism and the mainstream. By the mid-1950s, this took the form of charismatic renewal which, through the 1960s, became a major means for denominational resistance to increasingly dominant public secularism.⁷² Both Graham and Roberts (who would cooperate in the globalization of their respective evangelistic networks) modelled naïveté before a totalizing text as the source of power and counter-modernism. Templeton, for his part, however, could not ‘not know’, but at the same time didn’t have the philosophical sophistication either to relativize the procrustean rationalism and reductionism of the human sciences, or to hold to the ‘greys’ of the liberal ⁶⁷ Wacker suggests that in part this was interactive, between the many ‘faces’ of Graham, and the self-positioning of observers with regard to the fundamentalist/modernist debate. For instance, see Martin Marty’s 1988 assessment, quoted in G. Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, 2014), p. 96. ⁶⁸ Steve Posner and Amy Newmark, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Billy Graham & Me (Cos Cob, 2013). ⁶⁹ David Aikman, Billy Graham: His Life and Influence (Nashville, 2007), p. 129. ⁷⁰ Harrell, Oral Roberts, p. 439. ⁷¹ viz. A. H. Anderson, To the Ends of the Earth: Pentecostalism and the Transformation of World Christianity (Oxford, 2011), pp. 204–5. ⁷² See Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), pp. 209–10.

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evangelical theological position. In 1948, his inquiring mind and the pressure of preaching the text led him to construct his own synthesis of the Jesus story, a process which necessarily engaged with the seeming contradictions between the Gospels. When he brought it to publication in 1973, despite having declared himself an agnostic in 1957,⁷³ it reached the bestseller lists. By then, as Vance demonstrates, he had long since replaced performances of faith with ‘performances of unbelief ’ more suited to the newspaper press and television media which thereafter became his life. Templeton rejected Graham’s appeals to what he came to see as the unknowing ‘common people’ (for whom the message of the Church was too complex) to re-establish himself as ‘the representative of thinking and caring people who were declaring this religion [of Christianity] to be dead’.⁷⁴ For both, the appeal to the popular was based on absolute categories: even in his agnostic phase, ‘Templeton often sounded very much like a conservative Christian’.⁷⁵

TWO SCHOLA RS: BRUCE AND BULTMANN The Second World War proved a watershed for interpretation of the Bible in the anglophone world. The ‘higher criticism’ which had bothered the waters of Western interpretation through the latter part of the nineteenth century was rendered less plausible on a number of fronts. First, many in the German school (or at least their foot soldiers) became associated with the hyper German nationalism which sparked the war, and some even with membership of the Nazi Party.⁷⁶ Secondly, the struggle of the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church) with the Deutsche Christen for the leadership of the German Church projected German conservative and neo-conservative theologians and interpreters into the consciousness of the English-speaking world. Thirdly, involvement in the Middle East after the first War released into the West significant new archaeological and documentary materials, particularly from the discoveries at Ras Shamra and, shortly afterwards, at Qumran. The result

⁷³ David Vance, ‘Charles Templeton and the Performances of Unbelief ’, Carleton University (Canada), CURVE, 2008, https://curve.carleton.ca/248c9f9b-7985-4a75-83bc-3008b2c5afca, accessed 18/3/2018. ⁷⁴ Vance, ‘Charles Templeton’, p. 67. ⁷⁵ Vance, ‘Charles Templeton’, p. 71. ⁷⁶ For which see Susannah Heschel’s work on the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, e.g. Transforming Jesus from Jew to Aryan: Protestant Theologians in Nazi Germany (Tucson, 1995); and Karla Poewe’s ‘Jakob Wilhelm Hauer’s New Religion and National Socialism’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 20.2 (2005), pp. 195–215. Emily Anderson points to similar co-option of Japanese Protestantism in the pre-Second World War period (Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan, London, 2014, p. 69).

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of biblical scholarship coming ‘out of the armchair’⁷⁷ was ‘an enhanced respect for the received Hebrew text’,⁷⁸ and the rise of ‘biblical theology’ as a counterweight to continental speculative traditions. This interacted with the emergence in 1952 of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which immediately raced to the top of the non-fiction charts with millions of copies sold. In the critical world, it sparked debate: Dwight Macdonald likened the ‘flat, insipid and mediocre’ language of the new Bible to ‘taking apart Westminster Abbey to make Disneyland out of the fragments’.⁷⁹ Fundamentalist teacher C. F. Lincoln lambasted it as an ‘unreliable and unacceptable translation for the reverent, Bible-loving Christian’,⁸⁰ translated by heretics and promoted by apostates. In the world of popular bible reading, it sparked assessments as to ‘the average Christian’s commitment to study of the text’. The new version emerged at just the right time for publishers—a post-war interest in spirituality and human flourishing, a broad evangelical revival on both sides of the Atlantic, and a ‘theological revival’ among mainstream and ‘liberal’ schools (featuring thinkers including ‘religious socialists’ such as Tillich, dialecticians such as Niebuhr,⁸¹ and visitors such as Brunner, in addition to the German intellectual exodus which had made America its home in the 1920s),⁸² ensured a receptive public for the text.⁸³ The moral earnestness of these biblicallyengaged movements was given point by the new crisis which emerged out of the Second World War: the threat of nuclear annihilation which informed the public panics of the Cold War. For people such as Barth, who sought to oppose the secularization of Christ and who taught ‘the crisis of all humanity before God’,⁸⁴ the 1950s (defined by Korea, the nuclear arms race, the Geneva Conference, Suez, Vietnam, and the like) created an almost perfect framework for reconstructionist moral earnestness.⁸⁵ Regardless of whether one was a

⁷⁷ See T. W. Davis, ‘A History of Biblical Archaeology (Palestine)’, The University of Arizona (ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 1987, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/143729157.pdf, accessed 5/4/2018), for an account of the connections between W. F. Albright and G. E. Wright, and the rise of the Biblical Theology Movement. Davis later published more extensively under the title Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology (New York, 2004). ⁷⁸ G. W. Anderson, ed., Tradition and Interpretation (Oxford, 1979), p. xiii. ⁷⁹ Macdonald’s original book emerged in 1962 as Against the American Grain; this reference is taken from the 2011 reprint, edited by Louis Menand, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (New York, 2011), pp. 165–8. ⁸⁰ ‘A Critique of the Revised Standard Version’, Bibliotheca Sacra 110 (January 1953), p. 50. ⁸¹ Charles C. West, Communism and the Theologians: Study of an Encounter (Philadelphia, 1958), p. 179. ⁸² Claus-Dieter Krohn, Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research, trans. R. and R. Kimber (Amherst, 1993). ⁸³ David Norton, A History of the English Bible as Literature (Cambridge, 2000), p. 369. ⁸⁴ West, Communism and the Theologians, p. 217. ⁸⁵ Joel Carpenter, ‘Youth for Christ and the New Evangelicals’ Place in the Nation’, in R. A. Sherrill, ed., Religion and the Life of the Nation: American Recoveries (Chicago, 1991), pp. 128–9.

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disciple of Bultmann, of Barth, or of the rising evangelical voice of F. F. Bruce, in the 1950s reading the Bible mattered. In the British world, theology had not been as institutionally sundered from the mainstream universities as it had become outside the Ivy League in the USA (or indeed, those other countries of British settlement, Australia and Canada). In New Zealand, the Presbyterian roots of Otago University made its continuing connections with Knox College logical, while the dense theological communities which fed into the South African ‘traditional’ universities (such as the University of Pretoria) meant that many continued to include either integrated theological faculties or cooperative degrees through associated theological colleges. In Britain itself, the continuing strength of the Inter-Collegiate Christian Unions (particularly OICCU and CICCU) and the Student Christian Movement meant that British biblical scholarship was to continue to have influence beyond Britain’s numbers or its waning political influence. For rising scholars such as F. F. Bruce, the context was a triple set of negotiations—between denominational belonging, the demands of public scholarship and academic reputation, and participation in the rising neoevangelical campaign to work out ‘what it means to be evangelical but not fundamentalist’.⁸⁶ In farewelling Bruce after his death, J. P. Kane captured these tensions neatly: Frederick Fyvie Bruce, Editor of the Palestine Exploration Quarterly from 1957 to 1971 and Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester from 1959 to 1978, was a man of deep Christian conviction, by churchmanship a lifelong member of the Brethren, by scholarship a master of biblical exposition in the liberal evangelical tradition, an exegete rather than a theologian. Obscurantism, which goes in some quarters by the name of fundamentalism, was his enemy; critical scholarship informed by living faith was his delight. He was an active and much sought after preacher.⁸⁷

Bruce grew up in dispensationalist Scottish Brethren circles, in which Bible study was a central organizing pursuit, evangelism the raison d’être of living and where the watchwords were ‘plain living and high thinking’.⁸⁸ With other well-placed brethren (such as W. J. Martin at Liverpool, Eric Sauer in Germany, or Anglican convert S. H. Hooke in England, Canada, and the USA) he would have a strong influence on concentrating post-war evangelicals on the Bible (rather than, as was the case with Martyn Lloyd-Jones, on systematic theology).⁸⁹ A graduate of Aberdeen (to which he could afford to go only by

⁸⁶ ⁸⁷ ⁸⁸ ⁸⁹

Gary Dorrien, The Remaking of Evangelical Theology (Louisville, 1998), p. 47. J. P. Kane, ‘Obituary: F. F. Bruce’, Palestine Exploration Quarterly 123.1 (January 1991), p. 3. Tim Grass, F. F. Bruce: A Life (Grand Rapids, 2011), pp. 6–9. Grass, F. F. Bruce: A Life, pp. 46–7.

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winning a bursary won first by William Robertson Smith)⁹⁰ and Cambridge, his original academic direction was in Classics. The Bible was deeply embedded in his identity, however, and the Reformed tradition with which he associated his own faith provided ready links with the linguistic and interpretative skills which Classics provided.⁹¹ Not only was he the son of an evangelist, but his wife was distantly related to the ‘Archbishop of Fundamentalism’, Henry Allen ‘Harry’ Ironside, pastor of Moody Memorial Church, Chicago. Bruce was not of that ilk: a ‘gentle, modest Christian humanist’,⁹² he would become a foundational contributor to the neo-evangelical biblical scholarship of the 1940s and 1950s, author of over 2,000 books and articles, mentor of the rising neo-evangelical theological cohort (such as J. I. Packer and I. Howard Marshall), a moving spirit behind Tyndale House, Cambridge, and a textual interpreter read and honoured all over the world. In part, that influence was a result of his own involvement, at both university and national level in the InterVarsity movement (vice president from 1943), to the increasingly global publication arm of which he was a significant contributor of biblical commentaries and studies. While his first commentary (begun on duty while serving as an air raid warden in 1939) would be on the Book of Acts (which he had essentially memorized as a child), his first monograph was a programmatic one for neo-evangelicals: Are the New Testament Documents Reliable? (1943).⁹³ It would sell hundreds of thousands of copies, and remain in print for over sixty years. Bruce was on the leading scholarly edge of a resurgent, open evangelicalism which expanded out of fortress fundamentalism, and sought to meet the impact of the human sciences on the biblical text with ‘better scholarship’.⁹⁴ When his Commentary on Acts was published in 1951, it was still ‘rare to find any book by evangelical scholars listed on a course bibliography in a mainline seminary or university’.⁹⁵ By the time he died in 1990, there were significant circles of evangelical bible scholars all over the world, many of whom (such as Leon Morris in Australia, and George Eldon Ladd in the USA) were also remarkably successful authors. His slightly younger Australian contemporary, Morris, the son of a Lithgow iron founder, ‘wrote more than 50 books of theology and biblical commentary’ which sold nearly two million copies.⁹⁶

⁹⁰ Grass, F. F. Bruce: A Life, p. 19. ⁹¹ J. Brashler, ‘From Erasmus to Calvin: Exploring the Roots of Reformed Hermeneutics’, Interpretation 63.2 (April 2009), p. 160. ⁹² J. I. Packer, quoted in Grass, F. F. Bruce: A Life, p. x. ⁹³ Grass, F. F. Bruce: A Life, p. 39. ⁹⁴ Grass, F. F. Bruce: A Life, p. 39. ⁹⁵ Ward Gasque, ‘The Legacy of F. F. Bruce’, Christianity Today 4.16 (November 1990), p. 19. ⁹⁶ Peter Adam and Paul Barker, ‘Theologian Left a Legacy of Faith and Biblical Text: Leon Morris, Theological Scholar 1914–2006’, The Age 15 August 2006, http://www.theage.com.au/ news/national/theologian-leaves-legacy-of-faith/2006/08/14/1155407739275.html?page=fullpage# contentSwap1, accessed 1/11/2017.

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These were the forerunners of publishing marvels such as ‘the theological Hootie of our age’, N. T. Wright.⁹⁷ The return to a historical approach to the text (prompted by E. P. Sanders ‘covenantal nomism’,⁹⁸ but developed by ‘new perspectivists’ such as Wright, James Dunn, Richard Bauckham and others) were, in a sense, implicit in Bruce’s own historiography. The institutions which Bruce and his generation built sustained generations of bible scholars, such as J. A. Thompson (Baptist, Australia), Graham Twelftree (Uniting Church, Australia), Ben Witherington III (Methodist, USA), Craig Blomberg (Baptist, USA), James Dunn (Presbyterian, Scotland and Durham), I. Howard Marshall (Methodist, Scotland), and many others beside. Their academic and even popular success, however, was not disconnected from Billy Graham’s biblical pragmatism: the students who flowed into and supported institutions such as Fuller Theological Seminary (Pasadena), Regent College (Vancouver), or Regent’s Park Baptist College (Oxford) were the result of the post-war evangelical resurgence which people such as Graham and Roberts helped foment. The people who bought N. T. Wright’s ‘gripping and fascinating . . . world of biblical history’ were non-, inter-, and transdenominational Christians of every stripe, linked together by the communications revolution which, in 1995, saw Graham address (by satellite) the largest evangelistic audience in human history. In a crystalline statement reflecting glocalization, Graham noted to the Los Angeles Times, ‘It’s not television. It’s as though I am coming to a place personally.’⁹⁹ Well into the 1970s, however, neo-evangelical readings of the Bible remained the minority position among dissenting scholars. While mainline denominations could maintain their institutional core, and universities were prepared to fund specialist biblical scholarship, the ‘new knowledge class’ could operate virtually without reference to the broad spectrum of American Christianity. Certainly, until the mid-1960s, student organizations such as the Student Christian Movement (fuelled by its imprint SCM Press) remained strong, graduating cohorts of those attached to modernist, Barthian, or (increasingly) Bultmannian/existential interpretations of the text.¹⁰⁰ The Bible, its academic

⁹⁷ A phrase coined by Fred Sanders because, just as the band Hootie and the Blowfish was omnipresent on popular media in the 1990s, N. T. Wright ‘is everywhere. Multiplatinum, hit singles, the whole package. . . . This is N. T. Wright’s world, and the rest of us are just livin’ in it’: Fred Sanders, ‘Getting Along with N. T. Wright Without Really Trying’, First Things 24 November 2010, http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/11/getting-alongwith-nt-wright-without-really-trying, accessed 23.3.2015. ⁹⁸ J. D. G. Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul (Grand Rapids, 2008), pp. 5ff. ⁹⁹ Associated Press, ‘Technology Will Give Billy Graham Crusade a Worldwide Audience’, Los Angeles Times 25 February 1995, http://articles.latimes.com/1995-02-25/local/me-35843_1_ billy-graham-crusade, accessed 23.3.2015. ¹⁰⁰ Steve Bruce, ‘The Student Christian Movement: A Nineteenth-Century Movement and Its Vicissitudes’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 2.1 (1982), p. 68.

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integrity, and its witness to ‘the truth of Jesus Christ and of his calling’,¹⁰¹ was studied devotionally, academically, and politically by interdenominational student groups in schools and universities all over the world. The Rediscovery of the Bible by Suzanne de Dietrich ‘encouraged students, in a phrase attributed to Barth, to study with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other’.¹⁰² F. F. Bruce’s Classical training also came from a period before the ‘literary turn’ became widespread, and before the (sometimes bitter) divisions between SCM and more biblicist InterVarsity groups through the late 1920s. With regard to the literary turn, though he responded to it, his stamp on Evangelical biblical scholarship was to reinforce the broader predilection for exegesis rather than hermeneutics.¹⁰³ The effect of the liberal/fundamentalist divisions, however, meant that it was no longer possible to (as Bruce did) hold membership and sometimes even office in organizations aligned, on the one hand, to liberal internationalism, and, on the other, to biblicist ‘conservatism’. The clashes between the two locked them into forms of scholarship which made both inflexible in the face of rapid cultural change. Even today, contemporary debates over text and inspiration between, for example, William Lane Craig (Talbot School of Theology) and former evangelical Bart Ehrman of UNC (Chapel Hill),¹⁰⁴ are not dissimilar to those addressed by Bruce in the 1950s. The influence of Bultmann—whose reputation was founded on his brilliance as a New Testament scholar, and to whom anglophone dissenting biblical scholars such as Vincent Taylor of Wesley College, Leeds, were responding in the 1930s, when Bultmann was still considered a sort of radical Barthian¹⁰⁵— gained significant traction in the 1950s, swinging the debate away from ‘higher’ to ‘form’ criticism, and questions of the mythological function of the biblical texts. For Bultmannians, Jesus ‘laid no claim to any supernatural status and did not seek to establish any direct connexion between his person and the eagerly awaited parousia’: his divinization and miraculous/oracular functions were later impositions by the oral tradition which connected the lived experience with the textualization in what came to be known as the Gospels.¹⁰⁶ ¹⁰¹ R. Boyd, ‘The Witness of the Student Christian Movement’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 31.1 (January 2007), p. 3. ¹⁰² Boyd, ‘The Witness of the Student Christian Movement’, p. 3. ¹⁰³ See, for example, Bruce’s Manson Memorial Lecture of 1981, ‘The Roman’s Debate – Continued’, in which he simply establishes his position on reliability and authorship, and proceeds to unpacking authorial intention without engaging the ‘problems’ bothering scholars more generally. ¹⁰⁴ Among their works, see W. L. Craig, The Historical Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus during the Deist Controversy (Toronto, 1985); and Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco, 2005). ¹⁰⁵ V. Taylor, ‘The Barthian School: IV. Rudolf Bultmann’, The Expository Times 43.10 (July 1932), pp. 485–90. ¹⁰⁶ D. E Nineham, ‘Theologians of our Time: XIX. Rudolf Bultmann’, The Expository Times 76.10 (1965), p. 800; see also R. D. Kysar, ‘A Comparison of the Exegetical Presuppositions and Methods of C. H. Dodd and Rudolf Bultmann in the Interpretation of the Prologue of the Fourth

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Interpreters, such as John Macquarrie (Presbyterian, Scotland; thence Episcopalian, USA), established the links between Bultmann and Heidegger, shifting the emphasis from text to existential context.¹⁰⁷ While Barth’s work was in reaction to the liberalization of biblical scholarship, Bultmann’s (‘the last of the theological giants who grew up in the universities of the Kaiser’s Germany’) was an attempt to ‘recover the highest tradition of German biblical scholarship after the interruption of the [first] war’.¹⁰⁸ Existential approaches seemed for a while to offer a new way of engaging the problems left over from the War, and the new consumer-oriented peace. Bultmann was soon taught in lecterns (at Trinity College, Glasgow, for example, by scholars such as Ian Henderson), and preached in pulpits. Murdo Ewen Macdonald, later Professor of Practical Theology at Glasgow, garnered an international reputation as one of Scotland’s greatest preachers, for his ability to interweave Bultmann with literature and meaty illustrations drawn from his wartime experience with the Cameron Highlanders, the First Parachute Brigade, and in German POW camps.¹⁰⁹ The importance of the global Presbyterian networks for the spread of this highly theoretical, intellectual and yet (in the context of the suffering of war and the threat of nuclear annihilation) strangely effective form of preaching and teaching is apparent from ‘Padre Mac’s’ vigorous international itinerary. Lecturing at Presbyterian Colleges in Canada and Presbyterian Churches in Australia led to invitations for lectures in Lutheran Colleges throughout the USA, and at universities such as Emory. Macdonald’s church, St George’s West, Edinburgh, attracted a large crowd of up to 400 students, many of whom went on to teach in universities and colleges around the world. This pattern was repeated in many less significant places, by pastor-scholars seeking to retain the pre-war ideal of an intelligent, humanist Christianity.

DISCONNECTION The Cold War and the Vietnam War, however, severely damaged the breezy confidence in the West with regard to collective security and international peace-making. By the late 1960s, the massification of higher education in the Gospel’, PhD thesis, Northwestern University, 1967 (microform, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International [1975?]. 1 microfilm reel; 35 mm). ¹⁰⁷ viz. John Macquarrie, An Existentialist Theology, A Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann (London, 1955). ¹⁰⁸ D. L. Edwards, ‘Rudolf Bultmann: Scholar of Faith’, Christian Century 1–8 (September 1976), p. 728. ¹⁰⁹ ‘Obituary: Murdo Ewen Macdonald’, The Scotsman 14 June 2004, https://www.scotsman. com/news/obituaries/murdo-ewen-macdonald-1-534955, accessed 22/3/2015; M. E. Macdonald, Padre Mac: The Autobiography of the Late Murdo Ewen Macdonald of Harris (Kershader, 2008).

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West and its capture (as an arm of economic policy and social engineering) by the welfare state¹¹⁰ was pushing all forms of biblical scholarship to the edges of the academy. In the short term, the humanities responded by absorbing materialist and literary ‘sciences’, but over the longer term biblical scholarship began to decline in the face of the rise of the technical/scientific professions.¹¹¹ In this setting, with the radicalization and politicization of student life, the liberal/internationalist streams of bible interpretation in higher education institutions began to decline. Civil rights in the USA, liberation theology emerging from Latin America and in the anglophone sphere in Africa and Asia, the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr, the ‘Prague Spring’, and the ‘May Revolution’ in France: it was a period of enormous turbulence, in which the Bible seemed to have far less relevance to students than, say, Marcuse. The SCM, for example, was captured by single issue politics, and ‘the movement’s traditional and essential links with Bible, theology, church, and mission were weakened’. In Steve Bruce’s words, its discursive, scholarly, undogmatic style meant that the liberal/Bultmannian stream was swamped by counter dogmatisms (Marxism, Death of God theology, etc.), and submitted to ‘this process of losing oneself in the secular world . . . ’.¹¹² The movement lost a great deal of support from the churches and went into a steep decline, and its characteristic radical, biblical, and ecumenical witness largely disappeared from the university, where it was so badly needed.¹¹³

SCM’s collapse was rapid, and matched almost precisely the onset of secularization described by Callum Brown in The Death of Christian Britain.¹¹⁴ The traditional connection between Churches and departments of religion, theology, or bible (at least outside the USA) also weakened. Through the 1970s, in Australia and New Zealand, the ‘new universities’ either established no formal link to theology or religious studies at all, or established ‘Studies of Religion’ programmes, where the interest was purely anthropological. The ironic result was the strengthening of neo-evangelical movements, which continued to flourish in their parallel world of bible and liberal arts colleges, with its associated ‘service industry’ of evangelical presses, media companies, television and radio stations, and even political lobbies. In all of these, the humanities were relatively weak, except where they served the biblical and theological core, and

¹¹⁰ R. Barcan, Academic Life and Labour in the New University: Hope and Other Choices (Farnham, 2013), p. 34. ¹¹¹ J. J. Williams, ‘The Post-Welfare State University’, American Literary History 18.1 (Spring 2006), pp. 190–216. ¹¹² Bruce, ‘The Student Christian Movement’, p. 78. ¹¹³ Boyd, ‘The Witness of the Student Christian Movement’, p. 6. ¹¹⁴ ‘Was there some perceptible change of a much wider and more profound nature in around 1963 which triggered the downward march of all statistical and related evidence of popular religiosity?’: C. G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London, 2000), p. 7.

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the sciences were taught largely as either an extension of apologetics or as a neutral space towards professional outcomes. In the most secularized systems (Australia, for example), there was virtually no connection between biblical scholarship and the main interests of universities. (The Anglican Moore Theological College, for instance, could produce internationally known biblical scholars such as Bill Dumbrell or Paul Barnett, but have virtually no connection with the University of Sydney which sat immediately across the road from its premises on Carillon Avenue, Newtown.) Former biblical powerhouses in Canada—McGill University for example, or the collegiate universities embraced by the University of Toronto—refocused their activities. The Bible did remain a key focus of interest in the USA, in Scotland, and in the ancient universities of Britain and Ireland. On the one hand, this reinforced the dominance of the northern hemisphere, a development which shaped the evolution of alternative modes of biblical interpretation in the Majority World. Students in all dissenting traditions trekked to ‘the global North’ to take higher degrees, returning home with their credentials and transferred authority. On the other hand, when these centres sneezed, the rest of the anglophone biblical world caught a cold. The fact that, in the USA, the shortest way to public intellectual status was to appeal to the secular and knowledge class elites by bearding the evangelicals in their respective dens was indicative of a breakdown of intellectual discourse in the West. In a society where media attention was power, the Bible became a means of accessing power (as Vance notes with regard to the Death of God theology of the 1960s, both ‘risking’ and ‘enjoying’ notoriety)¹¹⁵ in the culture wars which afflicted post-1960s America. Accordingly, books on Jesus and the Bible regularly continued to float to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, evidence of the continuing turmoil beneath.¹¹⁶

(RE)EMBODYING THE BIBLE The consumer, youth, and civil rights revolutions in the West were associated with a personalization of biblical reception. Indeed, many scholars sought alternative methods of biblical ‘embodiment’, stripping the text of its transcendental, male, white, Christian and imperialist orientations, and reorienting analyses around narratives which were black, female, and postcolonial. The Holocaust impelled many to seek at a more popular level for the sort of ¹¹⁵ Norman Vance, Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God (New York, 2013), p. 15. ¹¹⁶ In recent years, for example, Reza Aslan’s Zealot (New York, 2013); Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s Killing Jesus (New York, 2013). In addition, biblical debate has been spurred by the seeming media omnipresence of the neo-atheists, Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and their ilk.

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Christian–Jewish relationships which had, in previous years, been common among scholars seeking to command Hebrew and the related rabbinic literature. On the scholarly side, thinkers such as Isidore Epstein (London), Raphael Loewe (Leeds),¹¹⁷ and Jacob Neusner (Princeton and Bard College) contributed enormously to the reading of biblical texts. Direct witnesses to the Holocaust, such as Henri Tajfel,¹¹⁸ Elie Wiesel, and Viktor Frankl, provided the experiential (and in Frankl’s case, the psychological) connection between Bultmannian existentialism and the reading of the text in the 1960s and 1970s. In the meeting between the charismatic and Youth Revivals of the 1960s, on the one hand, and emerging Messianic Jewish communities on the other, practice met a radical rereading of the first century Church in the context of counter-modernist communitarian America.¹¹⁹ Primitivist sentiments were not foreign to young people brought up in American Christian homes, but the cultures of their traditional ecclesial structures increasingly were. Some formed their own interdenominational communities or refashioned models from the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century,¹²⁰ some formed new types of bible-based Church, and others identified with ethnically and proselyte Jewish communities. The desire to live a life more biblically aligned was, in short, a form of dissent from what, in the United States, had become an unsatisfactory choice between ‘establishment’ evangelicalism or tired liberalism.¹²¹ The fusion of Graham’s and Roberts’ biblical pragmatism also found shape in another form of embodiment: the charismatic movement in the mainline Churches. While too large a movement to exhaustively detail here, this was both strongly biblicizing and at the same time very much about the application of the Bible as a form of spiritual technology for daily life. Early charismatic theologian, Tom Smail, for example, drew on bible, theology, and spiritual experience to frame new approaches to Trinitarian theology.¹²² For evangelicals, the charismatic movement moved the Bible back into daily use; for liberals, it made it a living thing again (albeit sending some, such as Marcus ¹¹⁷ ‘[Obituary]: Professor Raphael Loewe: Hebrew scholar who was much admired for the breadth and depth of his erudition, especially in the rich heritage of the Spanish Jews’, The Times 9 June 2011, p. 51. ¹¹⁸ Coleman A. Baker, ‘Social Identity Theory and Biblical Interpretation’, Biblical Theology Bulletin 42.3 (August 2012), p. 130. ¹¹⁹ For which, see Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Messianic Judaism (New York, 2000). ¹²⁰ See B. D. Zablocki, The Joyful Community: An Account of the Bruderhof, a Communal Movement Now in its Third Generation (Baltimore, 1971); ‘An Experiment in Unity’, Christianity Today 34.5 (19 March 1990), p. 60; Jim McKnight, Australian Christian Communes (Cobbitty, 1990). ¹²¹ Hillary Kaell, ‘Born-Again Seeking: Explaining the Gentile Majority in Messianic Judaism’, Religion 45.1 (January 2015), p. 43; Larry Eskridge, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (New York, 2013), pp. 263ff. ¹²² Fred Sanders, ‘Tom Smail (1928–2012): “The Spirit is Given from the Cross” ’, http://www. patheos.com/blogs/scriptorium/2012/02/tom-smail-1928-2012-the-spirit-is-given-from-the-cross/ #ixzz3VOOm0oGY, accessed 25/3/2015.

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Borg, off in interesting shamanic directions).¹²³ For liturgical traditions, oral histories of participants point to the Bible coming ‘alive’ through the Spirit: their evangelical colleagues continued to struggle with their practices, but often found unexpected interdenominational fellowship with these fellow charismatics. And of course, they could find good biblical reasons for feeling this way,¹²⁴ resulting in a flood of literature both popular and scholarly. The rise of related theological institutions (from Ralph Wilkerson’s Melodyland School of Theology to Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, and Regent University at Virginia Beach) both trained and attracted a related biblical scholarship. Not only do charismatic/pentecostal scholars now contribute to older institutions (such as Amos Yong at Fuller or Craig S. Keener at Asbury Theological Seminary) but there has been a professionalization of biblical scholarship at specifically pentecostal and charismatic institutions which has defended both the reliability of the text, and its supernatural content. Keener’s Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (2011) or Graham Twelftree’s Jesus the Exorcist: A Contribution to the Study of the Historical Jesus (2010) represent not only sophisticated contemporary scholarship, but a significant backflip on issues which most biblical scholars in the first part of the twentieth century would have considered ‘academic’ matters rather than issues of faith. Pentecostalism as a form of global dissent, not against the state but against ‘the world as it is made out to be’, had finally found its voice. By mid-century, the campaign of early century liberal dissenters against what they saw as an irrelevant, arid orthodox transcendentalism was caught in its own discourse of crisis. A journal of that name (Christianity and Crisis) founded by Niebuhr in 1941 to encourage American involvement in the Second World War ‘reflected the shifts in American liberalism since the 1960s’.¹²⁵ (Like its constituency, it was itself in a material crisis by the 1980s, and ceased publication in 1993.) Apart from being a logical extension of existentialist approaches to the text, the ‘Death of God’ theology was a sociological reframing of Christianity towards what was seen as the contemporary malaise of the West. In the face of declining social embodiment (variously conceptualized as the death of Christendom), at its extremes such thought moved towards the sort of ‘Christian atheism’ developed by Lloyd Geering (Presbyterian, New Zealand), who championed Cupitt’s Sea of Faith approach

¹²³ Donald G. Bloesch, Jesus Christ: Savior & Lord (Downers Grove, 2005), p. 16; David S. du Toit, ‘Redefining Jesus: Current Trends in Jesus Research’, in Andreas Schmidt, ed., Jesus, Mark and Q. (Sheffield, 2001), pp. 83–4. ¹²⁴ Ross Peart, ‘That they all may be one (Meaning and Purpose of the Charismatic Movement)’, Vision Magazine, no. 17 (September–October 1976), p. 12. ¹²⁵ Peter Steinfels, ‘Influential Christian Journal Prints Last Issue’, New York Times 4 April 1993, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/04/us/influential-christian-journal-prints-last-issue.html, accessed 23/3/2015.

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in Australia and New Zealand.¹²⁶ Modernizers sought to get outside the walls of their studies, to retake ground as viable contributors to public debate. After a distinguished academic career, Butler University graduate Bob Funk (Disciples) developed one of the best known of such efforts by founding in California (on his retirement from the University of Montana) an independent ‘Westar Institute’. From 1985, the Institute’s ‘Jesus Seminar’ sought to ‘communicate biblical scholarship with the public rather than expecting some kind of trickle-down effect through journals or churches’.¹²⁷ It was nominally democratic (voting on what could be considered the actual ‘words of Jesus’¹²⁸ in the New Testament by means of coloured balls), and addressed to the media (the Seminar included film-makers and others who were not biblical scholars). ‘We are in quest of his voice, insofar as it can be distinguished from many other voices also preserved in the tradition.’¹²⁹ Starting with the presumption that Christianity’s message had ceased to be plausible, Funk noted: What we need is a new fiction that takes as its starting point the central event in the Judeo-Christian drama and reconciles that middle with a new story that reaches beyond old beginnings and endings. In sum, we need a new narrative of Jesus, a new gospel, if you will, that places Jesus differently in the grand scheme, the epic story.¹³⁰

The Seminar’s opponents did not accept its premise about itself: it was not a neutral, scholarly pursuit, but a last gasp of old liberal ideologues seeking to break out of the isolation imposed upon them by the decline of mainstream denominations and of history as a dominant discourse, by secularization and the arcane vocabulary and techniques of the previous ‘historical quests’ for Jesus. For his part at the other end of the world, Geering’s thought sought a different embodiment: in panentheist and even pantheist ecological visions. As Moser notes, ‘He proposes a way of reclaiming Christianity’s relevance by ceasing to be a supernatural faith’, following a naturalistic history of religion

¹²⁶ On theological non-realism and the Sea of Faith movement, see Don Cupitt, Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays (New York, 2002). ¹²⁷ Karen L. King, quoted in L. Goodstein, ‘R. W. Funk, 79, Creator of Jesus Seminar, Dies’, New York Times 10 September 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/national/10funk.html, accessed 25/03/2015. ¹²⁸ viz. R. W. Funk, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York, 1993), and The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus (San Francisco, 1998). ¹²⁹ R. W. Funk, ‘Jesus Seminar Opening Remarks’, the opening remarks of Jesus Seminar founder Robert W. Funk, presented at the first meeting in Berkeley, California, 21–4 March 1985, https://www.westarinstitute.org/projects/jesus-seminar-opening-remarks, accessed 1/11/ 2017. ¹³⁰ Mark D. Roberts, ‘Unmasking the Jesus Seminar: A Critique of Its Methods and Conclusions’, on Patheos, 2005, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markdroberts/series/unmasking-thejesus-seminar/#ixzz3V00zCaNd, accessed 1/11/2017).

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towards a ‘“secular,” a “this-worldly” faith’¹³¹ which shifted the category of God from realism to non-realism.¹³² At the same time, the search for ecological motifs in the Bible, a reframing of God as ‘present’ in continuous creation became (in the decades after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, 1962) an increasingly common mode of generalizing the concerns of the text beyond the walls of the Church, or indeed of Western societies. The difference between HarperOne’s Green Bible (printed with soy-based inks on recycled paper, and highlighting ‘the more than 1,000 references to God’s love for and the human obligation to care for the environment’)¹³³ and Tony Campolo’s ‘Red Letter’ Christians (building on the printing innovation of Louis Klopsch in 1901, which reinforced the shift from Pauline interpretations to the words of Jesus among biblical primitivists)¹³⁴ is more than colour or mere Christian kitsch. Both are attempts to identify the core of biblical teaching, and both are responding to contemporary ideologies. The one follows an existentialist approach to identifying the kerygma of common humanity (refocusing along the way on the variant readings of the Gospel by Christian mystics, such as Francis of Assisi or Meister Eckhart). The ‘red letter’ Christians focus on what opponents (and even some Protestants) have called ‘the bibliolatry’ of the text, so reframing a Christian practice detached from sociologized and reductivist definitions of ‘religion’ by returning to the nineteenth-century concept of ‘disciples of Jesus’ or even the pre-Constantinian ‘followers of the Way’. While responding to similar challenges of secularization and techologization to what it means to be human (and even quietly swapping technique), the divisions over how the old culture warriors arrived at their conclusions remained at issue. Geering’s latter work was considered by one reviewer to have descended not into ‘a thoughtful book on the “greening of Christianity,” but rather a “greentinted” rant against anything that he deems too “heavenly minded,” even Christ himself ’.¹³⁵ For their part, those afloat on the Sea of Faith felt that those who had remained on the Rock had failed (through either lack of education or of intelligence) to understand Bultmann’s warning that It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed

¹³¹ M. Moser, ‘Coming Back to Earth: From Gods, to God, to Gaia – By Lloyd Geering’. Religious Studies Review 36.4 (December 2010), p. 276. ¹³² K. M. Kwan, ‘Lloyd Geering: A Liberal Theologian Turned Secular Humanist’, Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice 16.1 (February 2008), p. 4. ¹³³ Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan, ‘Green Bible emphasizes ecology’, McClatchy—Tribune Business News 6 December 2008, http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy2.library.usyd.edu.au/ docview/456646646/abstract/2F0C8C6397EF4C74PQ/1?accountid=14757, accessed 25/3/2015. ¹³⁴ Tony Campolo, ‘What’s a “Red-Letter Christian”?’ BeliefNet http://www.beliefnet.com/ Faiths/Christianity/2006/02/Whats-A-Red-Letter-Christian.aspx, accessed 25/3/2015; Pepper, The Life-Work of Louis Klopsch, pp. 324–5. ¹³⁵ Moser, ‘Coming Back to Earth’, 276.

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by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work.¹³⁶

To save Grace, modernizers mythologized and eventually lost view of the text; to save the Text, primitivizers re-mythologized their present. The process of recontextualizing the Bible by reattaching it to specific ‘bodies’ was particularly notable in the ‘anthropological turn’, and in the application of ‘feminist’ and ‘black’ perspectives. The interest of anthropologically trained interpreters in the Bible has more recently been applied to Christian communities (as ‘reading communities’), after the belated realization among many social scientists (most famously Harvey Cox) that Christianity wasn’t going away in the West.¹³⁷ Its influence as a mode of interpreting the text of the Bible is much older: in rabbinic sources, it is very early, and in Western sources it emerges with considerations of ‘theological anthropology’— the nature of man from a biblical perspective. ‘Scientific’ anthropology emerged in the 1830s from an alignment of interests between evangelical social activists (in the Ethnological Society of London), racial theorists, and genuine scientists struggling over the implications of Darwinian theory, and was hammered out through the monogenesis/polygenesis debate.¹³⁸ Among twentieth-century dissenters, secularized philosophical anthropology (such as that produced by George Herbert Mead, a Congregationalist Oberlin undergraduate whose Jamesian and American pragmatist influences contributed to the development of symbolic interactionism and behaviourism) began to impact biblical interpretation in the 1920s. The ‘coming man in Methodism in Chicago’, Harry F. Ward, and ‘John Dewey’s counterpart among Protestant educators’, George Albert Coe, were typical of a wider trend on the radicalizing Protestant left, tying biblical teaching to social activism.¹³⁹ Until the 1930s, however, the concerns of cross-cultural missionaries and biblical theologians (such as the many disciples of Karl Barth, or David Stacey) were dominant,¹⁴⁰ though

¹³⁶ R. Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, ed. Schubert M. Ogden (Philadelphia, 1984), p. 3. ¹³⁷ H. Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Reading, 1995), pp. 47–8. ¹³⁸ Timothy Larsen, ‘The Book of Acts and the Origin of the Races in Evangelical Thought’, Victorian Review 37.2 (Fall 2011), p. 37. ¹³⁹ Doug Rossinow, ‘The Radicalization of the Social Gospel: Harry F. Ward and the Search for a New Social Order, 1898–1936’, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 15.1 (Winter 2005), pp. 66, 68–9. ¹⁴⁰ This theme did not decline—e.g. the writings of Russell Shedd, the Bolivian born, Wheaton- and Edinburgh-trained Baptist missionary, whose Man in Community: A Study of St. Paul’s Application of Old Testament and Early Jewish Conceptions of Human Solidarity (1964) reflected the trickle of anthropological thought into even conservative Christian circles. The Summer School of Linguistics also developed articulated anthropological approaches to language learning.

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there is evidence of antiquarianist interests in human social origins in the dissenting preaching tradition back into the nineteenth century. From that time, the anthropological work of interdisciplinary translators and comparative religionists begins to appear in the footnotes of mainstream biblical commentary. (Many of these were from the Anglo-Catholic tradition, such as AngloCatholic priest¹⁴¹ and founding Professor of the History of Religion at Leeds, E. O. James, and Samuel Henry Hooke, who was confirmed by Bishop Gore in Oxford out of an exclusive Brethren background.¹⁴²) From the 1960s, however, sociological and anthropological approaches to biblical texts expanded rapidly (more so, it appears from Library of Congress records, than, for instance, the post-Freudian psycho-interpretative approaches of authors such as Robin Scroggs¹⁴³). As with (and indeed originally in association with) the Jesus Seminar, these trends found various formal manifestations, such as the Social Facets/Context Group (founded 1986). By the 1970s, as concerns over the technologization of human society brought dehumanization and concepts of the post-human to the fore,¹⁴⁴ anthropological themes bridging both theological and technical anthropology could be seen emerging even in evangelical literature. Again, discussion (also taken up by Pope John Paul II in his ‘The Original Unity of Man and Woman’, 1979)¹⁴⁵ rotated around the biblical understanding(s) of the embodied human. Importantly, the work of Robert H. Gundry (a Baptist student of F. F. Bruce, whose Sōma in Biblical Theology appeared in 1976) focused on historical/anthropological analyses of the Hellenistic and Judaic worlds to inform an exegetical critique of Bultmann’s position on the ‘spiritual body’. For latter-day evangelicals as for their forebears, the physicality of Christ’s resurrection (and so that of believers) remained ‘central to [Paul’s] soteriology’.¹⁴⁶

¹⁴¹ Henry Vacher Burch was another of like churchmanship: his Anthropology and the Apocalypse, an Interpretation of ‘The Book of the Revelation’ in Relation to the Archaeology, Folklore, and Religious Literature and Ritual of the Near East, appeared in 1939. ¹⁴² F. F. Bruce, ‘Samuel Henry Hooke (1874–1968)’, The Witness 98.1167 (March 1968), pp. 101, 107. ¹⁴³ viz. P. Robin Scroggs, ‘The Heuristic Value of a Psychoanalytic Model in the Interpretation of Pauline Theology’, Zygon 13.2, 136–57; and The Last Adam: A Study in Pauline Anthropology (London: 1966); and Morris A. Inch, Psychology in the Psalms; A Portrait of Man in God’s World (Waco, 1969). ¹⁴⁴ Sharon V. Betcher, ‘Becoming Flesh of My Flesh: Feminist and Disability Theologies on the Edge of Posthumanist’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2 (Fall 2010), pp. 107–18. ¹⁴⁵ L’Osservatore Romano (weekly edition in English), 12 November 1979, p. 19. ¹⁴⁶ James D. G. Dunn, ‘Review: Gundry, Sōma in Biblical Theology with Emphasis on Pauline Anthropology, Scottish Journal of Theology 31.3 (June 1978), p. 290. Ironically, these contextualizing approaches also later saw Gundry ‘ousted from the Evangelical Theological Society, the closest thing [American] evangelicals have that resembles a magisterium’: Adam Omelianchuk, ‘The Curious Case of Robert Gundry’, First Things blog, 14 September 2011, http://www. firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/09/the-curious-case-of-robert-gundry, accessed 26/3/2015. For a more recent argument in this line, see Stephen T. Davis, ‘Was Jesus Mad, Bad, or God?’ in

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The daughters and sons of Elizabeth Cady Stanton drew deeply on these developments as mass education, sexual liberation in the 1960s, and (through the 1970s) affirmative action brought increasing numbers of women into academic teaching and research positions. For some women in conservative traditions, this appeared to be a real opportunity for creating an alternative space for biblical interpretation. The first wave had been headed in the 1920s by pioneers such as Mary Ely Lyman (Congregationalist, Mt Holyoke, Cambridge, and Union Theological Seminary), who sought to bring higher criticism and ‘the writings of the bible into direct relation to the life being lived today’.¹⁴⁷ The post-massification group agenda was set by scholars such as form critic Phyllis Trible (Meredith College, Wake Forrest, Andover, Union Theological Seminary), whose 1972 essay ‘Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation’, pointed to a programmatic reinterpretation of the Scriptures.¹⁴⁸ ‘Hebrew Scriptures and Women’s Liberation do meet . . . ’, she noted, ‘and their encounter need not be hostile’.¹⁴⁹ The approach expanded to become, in some senses, a literary industry linked to a broader social politics. But only for some, and in some places. As Sakenfeld notes, the influx of women scholars was at precisely the time that the post-war growth of universities reached its peak, and the long-running secularization debate was being institutionally resolved in those universities through the marginalization of confessional religion. ‘Studies of Religion’ departments blossomed for a while, and then began (outside the USA) to shrink. In Sakenfeld’s colourful metaphorical appropriation of Numbers 27: those engaged in feminist biblical study have left the security of a known world of scholarship with its recognizable debates and rules, and find themselves in an environment where there is far less certainty or ordinary source of sustenance. Second, ‘wilderness’ symbolizes a context of living in continuing hope for ‘land,’ a hope not just for space but for place within the scholarly community and within the church, a hope not yet fully realized. And third, ‘wilderness’ represents also for feminists a place of dissension and dispute along the journey, even as it did for Israel of old.¹⁵⁰

These new generation biblical interpreters found themselves ‘in the wilderness, awaiting the land’, embodying a text which was steadily being institutionally dispossessed. Over the longer term, feminist biblical interpreters could S. T. Davis, D. Kendall, and G. O’Collins, eds., The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God (Oxford, 2002). ¹⁴⁷ C. W. Atkinson, ‘Lyman, Mary Ely’, in B. Sicherman and C. Hurd Green, et al., eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge, 1980), p. 436. ¹⁴⁸ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 41 (1973), pp. 30–48. ¹⁴⁹ Quoted in Ann Loades, Karen Armstrong, et al., eds., Feminist Theology: A Reader (London and Louisville, 1990), pp. 21–2. ¹⁵⁰ Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, ‘Feminist Biblical Interpretation’, Theology Today 46.2 (July 1989), p. 154.

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rebrand themselves in order to find work in Women’s Studies units, straight anthropology, and related programmes. (Publishing opportunities, oddly enough, did not vary in the same way as employability.) Their real success, moreover, has been in connecting their disciplinary approaches in the growing evangelical and pentecostal scholarly world.¹⁵¹ Contemporary scholars such as Cheryl Johns, Jacqueline Grey, and Pamela Holmes, among others, have carried the concerns of the Old Dissent into the New Dissent of global pentecostalism. These developments—in rhetorical-critical methodology, the use of narrative and embodied approaches, the incorporation of social scientific and literary methods—also had a catalytic effect on the emergence of other, embodied approaches (such as ‘black’, ‘Asian’, and ‘disability’ streams). Scholars such as Susan Niditch, for example, combining the study of classical Jewish texts and context with that of folklore, popular religion, women, and the body, have provided inspiration to the ‘other’ Anglosphere, the vast body of Majority World Christians who (in parts of Africa and Asia) speak English as a first language. In Africa, this has taken shape in a variety of forms, ranging from charismatic pneumatology to the neo-Marxist materialist thought of biblical interpreters such as Itumeleng Mosala. Liberationist interpretations emerged out of Latin America, and have found a wide reading in the West. In evangelical circles, as Andrew Walls has pointed out, the mass availability of the Bible has resulted in differential readings in cultures which, in many cases, have more in common with the biblical context than abstracted Western scholarship. As Chan notes, ‘hierarchies’ of Church and family patterns in Asian cultures ‘fit the world described by the Bible rather better than a strong emphasis on gender equality’.¹⁵² There are thus independent and dissenting English-medium Churches in Nigeria, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, among others, for whom biblical text is read and preached primarily in English in ways which interact strongly with local cultural forms. Regional associations for biblical studies also mediate global discussions into contextualized scholarly debates: the Nigerian Association for Biblical Studies, for example, is based at Ibadan University, and produces both a journal (The African Journal of Biblical Studies) and a collected papers series addressing such themes as Biblical Studies

¹⁵¹ viz. Jeff Hittenberger, ‘Receiving God’s Gift of a Person with Special Needs: Amos Yong’s Theology of Disability’, in Wolfgang Vondey and Martin William Mittelstadt, eds., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies (Leiden and Boston, 2013), pp. 148ff.; Michael Wilkinson and Steven M. Studebaker, eds., A Liberating Spirit: Pentecostals and Social Action in North America (Eugene, 2010), pp. 132ff.; Jacqueline N. Grey, Three’s a Crowd: Pentecostalism, Hermeneutics, and the Old Testament (Eugene, 2011). ¹⁵² R. Mouw, ‘How Theologians Have Failed Asian Christians—and How They Can Do Better’, Christianity Today 25 August 2014, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/augustweb-only/how-theologians-have-failed-asian-christians-and-how-they-c.html, accessed 26/3/2015; A. F. Walls, ‘Introduction’ in The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, 1996).

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and Women Issues in Africa and Christology in African Context (sic).¹⁵³ A powerful liberal theological tradition also remains alive in those Churches which arose out of the missionary comity arrangements in South Korea. Yonsei University, the nation’s peak private university, for example, retains a strong academic biblical teaching programme, requires undergraduates to take three credit hours of ‘Understanding Christianity’ coursework, and has vibrant links with theological institutions in Germany and (in the tradition of Old Testament scholar Ik-Whan Moon, and Chang Sang at the nearby Ewha Women’s University) the USA.¹⁵⁴ The Bible, even in English, is not just the property of the West. Nor is it simply the property of the Churches, universities or theological institutes. The year 2011 saw the 400th anniversary of the King James’ Version, and a celebration of the contribution that version had made to the English language. It was the most printed book in the English language, and had seeped into the daily expressions and life of the entire Anglosphere.¹⁵⁵ Some of the uses to which it is put are specifically religious. Corporatization of bible printing, however, has resulted from commercial pressures common to the publishing industry around the world: a declining reading age, shifting leisure preferences, the ‘rise of the image’ and technology, and hyper-individualism. The biblereading community itself has also diversified: though some church traditions are declining, post-evangelical movements appropriate the text in different ways, and student-based ‘bible study’ groups continue to grow. In Davis Bunn’s words, ‘they are demanding a solid foundation in Biblical awareness, one that goes far deeper than anything I have ever seen before. One of the fastest growing such outreaches is the Bible Study Fellowship, or BSF.’¹⁵⁶ All of these have made the Bible a particularly attractive target for sales-sensitive marketers, who have taken the text and repackaged it into a myriad, niche-oriented forms: Some are in-depth reference works geared toward Bible study and some of those, such as ‘The Woman’s Study Bible’ and ‘The African American Heritage Study

¹⁵³ S. O. Abogunrin, J. O. Akao, and D. O. Akintunde, eds. (Lagos, 2003). ¹⁵⁴ See Don Kirk, ‘Sign of Change in South Korea: A Woman as Prime Minister’, New York Times, 12 July 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/12/world/sign-of-change-in-southkorea-a-woman-as-prime-minister.html, accessed 5/4/2018; Robert Benedetto and Donald K. McKim, Historical Dictionary of the Reformed Churches (Lanham, 1999), p. 312; ‘New Program Expands International Exchange and Cooperation’, http://www.ptsem.edu/news/ memorandum-of-agreement-with-yonsei-university, accessed 5/4/2018; ‘Chang Sang’, The International Who’s Who 2004 (Hove and New York, 2004), p. 299. ¹⁵⁵ See Adam Nicolson, ‘The King James Bible’, National Geographic Magazine (December 2011), http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/12/king-james-bible/nicolson-text, accessed 1/11/2017. ¹⁵⁶ Davis Bunn, ‘Evangelical and Post-Evangelical Christianity’, European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe 38.1 (April 2005), p. 10.

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Bible’ focus on the cultural experiences of specific readers. Some have titles other than ‘The Bible,’ such as ‘The Message’ and ‘The Promise.’¹⁵⁷

The explosion of ‘app’-driven bible reading on tablets and smartphones (such as the free YouVersion app, now downloaded over 290 million times, across 1,500 versions in 1,100 languages) and the decline of printed versions is a revolution the effects of which can only be guessed.¹⁵⁸ The impact of such developments on common readings within congregational settings can also only be surmised, and may be a contributor to the decline of the Bible in ritualistic settings (e.g. sermons) and a rising preference for the tele-enabled charismatic preacher. The purchase of Zondervan, with its extensive bible portfolio (including the North American print rights to the New International Version), by the Murdoch media empire raised many eyebrows (one author noting that investment ‘diversity . . . in his case ranged from a cleavage-saturated tabloid . . . to a publisher that offers Little Lamb’s Storybook Bible’).¹⁵⁹ It was a canny investment—a consistent profit-maker in troubled times for the publishing industry—but also one which raised ethical and reputation issues for the Bible as a cultural commodity. Much as Murdoch (the grandson of a Presbyterian minister) had done in establishing a contrarian/nationalist Americanophile network such as Fox News, there was money to be made by tacking against a broad secularizing ideological opposition to the Bible in the public sphere. (The latter-day pressure of Swedish or Canadian ‘hate speech’ legislation on elements of the biblical text were of a piece with moves to ban circumcision, and the 1963 Supreme Court ban on the ‘religious use’ of the Bible in US schools.¹⁶⁰) In part, its continued attractiveness as a source of archetypal stories was witness to the decline of art, to the homogenization of everything. In Josipovici’s words: [Today] art is impossible because the artist lacks authority, and to pretend otherwise, to go on as though nothing had happened, is a betrayal not only of artistic but of human values . . . [E]very major work of modern art has sprung Phoenix-like from such ashes . . . each true work wrenched from such circumstances will seem a miracle.¹⁶¹

¹⁵⁷ Judith Patton, ‘These Interpretations have Biblical Proportions’, The Patriot 11 November 1995, p. 1. ¹⁵⁸ Ferris Jabr, ‘The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens’, Scientific American 11 April 2013, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paperscreens/, accessed 1/11/2017. ¹⁵⁹ Will Braun, ‘Rupert Murdoch: Bible Mogul’, Geez Magazine 14 July 2011, http://www. geezmagazine.org/blogs/entry/rupert-murdochs-big-bible-business/, accessed 27/3/2015. ¹⁶⁰ Norton, A History of the English Bible as Literature, p. 367. See Roni Cohen, ‘Regulating Hate Speech: Nothing Customary About It’, Chicago Journal of International Law 15.1 (Summer 2014), pp. 229–55. ¹⁶¹ Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (New Haven and London, 1988), ix.

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Well into the twenty-first century, the Bible continues to prove grist for the commercial mills of American popular culture, as the steady stream of (sometimes wildly inaccurate) Hollywood blockbusters indicates, from Evan Almighty (2007) through Ari Handel’s Noah (2014), and Ridley Scott’s (rather anachronistic) Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014). It also continues to play a seminal role in prompting Western narratives, as can be seen in films such as Hacksaw Ridge (2017). On the one hand, this is testimony to the continuing influence of the Bible in the archetypical Nonconformist culture. On the other, it is clear that the culture has appropriated the text for its own purposes.

CONCLUSIO N On 21 January 2009, reformed evangelical apologist James White and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill academic Bart Ehrman met in an Internet-streamed debate over ‘Did the Bible Misquote Jesus?’ It was not a particularly significant event: apart from its concurrence with the upsurge of evangelistic neo-atheism, it was one of dozens of similar events which were occurring all over the anglophone world. On paper, it also appeared to be a remarkably unbalanced affair: Ehrman had built a significant name as a public intellectual, while White’s academic credentials were hardly in the same league. Both came from dissenting backgrounds, and agreed to the fact that intelligent people on both sides of the same text could come to different opinions. From a non-American point of view, the fact that the event took place at the Fort Lauderdale Sheraton Airport Hotel might well have seemed significant. Debate over the Bible was now a mobile, mediated thing which, in America at least, could readily draw a crowd and also speak to already consolidated communities of opinion. What strikes the viewer is how often both speakers kept falling back upon the authority of their scholarship. ‘Let me speak frankly,’ stated Erhman to an audience he had already acknowledged to be mainly evangelical: ‘I don’t know how much [of the discussion] will sink in to those who are not in the field’; and appealing to their own individual rights of conscience, ‘I do want to make a plea . . . I do hope that through our presentations, people will open their minds to other possibilities to the one that they are naturally inclined to accept.’¹⁶² Neither speaker really expected to convince the other of their position, consolidated as each was in their own constitutive narrative. The assumption was that evangelical and secular academic communities lived in different spaces, and that somehow the radical latter (despite its vast institutional and publicly funded presence in the USA) ¹⁶² YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moHInA9fAsI, accessed 31/3/2015).

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was the reforming ‘minority’ to the evangelical ‘majority’. While this was surely a myth as grand as any promoted by Bultmann, it was an admission from both sides that scholarship alone was no longer able to claim any neutral or superior suasion over individual opinion. Herewith the victory of anglophone Dissent, albeit transformed into a matter of liberty of conscience maintained on each side by ‘constant vigilance’ and at vast expense. Remarkably, at the core of modern culture wars there remained, after a century and a half of vigorous secularization, a debate about the nature of the Bible.

S E L E C T B I BL IO G R A P H Y Anderson, Allan H., To the Ends of the Earth: Pentecostalism and the Transformation of World Christianity (Oxford, 2011). Anderson, Emily, Christianity and Imperialism in Modern Japan (London, 2014). Bebbington, David W., Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989). Betcher, Sharon V., ‘Becoming Flesh of My Flesh: Feminist and Disability Theologies on the Edge of Posthumanist Discourse’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26.2 (Fall 2010), pp. 107–18. Brett, Judith, The Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard (Cambridge, 2003). Breward, Ian, A History of the Churches in Australasia (Melbourne and Oxford, 2001). Chant, Barry, The Spirit of Pentecost: The Origins and Development of the Pentecostal Movement in Australia, 1870–1939 (Lexington, 2011). Cox, Harvey, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Reading, 1995). Crerar, Duff, Padres in No Man’s Land: Canadian Chaplains and the Great War (Montreal and Buffalo, 2014). Davis, T. W., Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology (New York, 2004). Eskridge, Larry, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (New York, 2013). Finstuen, Andrew S., Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety (Chapel Hill, 2009). Grass, Tim, F. F. Bruce: A Life (Grand Rapids, 2011). Harrell, Jr, David E., Oral Roberts: An American Life (Bloomington, 1975). Kern, Kathi, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Woman’s Bible (Ithaca, 2001). Loades, Ann, Karen Armstrong, et al., eds., Feminist Theology: A Reader (London and Louisville, 1990). McLeod, Hugh, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007). Marsden, George M., The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York, 1996). Norton, David, A History of the English Bible as Literature (Cambridge, 2000).

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Ruotsila, Markku, The Origins of Christian Anti-Internationalism: Conservative Evangelicals and the League of Nations (Washington, 2007). Smith, A., ‘The mists which shroud these questions’: Mabel St Clair Stobart, the First World War and Faith’, Literature & History 20.2 (2011), pp. 1–15. Vance, Norman, Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God (New York, 2013). Wacker, Grant, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, 2014). Wilkinson, Michael and Steven M. Studebaker, eds., A Liberating Spirit: Pentecostals and Social Action in North America (Eugene, 2010).

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4 Biblical Interpretation in the Majority World K. K. Yeo

CHANGING WORLD, RENEWED READINGS As dissenting movements spread out into the world from the late eighteenth century, they encountered previously undreamed of questions about their gospel. Is Christianity a ‘white man’s religion’?¹ Did Jesus have blue eyes and blonde hair? From the very beginning, English Baptist missionary William Carey experienced the problems which underlying Western European assumptions brought with even the simplest of concepts. He noted, for example, the problems raised by his struggles to bring out a second edition of the New Testament in Bengali: Somebody, I think Morris, observed that Rowland Hill rather exulted in the thought that we had rendered βαπτίζω [baptizō] by a word signifying to drown. We, however, have not thought proper to alter it in the second edition, even after the most close investigation which we can make. There are several words which we have chosen from, thus েগাসল bathing; but this may be performed by pouring water all over the body as well as by immersion in it. ডুব খাওয়া, an immersion and immediate emersion. This was a plausible word, but I do not find that the Greek word has any idea of emersion belonging to it. I suppose it simply means to immerse, and that emersion is a consequent and separate act.²

¹ Glenn Usry and Craig S. Keener, Black Man’s Religion: Can Christianity Be Afrocentric? (Downers Grove, 1996). Aboriginal Australian, Torres Strait, and Melanesian Christians do not think the gospel is Western: see G. W. Trompf, The Gospel is Not Western: Black Theologies from the Southwest Pacific (Maryknoll, 1987). ² Letter, Carey to Sutcliff, 21 September 1803, in Eustace Carey, Memoir of William Carey, D. D.: Late Missionary to Bengal, Professor of Oriental Languages in the College of Fort William, Calcutta (London, 1836), p. 465.

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Even ‘water’ changed its meaning from culture to culture. The simple, in crossing global culture lines, rapidly became complex. These questions became even more significant in light of the changing face of global Christianity over the next two centuries. By the end of the twentieth century, the shift of Christian demographics away from Europe and North America to the global South, the Far East, and the Pacific meant that the Bible was preached, used, taught, and studied in ways no longer the exclusive domain of the global North. More than 60 per cent of sub-Saharan Africans claim to be Christians, while concentrated Christian presence is evident in many countries in South and East Asia such as the Philippines, Korea, parts of India (such as Kerala), and China (particularly Wenzhou). These Christians have Bibles in their own languages; they read them both alone, and as communities, with a renewed self-understanding and sense of what God is doing in their lands. As noted by Candy Brown in this volume (Chapter 1) the centre of gravity of Christianity has shifted and the world is ‘shrinking’, due mainly to the economic and geopolitical forces of globalization.³ God ‘so loves the [Majority] World’, for it includes most of the world’s population. Historically, the standard narrative traces the expansion of the dominant theologies of the European and North American colonial powers and their missionaries into the Majority World. This narrative is now largely glossed, or dismissed by scholars as inaccurate. When they arrived, missionaries found ancient Christian traditions which questioned their Eurocentric presumptions. Did the apostle Mark of the Bible found the church in Egypt? Did Matthew and/or Thomas really found the church in India? Were the Nestorians the first missionaries who brought the gospel to China? When, compared with Western European and North American Christians, did the Ethiopian church in Egypt (Acts 8:27) appropriate its favoured status and historical priority with the covenant of God, according to Psalm 68:31: ‘Let bronze be brought from Egypt; let Ethiopia hasten to stretch out its hands to God’⁴? Each of these is a question of origins, of the transition between myth and history. As Vico demonstrated in his magnum opus and response to Cartesian reductionism (the Scienza Nuova), every nation, every society defines itself against just this transition of consciousness.⁵ Just as it was with the emergence of questions about the ‘historic’ Jesus in the global North, each of the other Christianities at various stages navigated the transition between their tribal myths, the biblical ³ Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, 1996); Jeffrey P. Greenman and Gene L. Green, eds., Global Theology in Evangelical Perspective: Exploring the Contextual Nature of Theology and Mission (Downers Grove, 2012). ⁴ Unless otherwise stated, all Scripture verses in this essay are taken from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the Bible. ⁵ A. Robert Caponigri, Time and Idea: The Theory of History in Giambattista Vico (Chicago, 1953), p. 8.

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narrative, and the evidence around them of continuous succession. Christianity became indigenized not just in the twentieth century, but as part of a much longer cycle preceding the European expansion contingent on early modernity. Indeed, the British historian of mission, Andrew Walls, proposes that this indigenization process is intrinsic, definitional, to Christianity.⁶ Such regional accounts of origins point to the need to treat Majority World Bible readings as indigenous, often despite the efforts of missionaries. Bible teachers from the Majority World are neither ‘passive receptors’ nor ‘emptyhanded’ negotiators in biblical interpretation.⁷ Gerald West observes that Africans have always read the Bible with their own contexts in mind and constructively for their own peoples. Likewise, as David Kwang-sun Suh (a Korean Presbyterian) observes: Christianity in Korea has been and is thoroughly indigenized, [so that] the hierarchical structure of the Korean churches is more Confucian than Christian . . . [For example] the literary biblical fundamentalism of many Korean Christians is in fact deeply rooted in the old ethos of neo-Confucian literalism rather than in influences from outside sources.⁸

This shift away from a European-derived ‘orthodox’ narrative about Christian origins is matched by the growing realization that Majority World biblical interpretations and theologies⁹ benefit not only their own Churches, but also the entire global Church.¹⁰ In this sense, the emergence of ‘creative tensions’ in global encounters is a mechanism for expressing (D)issent against attempts to close down or normalize local Bible-reading traditions. Post-European and North American Christianities in the Majority World and in post-Christian Europe depict a blossoming picture of a ‘world Christianity’¹¹ that has multiple centres: the challenge now is fidelity to mutual exchange among these centres. Lamin Sanneh, the Gambian-born Yale University professor, foresees even a reverse missionary movement to the global North in his discussion of ⁶ Andrew F. Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Maryknoll, 2002), p. 78. ⁷ Gerald West, ‘Response’, in K. K. Yeo, ed., Navigating Romans through Cultures (Edinburgh, 2004), p. 89. ⁸ David Kwang-Sun Suh, ‘Asian Theology in a Changing Asia’, proceedings of the Congress of Asian Theologians (CATS), 25 May–1 June 1997; Suwon, ‘Korea’, in Philip Jenkins, ed., The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (New York, 2006), p. 21. ⁹ Daniel Carro and Richard Francis Wilson, eds., Contemporary Gospel Accents: Doing Theology in Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America (Macon, 1997); Donald Carson, ed., The Church in the Bible and the World: An International Study (Carlisle, 1987); Heikki Räisänen et al., Reading the Bible in the Global Village (Williston, 2000); John Parratt, ed., An Introduction to Third World Theologies (Cambridge, 2004); Amos Yong and Peter G. Heltzel, eds., Theology in Global Context (New York, 2004); William A. Dyrness and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, eds., Global Dictionary of Theology (Downers Grove, 2008). ¹⁰ ‘Global Church’, or ‘world Christianity’, or ‘Church universal’ are used synonymously in this chapter to mean every follower of Jesus Christ in the world. The terms do not mean body of Christ as an institution, organization, or denomination. ¹¹ Timothy C. Tennet, Theology in the Context of World Christianity (Grand Rapids, 2007).

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‘Can Europe be Saved?’¹² ‘The last will be first’ (Matt. 20:16), this alternative narrative suggests: just as gentile Christianity outgrew Jewish Christianity in the first century, so biblical interpretations in the Majority World seem set to supersede those of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century missionary societies in quantity and dynamism. The Bible, it seems, is making a long detour via the highway of the GrecoRoman cultural legacy through Western Europe and North America, and is now returning to the Middle East and Africa through the alleys and backroads of villages, while also trailblazing new paths in the valleys and basins of Latin America and Asia. This chapter recounts major characteristics of the role and use of the Bible in the Majority World, demonstrating that, in a globalized world, the thesis that the Spirit ‘blows where it chooses’ (John 3:8) and the Word ‘shall not return to [God] empty’ (Isa. 55:11). The key elements establishing a creative tension between indigenizing Majority World approaches to the Bible and those described in the ‘orthodox’ narrative include an openness to self-theologizing and communal readings; to concepts of the Spirit world and human flourishing; to the impact of multiple contexts, vernacular languages, sociopolitical and ethno-national identities, and power/marginalization structures; and to ‘framing’ public and ecological issues. Such dispositions and contextual drivers establish real points of tension with Western European and North American modes of reading of the Bible. No doubt strong headwinds lie ahead, but a truly global Church has at its core the sort of biblical universalism found in the praise of Habakkuk (2:14): ‘The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.’

SELF-THEOLOGIZING AND GLOCAL INTERPRETATIONS Biblical interpretations in the Majority World tend not to repeat the ethnocentric postures that grew out of the European empires, that theirs is the sole, normative reading—although the fact is that their biblical interpretations have always been theologizing about their own contexts. There is, for instance, no series called ‘America Bible Commentary’ or even the ‘North Atlantic Commentary’ series (despite the fact that most authors in such series come from those locations). Majority World communities, on the other hand, have produced an ‘Africa Bible Commentary’,¹³ a ‘Chinese Bible Commentary’, ¹² Lamin Sanneh, ‘The Church and its Missionary Vocation: The Islamic Frontline in a PostChristian West’, in Andrew Walls and Cathy Ross, eds., Mission in the 21st Century: Exploring the Five Marks of Global Mission (Maryknoll, 2008), pp. 145–7. ¹³ Tokunboh Adeyemo, ed., Africa Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids, 2006).

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and many other commentaries and monographs written by indigenous biblical scholars in their own vernaculars.¹⁴ Each of these ‘national’ projects is a reflexive response to the presumed neutrality and homogeneity of readings from the North Atlantic. I agree with José Miguez Bonino (Methodist, Argentina), who writes that ‘Theology has always been contextual: implicitly or explicitly, consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or against the will of the theologian.’¹⁵ Theologizing about one’s specific context asserts a healthy hermeneutical stance, one that makes the church catholic (global) as these contextual biblical interpretations are practised in the matrix of conferencing with one another. The principle of ‘four selfs’ (self-support, self-propagation, self-administration of the Chinese Three-Self, and Gonzalez’s addition of ‘self-theologizing’)¹⁶ calls for creative dialogue. Such a dialogue will necessarily involve, first, a catholic faith or theology based on the Scriptures that honours multiple and interacting world views; secondly, a global theology that respects cross-cultural and shifting contexts in which faithful communities embody real-life issues; then, a translatability of the Scriptures that upholds various dynamic vernaculars and faithful hermeneutics; and finally, dedicated forums which explore the proclamation and worship of a biblical God from a position of diversity. With the rise and multiplication of Majority World theologies, the conversation on biblical readings now has been greatly broadened to include not only Churches from which the missionary movements originated, but also the expanding horizons of Majority World readers. Biblical reading is inevitably a cross-cultural enterprise, one which crosses over from one’s own culture to that of the Bible and also to that of other contexts and cultures. In its emphasis on freedom of conscience and the return to often indigenous sources, it is a form of global (D)issent. As authors Herold Weiss, K. K. Yeo, and Charles Cosgrove¹⁷ wrote in their essay on ‘the cross-cultural Paul’, their cross-cultural friendship is the basis for sharing Paul’s journeys with their readers.¹⁸ The contextual pre-understanding of biblical hermeneutics in the Majority World is one of its distinguishing features. For example, J. Severino Croatto (Catholic, Argentina) offers a liberating reading of Isaiah to the Argentine context of oppression; Jorge Pixley (Baptist, USA) reads Exodus from his Nicaraguan context of violence and understands justice anew; Sharon Ringe

¹⁴ Jey J. Kanagaraj, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, Asia Bible Commentary Series (Secunderabad, 2005); Samuel M. Ngewa, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus (Grand Rapids, 2009). ¹⁵ José Miguez Bonino, ‘Latin America’, in Parratt, ed., An Introduction to Third World Theologies, p. 31. ¹⁶ For more on self-interpretation or self-theologizing, see Justo L. González, Mañana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective (Nashville, 1990), p. 49. ¹⁷ Weiss is a Uruguayan-born Seventh Day Adventist scholar; Yeo is a Malaysian Chinese Methodist, and Cosgrove is an American—all three work in the USA. ¹⁸ See Charles Cosgrove, Herold Weiss, and K. K. Yeo, Cross-Cultural Paul: Journeys to Others, Journeys to Ourselves (Grand Rapids, 2005).

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(Methodist) reads 1 and 2 Peter and Jude from her privileged US context while standing ‘in solidarity with Latino/a communities’.¹⁹ Intrinsic to each of these is a relational methodology. Contextual reading with deep conviction and critical reflection requires others to help remove one’s blind spots and cultural trappings so that every contextual reading can avoid the tendency towards parochialism inherent in purely local identities. As the saying goes (attributed to both Anaïs Nin and the Talmud): ‘We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.’ The challenge indeed is for both the Majority and Minority Worlds to read the Bible on their own but via a common journey with others who offer new perspectives which we ourselves do not have. While Majority World scholars have to do their own work, they have found helpful resources among African American and feminist groups in the USA, Western Europe, and elsewhere, the experiences of which resonate with their own, and relationships with which provide methods for ‘self-theologizing’.²⁰ Daniel Patte (Huguenot) distinguishes between the necessity of reading with others and the ill effect of reading for or to others. He equates reading for others to the ‘typical colonialist attitude that silences the “others”, stripping from them their dignity as persons, denying any value to their culture, and depriving them of their personal and communal identity’.²¹ The experiences of those reading the Bible in the Majority World provide illuminating examples: (1) The ‘liberation’ hermeneutical circle of Latino/a communities spearheaded by Severino Croatto, Pablo Richard, Milton Schwantes, Alicia Winters, Nancy Bedford, Elsa Támez, Nancy Cardoso and the journal RIBLA (Revista de Investigación Bíblica Latinoamericana) relates powerfully to their sociopolitical context. Hispanic theologies have their own themes,²² sociopolitical contexts, problems of oppression and violence,²³ salvation

¹⁹ J. Severino Croatto, ‘Isaiah 56–66’, in Daniel M. Patte et al., eds., Global Bible Commentary (Nashville, 2004), pp. 201–6; Jorge Pixley, ‘Exodus’, in Patte et al., eds., Global Bible Commentary, pp. 17–29; Sharon Ringe, ‘1 and 2 Peter and Jude’, in Patte et al., eds., Global Bible Commentary, pp. 545–52. ²⁰ Dwight N. Hopkins, Black Theology, USA and South Africa: Politics, Culture, and Liberation (Maryknoll, 1989); Cain Hope Felder, Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis, 1991); Richard J. Gehman, Doing African Christian Theology (Nairobi, 1987). ²¹ Daniel M. Patte, ‘Introduction’, in Patte et al., eds., Global Bible Commentary, p. xxix. ²² Juan Luis Segundo, The Liberation of Theology (Maryknoll, 1976); Justo L. González, Santa Biblia: The Bible Through Hispanic Eyes (Nashville, 1996); Miguel De La Torre and Edwin David Aponte, eds., Introducing Latino/a Theologies (Maryknoll, 2001); C. René Padilla, Bases bíblicas de las misiones: Perspectivas latinoamericanas (Buenos Aires and Grand Rapids, 1988). ²³ Mark Lau Branson and C. René Padilla, eds., Conflict and Context: Hermeneutics in the Americas (Grand Rapids, 1986); José Miguez Bonino, Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation (Philadelphia, 1975).

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and hope,²⁴ and they identify with the biblical narratives of prophets such as Amos for inspiration, imagination, and liberation.²⁵ (2) The ‘African beauty’ hermeneutic of African biblical interpretations runs through the work of Diane Stinton (a Canadian long based at Daystar University in Nairobi) in her use of the African image of a cooking pot on a three-stone fireplace—symbolizing the triads from biblical and Christian tradition (life, meditation, and community in African theologies)²⁶ and the Africana Bible.²⁷ She mentions two main phases of African interpretation: first, African or inculturation/indigenization theology (1950–80s) and, secondly, black or liberation theology in ‘independent Africa . . . [that] is not confined to modern socioeconomic and political levels but includes emancipation from other forms of oppression such as disease, poverty, hunger, ignorance and the subjugation of women’.²⁸ Further, while many mainline or mainstream churches are derivative of the works of missionaries, the African Independent Churches (or African Initiated Churches [AIC]) are radically unique and have their own leadership, rituals, theologies, and modes of biblical interpretation. (3) The ‘Asian fusion’ hermeneutic of biblical interpretation directly addresses multi-religious, scriptural, linguistic, and racial contexts. R. S. Sugirtharajah (a Sri Lankan scholar in diaspora) summarizes the four modes of biblical interpretation often used in that part of the world: orientalist, anglicist, nativistic, and postcolonial criticism.²⁹ Natee Tanchangpongs, a Thai Presbyterian scholar, assesses four Asian theologians (Raimon Panikkar, an Indian Catholic; Jung Young Lee, a Korean Presbyterian; the self-described ‘Hindu Catholic’, Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya; and Nozomu Miyahira, a Japanese Protestant) in their use of indigenous resources to express the doctrine of the Trinity in light of complex Asian world views and social contexts.³⁰ To speak of anything as ²⁴ Emilio A. Nuñez and William David Taylor, Crisis and Hope in Latin America: An Evangelical Perspective (Pasadena, 1996); Daniel Schipani and Anton Wessels, eds., The Promise of Hope (Elkhart, 2002). ²⁵ R. Carroll and M. Daniel, Contexts for Amos: Prophetic Poetics in Latin American Perspective (Sheffield, 1992). ²⁶ Diane Stinton, ‘Africa, East and West’, in Parratt, ed., An Introduction to Third World Theologies, pp. 116–17; for more on how community as a lens allows African Christians to understand theology, see A. Okechukwu Ogbonnaya, On Communitarian Divinity: An African Interpretation of the Trinity (New York, 1994). ²⁷ Hugh R. Page Jr, ed., The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora (Minneapolis, 2010). ²⁸ Charles Nyamiti, ‘Contemporary African Christologies: Assessment and Practical Suggestions’, in Rosino Gibellini, ed., Paths of African Theology (Maryknoll, 1994), p. 66. ²⁹ R. S. Sugirtharajah, Asian Biblical Hermeneutics and Postcolonialism: Contesting the Interpretations (Maryknoll, 1998), ch. 1. ³⁰ Natee Tanchangpongs, ‘An Asian Reformulation of the Trinity’, in Gene L. Green et al., eds., Trinity Among the Nations (Grand Rapids, 2015), ch. 6.

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‘Asian’, indeed, is to simplify the reality of life there. The very use of the term ‘Asia’ is incorporative into a globally reflexive scheme, against which local actors need to read texts in dissenting ways. ‘Asian’ theology and biblical interpretations³¹ readily dissolve into subsets or local-specific types, such as Indian Christian theology,³² Japanese theology,³³ Korean theology, or Chinese theology. In such settings, even categories such as ‘postcolonial’ are complicated by the shared expansions and contractions of Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and other historic forms of imperialism. (4) The ‘browning’ hermeneutic of colourful Oceania whose edges and biblical interpretations are even more difficult to map, yet significant. Oceania is more than simply Melanesia and Polynesia; Oceania ‘extends from the edges of Asia at the northwest to the west coasts of North America, and down to South America and across to Australia at the southwest’.³⁴ Jione Havea (Methodist/Uniting Church) marks the distinctiveness of Oceania: ‘Our contexts are fluid, as our cultures are oral, . . . our borders are [not] all comforting.’³⁵ Oceanian biblical interpretation inevitably takes on the task of addressing issues of migration from intra-islands or from foreign countries to the islands. Foreigners such as missionaries and colonists, he suggests, have brought both light and darkness to this region, with regard to the ways in which the Bible was read and taught in Oceania.³⁶ The Bible is supposed to allow people to belong both in their locale and in the Bible; given the nuanced context Oceania biblical readings call ‘attention to those things that are out of place’.³⁷ Thus Oceanian biblical interpretation can be termed as ‘ecological hermeneutics’, a theme made apparent in Lutheran pastor Norman Habel’s The Earth Bible project, that offers readings towards caring for the Earth guided by six ecojustice principles: intrinsic worth, interconnectedness, voice, purpose, mutual custodianship, and resistance.³⁸ ³¹ Bong Rin Ro and Ruth Eshenaur, ed., The Bible and Theology in Asian Contexts: An Evangelical Perspective on Asian Theology (Taichung, 1984); John C. England et al., eds., Asian Christian Theologies: A Research Guide to Authors, Movements, Sources, vol. 1 (Maryknoll, 2005); Sebastian C. H. Kim, ed., Christian Theology in Asia (Cambridge, 2008); R. S. Sugirtharajah, Frontiers in Asian Christian Theology: Emerging Trends (Eugene, 2010). ³² Robin H. S. Boyd, An Introduction to Indian Christian Theology (Delhi, 1991); R. S. Sugirtharajah and Cecil Hargreaves, eds., Readings in Indian Christian Theology (London, 1993). ³³ Yasuo Furuya, ed., A History of Japanese Theology (Grand Rapids, 1987). ³⁴ Jione Havea, David J. Neville, and Elaine M. Wainwright, eds., Bible, Borders, Belonging(s): Engaging Readings from Oceania (Atlanta, 2014), pp. 6 and 13 (‘50 shades of brown and black’ of Oceania). ³⁵ Havea et al., eds., Bible, Borders, Belonging(s), p. 7. ³⁶ Havea et al., eds., Bible, Borders, Belonging(s), p. 5. ³⁷ Havea et al., eds., Bible, Borders, Belonging(s), p. 10. ³⁸ See the Earth Bible Commentary series edited by Norman Habel (a Lutheran) published by Sheffield Phoenix Press. At the time of writing, seven volumes have been published: https://www. sheffieldphoenix.com/browse.asp?serid=32, accessed 2/11/2017.

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MULTIPLE CONTEXTS AND MYRIAD L I F E EX PE RI E NCE S Context or culture is the threshold of any theology and biblical interpretation. It is important to remember, therefore, that the context for postcolonial Majority World biblical interpretation (essentially since the end of the Second World War) includes some of the most significant ‘mega-trends’ and paradigm shifts in human history. If one considers, for example, Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon in 1969, beamed worldwide via emerging communications technologies, the ‘frame’ of human questions in general comes into question. How one reads ‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good’ (Gen. 1:31), for instance, shifts with one’s relation to the ‘globe’ in the term ‘global’. The ability to see the earth as a single thing, hanging against the stars, has only been reinforced by the omnipresence of radio, TV, Internet and Wi-Fi information technologies that rewire our world. They necessarily also rewire the ways Christians understand the world, as well as the ways they read the Bible. Across the same networks ran coverage of the two great civil rights campaigns of the 1960s—that led by Martin Luther King in the USA, and that headed over a longer period by the most iconic leader to emerge from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, Nelson Mandela. These have raised the global consciousness of every ethnic and local Christian group’s selfunderstanding of dignity, justice, and freedom, even as the elites of their own countries were more mobile and ‘global’ than ever.³⁹ At the same time, as Candy Brown has shown in this volume (Chapter 1) modernity brings with it both new natural disasters (such as global epidemics— SARS and Avian Flu, for example, and global warming), and increased awareness of the risk society. Christians in Africa and Asia—particularly those involved in activities which bring them in contact with, say, polluting mining practices in Africa, or the uglier side of the IT reprocessing industry in China—are made more aware of the ecological life-system in which they live, and of the fragility of life. As they were caught up in international networks (such as the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin in 1966) Majority World theologians were made more aware of the precommitments of their coreligionists in other countries. American evangelicals and Christians all over the world were particularly concerned about the Holocaust, the founding of the modern State of Israel, and the ‘Nakba’ (catastrophe) of the Palestinians since 1948. What they weren’t prepared for was the conflict between black Africans and white South Africans over a paper on ‘black and white nationalism in South Africa’, a live issue which effectively reframed broader

³⁹ Juliette Storr, ‘Living Here, Working There: Elite Migrants at the Interstices of Global Trade and Culture’, Global Media Journal 15.28 (June 2017), p. 3.

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questions about nationalism and self-determination, and the issues of ancestors and supersessionism.⁴⁰ By the early 1980s, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (under the leadership of black theologian Allan Boesak) was prepared to pronounce apartheid not merely a political error, but a form of state Church-supported ‘heresy’.⁴¹ Chinese Christians also read the Holocaust through their own experiences of exile and disaster—for me growing up as a Malaysian Chinese Christian, the ‘Rape of Nanjing’ in the Second World War was a filter through which events relating to ethnicity and ideology were passed.⁴² Things which seemed simple going in were, when globally reframed for post-war biblical interpreters, much more complex coming out. More broadly, changing international politics (the issues of totalitarianism, for example), the growing role of multi- or transnational corporations (resulting in an increase in the imbalance of global wealth and power, and structural oppression and poverty among Majority World countries), as well as the tyranny of child labour and human trafficking—in the light of these, Majority World Christians increasingly read the Bible with an eye towards peace and justice. Changing global contexts make Bible readers aware of gender, ethnicity, and justice issues at a regional level. Yet reading the Bible in their (readers’) contexts engages and transforms their worlds as well. J. Severino Croatto advocates for a biblical hermeneutic that is faithful to the Bible, true to individual contexts and meaningful to readers. This is especially clear from his commentary on the book of Exodus.⁴³ The facts of life on the ground are at odds with the authoritative text: thus sociopolitical reality, anthropological poverty,⁴⁴ and linguistic epistemology become filters used by the Majority World to read the Scriptures. These lenses emerged out of the Majority World, contexts that many in the developed, privileged, and resourceful ‘First World’ have long forgotten. The Majority World hears the Bible as speaking to its problems of dictatorship and colonialism, exile and displacement, poverty and famine, plague and pestilence, human trafficking and child labour, child prostitutes and child soldiers, patronage and corruption, pirating and extortion, civil or interreligious wars and ethnic violence, environmental ⁴⁰ Uta A. Balbier, ‘The World Congress on Evangelism 1966 in Berlin: US Evangelicalism, Cultural Dominance, and Global Challenges’, Journal of American Studies 51.4 (2017), p. 1188. ⁴¹ Stephen R. Haynes, ‘Kairos Again? The Church Struggle in South Africa’, in Hubert G. Locke and Marcia Sachs Littell, Holocaust and Church Struggle: Religion, Power, and the Politics of Resistance (Lanham, 1996), p. 202. ⁴² K. K. Yeo, Musing with Confucius and Paul: Toward a Chinese Christian Theology (Eugene, 2008), p. 3. ⁴³ J. Severino Croatto, Biblical Hermeneutics: Toward a Theory of Reading as the Production of Meaning (Maryknoll, 1987); J. Severino Croatto, Exodus: A Hermeneutics of Freedom (Maryknoll, 1981); Jorge V. Pixley, On Exodus: A Liberation Perspective (Maryknoll, 1987). ⁴⁴ John Parratt, ‘Introduction’, in Parratt, ed., An Introduction to Third World Theologies, p. 5: ‘Anthropological poverty . . . is the denigration of integrity, humanness and culture.’

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devastation and epidemic outbreak, massacres and gang warfare, landslides and forest fires, tsunamis and earthquakes, typhoons and tornados, religious wars and ethnic cleansing, rape and murder, and rising prices and lowered standards of living. Out of such life contexts of affliction and uncertainty, the Majority World uses the Bible in distinctive manners which prioritize wisdom literature, and a broader palette of expressive disciplines. Each of these pays attention to contextual concerns while regarding the Word of God as authoritative.⁴⁵ An a priori realization to this, however, is the fact that reading at all is an ability heavily intertwined with class, culture, and history. In India, for example, 15 per cent of the population are dalits; the word literally means ‘downtrodden’, ‘oppressed’, referring to ‘untouchables’ in the Hindu caste system, who are considered to be ‘polluted’ by birth. They are forbidden to learn Sanskrit for fear of learning Hindu scriptures; thus teaching the dalits to read becomes by default a Christian mission, as ‘in the beginning was the Word’ (John 1:1) for all to read and hear of the eternal logos. Speaking in one’s own tongue and via translation, the indigenous Gospel of life and hope becomes the property of the people in their vernacular. Wisdom literature is often situated in oral cultures and pre-Christian societies, and so rings true to the frailty of life, speaking forth sweetness and ordering beauty out of chaos. Elsa Támez (Methodist), a Mexican scholar, works on Ecclesiastes and James and appeals to wisdom from natural revelation and universal truth.⁴⁶ James 4:14 proves powerful and dear to Majority World Christians: ‘You do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.’ James is certainly not ‘an epistle of straw’, as Luther grumbled, and as many Pauline scholars in Europe and the USA have it; it is in fact ‘holistic wisdom’ for those like members of the Jacobian community whose world view inherently loves metaphor (rather than analytical logic), unity of the whole (rather than either homogeneity/precision or segregation/differentiation), and ‘bothand’ interaction/mutuality (rather than ‘either-or’ linear thinking).⁴⁷ Martin Luther also did not have a high view of the book of Hebrews or Revelation, yet Majority World readers respect and cite the two works often. K. K. Yeo, a Malaysian-born Chinese Methodist scholar now living in the US, traces the courting wisdom of James from the Old Testament motif and argues similar befriending wisdom in the book of Zhuangzi.⁴⁸

⁴⁵ John W. Z. Kurewa, Biblical Proclamation for Africa Today (Nashville, 1995); Gerald O. West, Biblical Hermeneutics of Liberation: Modes of Reading the Bible in the South African Context (Pietermaritzburg, 1991). ⁴⁶ Elsa Támez, When the Horizons Close (Maryknoll, 2000), p. 145; Elsa Támez, The Scandalous Message of James: Faith Without Works is Dead (Minneapolis, 2002). ⁴⁷ See K. K. Yeo, Zhuangzi and James [in Chinese] (Shanghai, 2012). ⁴⁸ Yeo, Zhuangzi and James, ch. 7.

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Economic surplus and physical infrastructure powerfully affects the ambience of biblical reading communities. Christians in the Majority World do and live theology in the messiness of life, rather than in the armchairs or airconditioned towers of libraries. Cameroonian Catholic theologian Jean-Marc Ela (Catholic) speaks of ‘shade-tree theology—a theology that, far from the libraries and the offices, develops among brothers and sisters searching shoulder to shoulder with unlettered peasants for the sense of the word of God in situations in which this word touches them’.⁴⁹ Kosuke Koyama, a United Church of Christ in Japan (UCCJ) missionary in Thailand, preaches of ‘water-buffalo theology’.⁵⁰ Atsuhiro Asano, another Japanese scholar, focuses on the motherliness of God in the Bible intrigued by a Japanese story.⁵¹ Hwa Yung, a Malaysian Methodist bishop, proposes (in response to the ‘bread’centredness of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures) either a theology of mangoes or bananas, drawing on the metaphor of common tropical fruits there.⁵² Jesus is the ‘Crucified Guru’ in Indian Christology,⁵³ whereas R. S. Sugirtharajah, argues for a postcolonial reading of the Bible.⁵⁴ In contrast to the obesity problem in many developed countries, the Lucan Magnificat of God filling the hungry and sending the rich away empty speaks to the Majority World, where at least 50 per cent of the population still lives below the poverty line. Elijah and Elisa’s ministry of providing food for the hungry (1 Kgs 19:4–8) is not—in the Majority World context—a merely historical narrative, but a still prophetic word of hope today. So is Jesus’ saying that ‘I am the bread of life’ (John 6:41–51). Famines resulting from either natural catastrophe or human mismanagement are real issues in the Majority World. Food is a blessing of God’s creation (Gen. 1:29), as is the Promised Land one of ‘milk and honey’ (Deut. 31:20) in the midst of the desert. As the Chinese proverb says, ‘people regard food as heaven’. However, inequitable sharing causes obesity as a moral and spiritual sickness; as Deuteronomy tells us, ‘You grew fat, bloated, and gorged! He abandoned God who made him, and scoffed at the Rock of his salvation’ (Deut. 32:15). Reading the Bible in Majority World context has, as the British Catholic Africanist Adrian Hastings noted of late antiquity and early modern Europe, a powerful impulse to reimagining the normative order.⁵⁵ ⁴⁹ Jean-Marc Ela, My Faith as an African (Eugene, 2009), p. vi. ⁵⁰ Kosuke Koyama, Water Buffalo Theology (Maryknoll, 1974). ⁵¹ Atsuhiro Asano, ‘Motherliness of God: Search for Maternal Aspects in Paul’s Theology’, in Green et al., eds., Trinity Among the Nations, ch. 7. ⁵² Hwa Yung, Mangoes or Bananas?: The Quest for an Authentic Asian Christian Theology (Carlisle, 1997). ⁵³ M. Thomas Thangaraj, The Crucified Guru: An Experiment in Cross Cultural Christology (Nashville, 1994). ⁵⁴ R. S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford, 2002). ⁵⁵ Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997), p. 4.

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Social context inevitably provides the language to depict spiritual matters. In the biblical world or now in the Majority World, resources are limited and borrowing with heavy interest often results in the legal problem of ‘debt as trespassing’. As the Lord’s Prayer has it, ‘Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors’ (Matt. 6:12). The Jubilee concept of hope in forgiven debt becomes the message of salvation (Lev. 25:8–13; Luke 4:19). Theology as practised by Majority World believers is also ‘not only written and spoken, but danced, prayed, mimed, and cried’.⁵⁶ Kofi Appiah-Kubi from Ghana asks where the ‘eternal life’ is that the Gospel of John talks about, ‘when all around us we see suffering, poverty, oppression, strife, envy, war and destruction’.⁵⁷ For his research, Philip Jenkins (a British Episcopalian working in the USA) is right in looking beyond academic writing but also to ‘commonplace sources, such as sermon texts, writings by local clergy and seminary educators, testimonies, best-selling memoirs and devotional works, or the kind of popular Christian writing that appears so often in popular media’.⁵⁸ John Mbiti, a Kenyan-born Anglican scholar, has long argued for a theology of life: ‘It is within the traditional thought-forms and religious concerns that our peoples live and try to assimilate Christian teaching.’⁵⁹

VERNACULAR L ANGUAGES AND INDIGENOUS THEOLOGY While Hebrew or Latin or Arabic may be considered sacred languages in other religions, to Majority World Christians, Christianity has no sacred language. The Bible is neither culture- nor language-specific. The biblical message is always proclaimed ‘in-carnationally’, that is, in its own culture ‘in-linguistically’, in line with the Pentecost event of presenting the gospel in the local tongues of the people (Acts 2:1–13). Lamin Sanneh understands that Christianity has always been ‘a translated religion without a revealed language’,⁶⁰ and this conviction is obvious in the Majority World where the Bible has been translated into more than 2,300 languages, with English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Swahili Bibles ranking at the top of the list in printing count. ⁵⁶ Mercy Oduyoye, ‘The Passion out of Compassion: Women of the EATWOT Third General Assembly’, International Review of Mission 81 (1992), p. 313. ⁵⁷ Kofi Appiah-Kubi, ‘Christology’, in John Parratt (ed.), A Reader in African Christian Theology (Sewanee, 2001), p. 76. ⁵⁸ Jenkins, ed., New Faces of Christianity, p. 8. ⁵⁹ John S. Mbiti, ‘Some African Concepts of Christology’, in Georg F. Vicedom and José Miguez Bonino, eds., Christ and the Younger Churches: Theological Contributions from Asia, Africa and Latin America (London, 1972), p. 52. ⁶⁰ Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Grand Rapids, 2003), p. 97.

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Not simply a matter of convenience or accessibility, translating the Bible into vernaculars has a transformational (even ‘saving’) effect on cultures. There is a biblical paradigm that warrants Bible readers to take local languages seriously, for when theology is not translated into local tongues (or cultural concepts), neither is the culture transformed (or fulfilled), nor does the Bible maintain its sacred force to speak words of life (which are thus becoming Scriptures). There are many examples. Noxomu Miyahira and Atsuhiro Asano use the community concept of ‘concord’ to work toward a Japanese Trinitarian view,⁶¹ making the doctrine of the Trinity more easily understood by Japanese Christians than using the Greco-Roman philosophical language of person/prosōpon/persona and essence/nature/substance/ousia. The word ‘concord’ thereby has taken on a Trinitarian meaning as well. Andrew Sung Park and Anne Joh (both Korean American Methodists) use the Korean concepts of han (relational consequence of sin) and jeong (affection) respectively to read the doctrines of sin and Christology;⁶² consequently, the two words han and jeong have become nuanced with Christian meaning. K. K. Yeo also has shown how the Confucianist word ren (love) is used to translate agapē in the New Testament and, consequently, how ren takes on the meaning of divine love.⁶³ Biblical metaphors and narratives involving lepers, whores, sheep, serpents, swine, donkeys, dictatorships, or false prophets are commonly found in the Majority World. And for cultures infused with symbolism, pictographs or oral presentations of either primitive or cosmopolitan kinds, the Bible speaks to them readily: young David is to be seen shepherding carabaos (water buffaloes) in the rice field; Mary carries baby Jesus at her back (African style);⁶⁴ sickness or famine is described as punishment from God or curse from an evil spirit; the blessing of harvest and offering agricultural products to the Church or to the pastor are an expression of love of God and his servant; rituals in life are paralleled to the biblical lifestyle where weddings and mourning and funerals honour the rhythm of life; slavery (sex, debt, labour), still part of the social institution that holds people captive, resonates with the parable of unjust credit with God as the gracious Creditor (Luke 18:1–8). Stories, parables, and Old Testament narratives—more so than, say, the Pauline epistles, especially the book of Romans—are popular among Majority World Christians. Revelation also is attractive because of its dramatic language. ‘Sacrifice’ in Africa and its link to the book of Hebrews is explored by Teresa Okure, a ⁶¹ Noxomu Miyahira, Towards a Theology of the Concord of God: A Japanese Perspective on the Trinity (Carlisle, 2000); Asano, ‘Motherliness of God’. ⁶² Andrew Sung Park, The Wounded Heart of God: The Asian Concept of Han and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (Nashville, 1993); Andrew Sung Park, Triune Atonement: Christ’s Healing for Sinners, Victims, and the Whole Creation (Louisville, 2009); Wonhee Anne Joh, Heart of the Cross: A Postcolonial Christology (Louisville, 2006). ⁶³ Yeo, Musing with Confucius and Paul, pp. 301–2. ⁶⁴ Jenkins, ed., New Faces of Christianity, p. 70.

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Catholic from Nigeria who interprets the Catholic doctrine of Eucharist as a sacrifice.⁶⁵ The narrative regarding sacrifice in Leviticus still speaks to the Ibibio people in Nigeria: ‘There is an atonement to please the gods. The medium of atonement is the shedding of the blood of animals.’⁶⁶ There is a powerful transformation of human lives and cultural contexts when theologies are done from ‘the womb of Asia’⁶⁷ and Jesus has ‘Asian faces’⁶⁸—a statement equally true of the African ‘womb’ and Latino/a ‘faces’. As Diane Stinton writes, ‘the propositional style of analysis associated with scholastic theology in the West is not the only way of expressing theology’.⁶⁹ Henry Okullu, a Kenyan Anglican bishop, advocates along the same lines: ‘We must look at the way in which Christianity is being planted in Africa through music, drama, songs, dances, art, paintings.’⁷⁰ A few years ago I was moved to see Chinese (Han and other nationalities) Christian artists mobilizing villagers in Yunnan to use painting to embody their stories as an encouragement also to young people to return to their villages and improve quality of life for their parents. Simon Chan, a Singaporean Chinese Pentecostal theologian, narrates the lived theology of Asian Christians inseparable from local contexts, thus demonstrating how the faithful speak to the theologian: ‘You said for us what we had wanted to say all along but could not find the words to say it.’⁷¹ The use of folklore or stories to reread the Bible is also common in Oceania. The Samoan Methodist Mosese Ma’ilo, for example, uses the Oceania legend of Mafatu and popular novel and film to read the Luke 15 prodigal son parable.⁷² Siosifa Pole (also a Methodist, latterly working among the pasifika diaspora in New Zealand) uses a Tongan concept of vahevahe (sharing) to reread discipleship in Matthew 4:19 and 28:19.⁷³ In Asia, story or narrative theology is prevalent;⁷⁴ for example, Chinese literature is full of story. Finding a cultural resource on the significance of ⁶⁵ Terésa Okure, ‘Hebrews: Sacrifice in an African Perspective’, in Patte et al., eds., Global Bible Commentary, pp. 537–8. ⁶⁶ Jenkins, ed., New Faces of Christianity, p. 46. ⁶⁷ C. S. Song, Theology from the Womb of Asia (Maryknoll, 1986). ⁶⁸ R. S. Sugirtharajah, ed., Asian Faces of Jesus (Maryknoll, 1993). ⁶⁹ Stinton, ‘Africa, East and West’, in Parratt, ed., An Introduction to Third World Theologies, p. 107. See also Diane Stinton, Jesus of Africa: Voices of Contemporary African Christology (Maryknoll, 2004). ⁷⁰ Henry Okullu, Church and Politics in East Africa (Nairobi, 1974), p. 54. ⁷¹ Simon Chan, Grassroots Asian Theology: Thinking the Faith from the Ground Up (Downers Grove, 2014), p. 17. ⁷² Mosese Ma’ilo, ‘The Prodigal in the “Sea of Stories”: Rereading Luke 15:11–32 with Albert Wendt and Armstrong Sperry’, 2015 conference presentation, Oceania Biblical Studies Association (OBSA), https://sites.google.com/site/wavesofthemoana/about-obsa, accessed 3/11/2017. ⁷³ Siosifa Pole, ‘Vahevahe: A Tongan Concept of Receiving and Using the Bible in Relation to Matthew 4:19 and 28:19’, 2015 conference presentation, Oceania Biblical Studies Association (OBSA), https://sites.google.com/site/wavesofthemoana/about-obsa, accessed 3/11/2017. ⁷⁴ C. S. Song, The Tears of Lady Meng: A Parable of People’s Political Theology (Maryknoll, 1982); C. S. Song, Tell Us Our Names: Story Theology from an Asian Perspective (Eugene, 2005); C. S. Song, The Believing Heart: An Invitation to Story Theology (Minneapolis, 1999).

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genealogy, a Baptist Chinese Old Testament scholar in Hong Kong (Fook-kong Wong) observes that ‘the genealogical lists in Chronicles bear witness to God’s intimate knowledge and remembrance of his people’.⁷⁵ K. K. Yeo uses the yin–yang cosmological metaphors to reread the faithfulness of God and relational anthropology (rather than the Greco-Roman metaphysic of ontology).⁷⁶ In Korean theology, Jung Young Lee (at Drew University in the USA) uses the yin–yang philosophy to speak of marginality and in-betweenness as the theological method.⁷⁷ In Asia, the pain of God and wounded love (han) have been particular emphases in Japanese and Korean biblical interpretations. To non-Asian ears, this sounds like believing in God’s impassibility, recalling the debate in the Early Church about whether patripassianism (the belief that God the Father suffered on the cross) is a heresy. Kazoh Kitamori (1916–98), a UCCJ Japanese scholar, however, interpreted Philippians 2 as God’s self-emptying of suffering between his love and his wrath, and contended that pain is not simply God’s saving mercy, but also his pathos attribute.⁷⁸ More than five years ago I conducted a series of symposia for scholars from different parts of the world to engage with North American Pauline scholar Robert Jewett and his Hermeneia Commentary on Romans. I immediately noticed that scholars from the Atlantic region were either resistant to Jewett’s basic thesis of Paul’s critique of imperial honour using the gospel of Christ—or were attracted predominantly to Jewett’s political reading of Romans, but found his shame and honour discussion unappealing. Scholars from the Majority World present at the Auckland (New Zealand), Stellenbosch (South Africa), Tokyo (Japan), Seoul (Korea), Kota Kinabalu (Malaysia), and Beijing (China) symposia, however, resonated with both of Jewett’s readings in terms of politics and shame/honour.⁷⁹ The two essays by Atsuhiro Asano, and Ezra Kok and Lim Kar Yong show, in Japan and Malaysia respectively, how the message of Romans speaks on two levels to the contexts of Spanish and Islamic privileges.⁸⁰ Our pre-understanding impacts the way we read the Bible,

⁷⁵ Fook-kong Wong, ‘1 and 2 Chronicles’, in Patte et al., eds., Global Bible Commentary, p. 122. ⁷⁶ K. K. Yeo, ‘The “Yin and Yang” of God (Exod. 3:14) and Humanity (Gen. 1:27)’, Zeitschrift für Religions-und Geistesgeschichte 46.4 (1994), pp. 319–32; see also Jung Young Lee, The Theology of Change: A Christian Concept of God from and Eastern Perspective (Maryknoll, 1979); Jung Young Lee, The Trinity in Asian Perspective (Nashville, 1996). ⁷⁷ Jung Young Lee, Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology (Minneapolis, 1995). ⁷⁸ Kazoh Kitamori, The Theology of the Pain of God (Eugene, 1946). ⁷⁹ K. K. Yeo, ed., From Rome to Beijing: Symposia on Robert Jewett’s Hermeneia Commentary on Romans (Lincoln, 2013). ⁸⁰ Atsuhiro Asano, ‘The Changing Faces of Identity in Paul’s Letters: With Reference to Robert Jewett’s Commentary on Romans’, in Yeo, ed., From Rome to Beijing, pp. 331–56; Ezra Kok and Lim Kar Yong, ‘The Agape Meal: Sacramental Model for Ministry Drawn from Romans 13:8’, in Yeo, ed., From Rome to Beijing, pp. 447–54.

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as Wonsuk Ma (Korean, Assemblies of God) suggests when he writes of the pride of Asian Christians in reconnecting their world views to Oriental biblical world views.⁸¹ As Andrew Walls once wrote, there is no need to interpret the Old Testament to Africans, because they are still living in the Old Testament world, a world that has long been dear to African Christians. The close proximity of African religions and philosophy to that of the Bible, however, sparks debate. Did, for instance, in the pre-Christian era, Africans worship the same God as the one revealed in the Bible?⁸² Bolaji Idowu and David T. Adamo, both Methodists from Nigeria, and Samauel Kibicho from Kenya say ‘yes’, but the late Byang Kato from Nigeria (who was converted in the evangelical SIM tradition from Hahma/Jaba traditional religion) concluded ‘no’.⁸³ Gabrielle Setiloane (Methodist) notes that ‘Modimo ga O itsiwe’ (‘God is not known’, i.e. an unknowable God) is superior to the Christian understanding of God-as-being in the New Testament, but that Yahweh in the Old Testament is comparable to Modimo.⁸⁴ Unlike the written culture of the global North, which tends to fixate on accuracy of textual criticism and scientific methods, major languages and cultures of the Majority World co-involve the auditory, rhetorical Word. Here, the use of drama and music in biblical studies—such as singing in Africa and China—are common, and often extend long enough to start a revival as worshippers prepare their hearts to study the Bible. For his part, Samuel Kunhiyop from Nigeria writes of the contribution of hymnody to the readings of the Coptic Church there.⁸⁵

S O C I O P O L I T I CA L RE ALI TI E S AND E T H N I C / N A T I O N A L ID EN T ITI E S Christians in the Majority World are broadly aware of the resonances between sociopolitical and biblical contexts. This provides greater clarity than in the assumed ‘Christian nations’ in Western Europe and North America, where ⁸¹ Jenkins, ed., New Faces of Christianity, p. 48. ⁸² John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London, 1992); John S. Mbiti, Bible and Theology in African Christianity (Nairobi, 1986). See also the work of J. N. K. Mugambi and Laurenti Magesa, eds., Jesus in African Christianity (Nairobi, 1989). ⁸³ Keith Ferdinando, ‘The Legacy of Byang Kato’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 28.4 (October 2004), p. 169. ⁸⁴ M. G. Setiloane, African Theology: An Introduction (Johannesburg, 1986); M. G. Setiloane, The Image of God among the Sotho-Tswana (Rotterdam, 1976); and also see in the work of John S. Mbiti, Concepts of God in Africa (New York, 1970), and his New Testament Eschatology in an African Background (Oxford, 1971). ⁸⁵ Samuel Waje Kunhiyop, ‘The Trinity in Africa: Trends and Trajectories’, in Green et al., eds., Trinity Among the Nations, ch. 3.

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theology has often been blind to theological critique of governments. The narrative tension between the Cross (faith in God/Jesus) and the sword (political persecution) is intrinsic to the story of the New Testament church, then reiterated in the Crusader period, the Spaniards and Portuguese conquistadores, and the Red Book of Mao in contest with the red-margin Chinese Bible during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The serious and continuing challenges of empire, dictatorship, and tyrant-rule to Christian faith thus provide the context for reading the Bible. How then would Christians living in Castro’s Cuba, Sandinista’s Nicaragua, Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia, Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, or Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe practise their faith? Popular Majority World reading of the Bible, especially on the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament, is similar to that of European orientations—the Old as foretelling, the New as fulfilment, often in a supersessionist sense of the Church replacing Israel; the Old Testament God as wrathful judge and the New Testament God as love and forgiveness. Western European history (in which the Holocaust of the Jews is a core reorganizational catastrophe) has inclined the Western European Church to pay more attention to Jewish–Christian relations, in part to avoid any antiSemitic tendency. Yet, hermeneutically, because of a cross-cultural sensitivity resulting from living in the world of differences, Majority World theologies pay attention also to the problems of racism and imperialism. Political narratives in the Old Testament and political readings of the New Testament help Majority World Christians understand God’s will and mission for them in the context of international politics and imperial relations.⁸⁶ They thus seek to build godly societies in matters of social justice and to resist dictatorship, to preach against war and violence as evil, and to appropriate a sense of divine chosen-ness or retribution (via famine and plague) in their collective understanding of blessedness or punishment as a nation. Old Testament texts are often used in Majority World reading circles, such as: ‘If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession’ (Exod. 19:5); ‘If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land’ (2 Chr. 7:14); ‘righteousness exalts a nation’ (Prov. 14:34); ‘Happy is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage’ (Ps. 33:12).⁸⁷

⁸⁶ Bill Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London and New York, 1989); Wes Avram, ed., Anxious about Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities (Grand Rapids, 2004). I am indebted to Terence Halliday, co-director of the Center on Law and Globalization, for ideas in this chapter on globalization and faith, freedom, and biblical justice, coming as a result of our monthly study at breakfast for the last ten years. ⁸⁷ Jenkins, ed., New Faces of Christianity, pp. 62–3.

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Secular states or nominal Christian nations have, across the twentieth century, continued to persecute Christians. There is ‘hell on earth’ in southern Sudan, Nigeria, parts of India, and now oppression and repression of government to Christians in North Korea, China, or Indonesia. Ethnic cleansing and political warring in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Liberia, Colombia, and Sierra Leone indicate that governments fail their own people in terms of maintaining peace and order, or are even complicit against their best interests. Racial violence and tribal rivalry in China, clashes between Arabs and black Africans in the Sudan, and conflict between Palestinians and Israelis in the Holy Land—these seem to replay such stories as Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, Pharoah and Moses’ people, Babylonians and Israel, Jews and Samaritans in the Bible. To Majority World readers, Psalm 37:1, 8–9 speaks volumes: ‘Do not fret because of the wicked; do not be envious of wrongdoers . . . Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath. Do not fret—it leads only to evil. For the wicked shall be cut off, but those who wait for the LORD shall inherit the land.’ The moral lesson of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) demonstrates that radical love towards one’s enemy is the Lord’s way. Christians preached and taught a public Bible in apartheid South Africa, as can be seen in Pastor Allan Boesak’s call for full civil rights and equality of blacks⁸⁸ and Willa Boesak’s proposal of a Christian ethic that offered creative resistance (both were Dutch Reformed in background).⁸⁹ Desmond Tutu works for reconciliation and identity as he tells blacks: ‘Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.’⁹⁰ Such South African readings have had profound effects through, for example, inspiring the Truth and Reconciliation processes in Sierra Leone, Canada, and elsewhere. Though there are countries such as Liberia in Africa and Thailand in Asia that were never colonized, the effect of colonization—external (by foreign countries) and internal (by local warlords or overlords)—has had serious consequences on local sociopolitical realities and, as a result, the way the Bible is interpreted. For example, a Chinese cross-cultural reading of 1 & 2 Thessalonians and Galatians by K. K. Yeo aims to recount the hope of China during the Cultural Revolution, and seeks to dialogue with the Analects for the construction of a Christian Chinese theology,⁹¹ while David deSilva (Methodist) reads Galatians in the light of challenges faced by the Sri Lankan churches.⁹² East ⁸⁸ Allan Boesak, Farewell to Innocence: A Social, Ethical study on Black Theology and Power (Maryknoll, 1986). ⁸⁹ Willa Boesak, God’s Wrathful Children: Political Oppression and Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, 1995). ⁹⁰ Alan Cowell, ‘Joyous Welcome Home for Bishop Tutu’, New York Times, 19 October 1984. ⁹¹ K. K. Yeo, Mao Meets the Apostle Paul: Christianity, Communism, and the Hope of China (Grand Rapids, 2002); Yeo, Musing with Confucius and Paul. ⁹² David deSilva, Global Readings: A Sri Lankan Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (Eugene, 2011).

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Asian Christians (in Korea, Japan, and China) cannot ignore their Confucianist heritage, leading to nationalism (against imperialism) in nation-building and indigenized biblical readings becoming intertwined. In Malaysia, the Bible is treated according to the rhetorical tactic of a ‘hidden transcript’, as Hii Konghock (Methodist) uses James Scott’s work to read some New Testament texts as a political subtext and as he reads Romans against his Malaysian situation.⁹³ Demonization of other cultures and other groups has historically been part of some hermeneutical processes for affirming one’s own national identity. Consigning others to negative Old Testament categories (as the descendants of Ham, or the Amalekites which confirm the ‘chosen’ nature of a confronted ‘Israel’) was one mechanism for justifying a sense of one’s own tribe’s election.⁹⁴ Multicultural reading—with the praxis of displacement, replacement, and fulfilment—is a hopeful one. Such moves are made by Palestinian Christian theologians in the context of deportation and colonized rule of Palestinians in Israel. Naim Ateek (Baptist), president of Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, for example, reads the Bible for justice and reconciliation despite the harsh experience of indigenous people groups and ‘divine favour’ for Jews.⁹⁵ Yohanna Katanacho (a Palestinian Baptist who is dean of Bethlehem Bible College), reads the Gospel of John inclusively for Jews and Palestinians, although for Palestinians, he writes, ‘Jesus is again facing Herod, but this one is Israeli’ and ‘Jews and Palestinians need to resist the temptation of exclusive contextualization. Christ is fully human and he can represent both Palestinians and Jews.’⁹⁶ Mitri Raheb (Lutheran, Palestinian), president of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem, reads from the Bible ‘creative resistance’ for Palestinian Christians in the face of empire and sustains the promise of Jesus to the meek to inherit the land (Matt. 5:5): We have been trained to naively connect Israel today with the Israel of the Bible, instead of connecting it to the above chain of occupying empires [Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Ayyubide,

⁹³ Hii Kong-hock, ‘Contesting the Ideology of the Empire: Paul’s Theological Politics in Romans, With Preliminary Implications for Chinese Christian Communities in Malaysia’ (PhD diss., Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, 2007); see also James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990). ⁹⁴ John Harris, One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity: A Story of Hope (Sydney, 1990), p. 30. ⁹⁵ Naim Ateek, Justice, and only Justice (Maryknoll, 1989); Naim Ateek, A Palestinian Christian Cry for Reconciliation (Maryknoll, 2008); see also Mitri Raheb, I am a Palestinian Christian (Minneapolis, 1995). ⁹⁶ Yohanna Katanacho, ‘Reading the Gospel of John through Palestinian Eyes’, in Gene L. Green et al., eds., Jesus Without Borders, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, 2014). It will be a demonstration of global hermeneutic to bring Katanacho’s Palestinian reading into dialogue with the ‘beyond the pale’ reading by an Australian scholar, Ruth Sheridan who examines the Jewish reading of Daniel Boyarin and Adele Reinhartz. Ruth Sheridan, ‘Jewish Readings of the Fourth Gospel: Beyond the Pale?’ in Havea et al., eds., Bible, Borders, Belonging(s), pp. 93–108.

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Ottoman, British, and Israeli Occupation]. If we focus on the latter, Jesus’ words [in Matt. 5:5] make perfect sense. None of those empires lasted in Palestine forever.⁹⁷

South African black theology emerged amidst the legacy of apartheid, and so black theology (based on the broader Black Consciousness Movement) follows the theme of liberation through the Old Testament Exodus motif, but questions ‘less friendly’ texts in which ethnic discrimination, racial prejudice, sexism, religious intolerance, and other forms of oppression are found.⁹⁸ Archbishop Desmond Tutu reflects, ‘When confronting the iniquity of forced removals of black people, was not the story of Naboth’s vineyard perfectly tailor-made for castigating official injustice and oppression?’⁹⁹ Mercedes Garcia Bachmann (Lutheran, Argentina) is not alone in critiquing the militaristic overtones of Joshua.¹⁰⁰ What Noh Jong Sun (at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea) has called ‘the Joshua Syndrome’ leads to ‘the psychiatric identification with Joshua’ regarding Europeans against Native Americans, and the US against Iraq in the first Gulf War of 1991.¹⁰¹ For Zimbabwean Dora Mbuwayesango (an Episcopalian teaching in an AME Zion Church affiliated seminary in the USA), ‘The book of Joshua appears to be a blueprint for the colonization of southern Africa.’¹⁰² The South African Kairos Document (September 1985) was, in the context, an important use of the Bible as a basis for theological reflection on an active context of oppression: Jesus wept over Jerusalem; he wept over the tragedy of destruction of the city and the massacre of the people that was imminent, ‘and all because you did not recognize your opportunity (kairos) when God offered it’ (Luke 19:44). There will be no real peace without justice and repentance. The Document mentions the misuse of Romans 13:1–7 as a means of transferring absolute and divine authority to the state. Biblical scholars who drafted the Document have taken the trouble to study the theme of oppression in the Bible and have discovered that there are no fewer than twenty different root words in Hebrew to describe oppression. As T. D. Hanks argues, oppression is ‘a basic structural category of biblical theology’.¹⁰³ The Document thus at times reads like creedal affirmation: ‘We believe that God is at work in our ⁹⁷ Mitri Raheb, Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible through Palestinian Eyes (Maryknoll, 2014), pp. 98–9. ⁹⁸ Néstor Míguez, ‘Latin American Reading of the Bible: Experiences, Challenges and its Practice’, The Expository Times 118.3 (December 2006), pp. 120–9. ⁹⁹ Desmond Tutu, ‘Dark Days’, Journal of Theology of South Africa 118 (2004), pp. 27–39. ¹⁰⁰ Mercedes Garcia Bachmann, ‘Deuteronomy’, in Patte et al., eds., Global Bible Commentary, p. 58. ¹⁰¹ Jong Sun Noh, ‘Joshua Syndrome and Emerging Threats to Life in the World’, CTC Bulletin 20/1 (2004), http://cca.org.hk/home/ctc/ctc04-01/ctc04-01c.htm, accessed 7/7/2014. ¹⁰² Dora Mbuwayesango, ‘Joshua’, in Patte et al., eds., Global Bible Commentary, p. 64. ¹⁰³ Thomas D. Hanks, God So Loved the Third World: The Biblical Vocabulary of Oppression, trans. James C. Dekker (Eugene, 2000), p. 4.

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world turning hopeless and evil situations to good so that his “Kingdom may come” and his “Will may be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We believe that goodness and justice and love will triumph in the end and that tyranny and oppression cannot last forever. One day “all tears will be wiped away” (Rev. 7:17; 21:4) and “the lamb will lie down with the lion” (Isa. 11:6). God “is always on the side of the oppressed” (Ps. 103:6). “True peace and true reconciliation are not only desirable, they are assured and guaranteed. This is our faith and our hope.”’¹⁰⁴ Immigrants who find their identities uprooted in the rapid change of globalization find 1 Peter and James to be nourishing. Some new immigrant communities in the USA are confronted with the issues of exile and displacement. These communities attempt to read the Bible as they wrestle with their double rootedness and ‘hyphenated’ identities, be they a mixture of Asian American, Korean American, or Hispanic American.¹⁰⁵ Thus, even if living in Europe or North America, the concerns of Majority World readers remain intrinsically tied to the Majority World. They draw on the New Testament motif to identify with Christ’s suffering and find hope and possibility in a new and changing environment.¹⁰⁶ ‘Powers and principalities’ both inside and outside the Church are thus real issues which members of the global Church will face together in our shrinking and interconnected world. Orlando E. Costas, a Puerto Rican Methodist migrant to the USA, issued a call to North American mission agencies not to exert technocratic financial control over Latin American Churches and pastors.¹⁰⁷ The Mexican Methodist Elsa Támez reads Ecclesiastes to critique the delusional affects of our modern technocratic culture, wherein ‘horizons are closing in and the present becomes a hard master, demanding sacrifice and suppressing dreams’.¹⁰⁸ To many Christians in the Majority World, the illusive temptation of mass media is to cover up what is truthful. As the dissident French Protestant sociologist, Jacques Ellul, noted, technocratic culture deceives what is good and beautiful by means of advertising.¹⁰⁹ For Majority World interpreters of the text, however, the Word of God presents an alternative narrative: it is truth that leads to freedom (John 8:36).

¹⁰⁴ The Kairos Document, quoted in Andrew Bradstock and Christopher Rowland, eds., Radical Christian Writings: A Reader (London, 2008), p. 301. ¹⁰⁵ See Peter C. Phan, Christianity with an Asian Face: Asian American Theology in the Making (Maryknoll, 1988). ¹⁰⁶ Orlando E. Costas, Christ Outside the Gate: Mission Beyond Christendom (Maryknoll, 1984). ¹⁰⁷ Orlando E. Costas, The Church and Its Mission: A Shattering Critique from the Third World (Maryknoll, 1974); Douglas M. Strong, They Walked in the Spirit: Personal Faith and Social Action in America (Louisville, 1997), p. 109. ¹⁰⁸ Elsa Támez, When the Horizons Close (Maryknoll, 2000), p. v. ¹⁰⁹ J. M. van der Laan, Narratives of Technology (New York, 2016), p. 219.

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FREEDOM, J USTICE, AND COMMUNA L REA DINGS In contrast to the individualist, subjectivist, and moral world views dominant in too much of Europe and North America, one of the distinctive features of the Majority World biblical reading is its focus on the social and communal experience of faith, including the public nature of theology such as the prophetic voice of faith to justice.¹¹⁰ This is not difficult to understand, as much of the Majority World retains communal understandings of self and world, which is quite similar to the Old Testament world view. John S. Mbiti once wrote, ‘I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.’¹¹¹ The modern European and North American world has been baptized by Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’), but in Africa, John S. Pobee (a Ghanaian Anglican) contends, ‘Cognatus ergo sum’ (‘I belong by blood relationship, therefore I am’).¹¹² Reading biblical books such as the book of Romans¹¹³ in a round-table is common in the Majority World. Reading of the laos (laity or common people) is often done in community, as can be seen in the excellent work of Pablo Richard on the ‘people’s commentary’ of the Apocalypse.¹¹⁴ Philip Jenkins describes African theology as a communal identification with the Old Testament Jews; during the Rwandan massacres, imprisoned Tutsis awaiting death hoped—in vain—that they would be rescued in ‘the same way as the Jews were saved by Esther . . . [Many African] churches adopt Old Testament codes about dietary laws and taboos, prohibit pork, practice circumcision and allow polygamy.’¹¹⁵ Bénézet Bujo, a Catholic who teaches in Switzerland, writes of the communal aspect of Jesus as the ‘Ancestor Par Excellence’ or ‘ProtoAncestor’, who has come to bring peace and to bring back all men to brotherhood . . . From now on there is neither black nor white, neither yellow nor red; there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither Tutsi nor Hutu, neither Luba nor Munyamwezi nor Chagga nor Agikuyu; there is neither slave nor free man, neither man nor woman, neither cultivator nor minister of states, for all you are only one in Christ Jesus.¹¹⁶

¹¹⁰ On public theology in Asia, see K. K. Yeo, ‘Theology and the Future of Global Christianity: Glocal and Public Theologies’, in Trevor Cairney and David Starling, eds., Theology and the Future: Evangelical Assertions and Explorations (Edinburgh, 2014); Vinoth Ramachadra, Faiths in Conflict? Christian Integrity in a Multicultural World (Downers Grove, 1999). ¹¹¹ John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London, 1969), pp. 107–8. ¹¹² John S. Pobee, Toward an African Theology (Nashville, 1979), p. 88. ¹¹³ Yeo, ed., Navigating Romans through Cultures. ¹¹⁴ Pablo Richard, Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on the Book of Revelation (Maryknoll, 1995). ¹¹⁵ Jenkins, ed., New Faces of Christianity, pp. 49–50. ¹¹⁶ Bénézet Bujo, Christmas: God Becomes Man in Black Africa (Nairobi, 1995), pp. 36–7.

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Kwame Bediako of Ghana (Presbyterian) refers to the Epistle to the Hebrews as ‘Our Epistle’, claiming that the value of the ‘presentation of Jesus in Hebrews stems from its relevance to a society like ours with its deep tradition of sacrifice, priestly mediation and ancestral function’.¹¹⁷ In other words, Bediako follows the Epistle’s argument that Jesus Christ has fulfilled the Ghanaian purification rituals of animal sacrifice, just as Christ did to the Levite ritual system of sacrifice. Bediako thus starts with the belief that African Christianity has to be authentic to its contexts.¹¹⁸ Such communal readings of the Bible are based on the lived experience of readers, a compound lens that is also nurtured in Latin American liberation theology.¹¹⁹ While originating (as Hutchinson notes in Chapter 8 in this volume), in Catholic settings, liberation approaches spread readily to Methodist liberal dissenting theologies and (by osmosis and reaction) has shaped even the contrarian approaches to the biblical text among evangelicals, particularly the ‘Evangelical Left’ in the USA who emerged from 1960s opposition to the Vietnam War and American imperialism.¹²⁰ Néstor Míguez writes: Perhaps our ‘reading’ of the Bible in popular context has to become more and more a ‘hearing’ of the narratives of the people, of the life stories, of their endurance, anguish and faith . . . The small narratives of the people as they go on in the quest for a little bit of happiness, friendliness, joy, in the midst of aggression and competence . . . Liberation must not then be a big ideological word, but the refreshing experience of a little bit of dignity. Obviously, we cannot take refuge in the small world of intimacy and forget that much of the suffering is located in the macro structures of injustice . . . This is a new ‘canonical corpus’ that allows interpretation.¹²¹

The communal sense of generational guilt and curse may also be seen in the way the poor or oppressed identify their problems as part of their own ‘lot’; some of these ideas are indeed found in Old Testament texts (Deut. 24:16, Exod. 20:5). The ‘cry of my people’ (Exod. 3:7; Jer. 8:19) with regard to the problems of poverty and despair is seen most vividly in the experience of the mestizos and the dalits who see no way out of their vulnerabilities—social and ¹¹⁷ Kwame Bediako, Jesus and the Gospel in Africa (Maryknoll, 2004), p. 28. ¹¹⁸ Kwame Bediako, Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (Maryknoll, 1997). ¹¹⁹ C. Rowland and M. Corner, Liberating Exegesis: The Challenge of Liberation Theology to Biblical Studies (Philadelphia, 1989). ¹²⁰ Carolyn Mauldin, ‘Liberation Theology in the Methodist Church of Brazil: Faith and Action in Six Methodist Educational Institutions’, unpublished PhD thesis, Saint Louis University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1982, 32; and also see by extension, Wilfredo H. Tangunan, ‘Social Transformation in the Philippines: Three Methodist Contributions’, unpublished PhD thesis, Drew University, 2007, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. ¹²¹ Néstor Míguez, ‘Latin American Reading of the Bible: Experiences, Challenges and its Practice’, http://www.academia.edu/2499990/Latin_American_Reading_of_the_Bible_Experiences_ Challenges_and_its_Practice.

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economic, health and education, unemployment and idolatry of market, empire militarism and ecological destruction, degradation of human dignity and policies of marginalization (of many African Americans in the USA, such as the ‘New Jim Crow Law’), and human trafficking and undernourished children. The Womanist theologies in the Majority World are another way of taking a communal experience (of women) seriously. For example, the congregational preaching in the African Initiated Church in Kasane, where women priests take the lead and the congregation follows, is described by Musa Dube, an Ndebele (Zimbabwean roots).¹²² This will receive more attention later in this chapter.

SPIRIT, S PIRITUAL WORLD VIEW, AND I LLNESS As noted in the Introduction to this volume, the WCD (World Christian Database) tracks the remarkable rise of Pentecostals in global Christianity, and also the increase of charismatics in traditional denominations: ‘Barrett and Johnson call them Charismatic, part of the Holy Spirit movement in old-line denominations, and they estimate that the related Pentecostal and Charismatic movements encompass 524 million believers.’¹²³ This phenomenon has in part been explained by the spiritual, sometimes even animistic, world view which forms many cultures in the Majority World.¹²⁴ This spiritual world view is closer to that of the Old and New Testaments, and radically different from that of the ‘Northerners [who] sold out to scientism, materialism and determinism’.¹²⁵ Not all Churches in the Majority World hold to such a spiritual world view, but the common ‘shamanic underlay’ of the societies in which they work tends to see spirits and principalities very much at work in all dimensions of life, whether in morality, health, natural disaster, or religious dimension. The relationship between AIDS and the Bible is often linked in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Malawi, Zambia, Angola, and Mozambique, where AIDS is compared with the plague in Egypt in the Old Testament or leprosy in the New Testament. Public health issues and healing are thus linked to the salvific themes in the Bible, and so Church liturgy often has healing and exorcism as part of the community’s worship life. ¹²² Musa W. Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Minneapolis, 2000), pp. 39–42. ¹²³ Richard Ostling, ‘Researcher Tabulates World’s Believers’, http://www.adherents.com/ misc/WCE.html; see also Amos Yong, The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global Theology (Grand Rapids, 2005). ¹²⁴ David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford, 2002), p. 32. ¹²⁵ Jenkins, ed., New Faces of Christianity, p. 16.

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The HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa presents most markedly among women and girls, who are without any kind of economic and social support. Biblical soteriology touches on transformation or eradication from among the people, especially the least, the weak, and the poor: diseases, AIDS, poverty, famine, ethnic and domestic violence, human rights violations, and environmental degradation. Jesus in the New Testament is perceived to be a miracleworker, or in the Bantu language, a ‘medicine-man’ (nganga): ‘Jesus worked miracles, healing the sick, opening the eyes of the blind, raising the dead to life. In short, he brought life, and life-force, in its fullness.’¹²⁶ Not surprisingly, this has re-emerged as a plausibility structure among those USA biblical interpreters (such as Craig Keener and William Dyrness)¹²⁷ who have direct connections in Africa or other Majority World settings. To many Europeans and USA citizens, traditional medicine (of herbs or using acupuncture) is considered ‘alternative’, yet to many Christians in the Majority World, there is no antagonism between traditional medicine and the Bible. In part this is economic (there are often few ‘alternatives’ to be had), but studies of African modernization point out how persistent this remains even among upwardly mobile urban classes.¹²⁸ There is a growing coincidence, encounter, and cooperation around social and spiritual issues faced by Christians in the Majority World, partly because of the way in which Pentecostal and charismatic networks have enlarged, pluralized, and energized Christians to understand global problems faced by all (in East and West, North and South, rich or poor), arriving at a common conviction that there is a spiritual root to global crisis.¹²⁹ In response to the concerns raised in demonology, for example, Jenkins mentions the pervasive use of Psalm 91 in Africa and Asia. But in the USA (with events such as September 11) Psalm 91:5, 10–11 (used by Jesus in his temptation in the wilderness) also is used to address secular evils or to assist soldiers in battle. In the global North, a fading ‘magic’ or authoritative power of the Bible is evident in the swearing on the Book (in presidential vows or court rooms). Yet in the Majority World, teaching the local dalits to read is itself a ‘magical act’, giving them the power to break the curse of being born worse than slaves for life:

¹²⁶ Bénézet Bujo, African Theology in its Social Context (Eugene, 2006), p. 79. ¹²⁷ Craig Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Grand Rapids, 2011), p. 6. ¹²⁸ Victor Molobi, ‘Living in the Townships: An Appraisal of Pentecostal Social Ministry in Tshwane’, Hervormde Teologiese Studies 70.3 (2014), p. 3; and see Allan Anderson, ‘New African Initiated Pentecostalism and Charismatics in South Africa’, Journal of Religion in Africa 35.1 (2005), pp. 66–92. ¹²⁹ Rex Ambler, Global Theology: The Meaning of Faith in the Present World Crisis (London, 1990).

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the great West African evangelist William Wadé Harris explicitly used the Bible as the mighty symbol that overwhelmed all fetishes and pagan amulets, almost a superfetish in its own right . . . In India, Clarke tells how, while visiting a Christian Dalit community, he was asked to . . . grant [a sick Hindu woman] the healing powers of the Bible . . . Because the woman is illiterate . . . he places the Bible on her head as he prays for her.¹³⁰

In rural areas of China, some Christians drink burnt scriptural verses in the water, hoping for healing and protection from evil spirits. In the Book of Acts, the apostles’ teachings, especially that of Peter and Paul, are not simply a rule of life, spiritual guide, or moral compass; the teaching—together with their clothing (handkerchief)—is also a healing wand, protecting believers from evil spirits. In Chinese Christian homes, instead of traditional Chinese proverbs, Christian verses are written on the same red papers and posted on walls and doorposts, and so are incorporated into traditional approaches to bringing blessings to the family. Many Christians still take the promise of Mark 16:14–20 seriously, believing that the gifts of God mentioned there are still operative today. Similar to Christians in the global North, Majority World Christians also display biblical texts and symbols prominently not only on crucifixes, but also by including Bible verses in fortune cookies, on greeting cards, in company names, or on car bumpers as a tool of evangelism or edification. The work of the Holy Spirit in global theology and church life has also been an urgent focus in the Majority World, where health resources are lacking or absent. The only hope for many is the prayer that God indeed ‘will pour out the Spirit upon all flesh’ (Joel 2:28; Acts 2:17). When Christians in Europe or North America reach for medicines in their refrigerators for healing, Majority World Christians reach for the Bible, where the promises of healing and wholeness are prevalent: Isaiah 53:1–7; James 5:14–15; Isaiah 53:4–5; Luke 8:4; Matthew 15:28. And from such Bible reading comes the question: Is sickness a result of sin? Exodus 15:26 says to them, ‘I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians; for I am the LORD who heals you.’ While John 5:1–14 does not suggest an answer as Jesus heals the lame man at the pool, John 8:23 implies that not every sickness is a direct result of sin (see also Mark 2:1–5 and Job 1:6–12). Other verses suggest to readers that sickness may be a trial from God to strengthen our faith (1 Pet. 1:6; Job 2:1–10). Even in non-charismatic traditions, foreign missionaries were often surprised to see such texts, embedded in forgotten places in liturgies for anointing and prayer for healing, lifted out and given new force by their hearers.¹³¹

¹³⁰ Jenkins, ed., New Faces of Christianity, p. 36. ¹³¹ Colin Buchanan, ed., Historical Dictionary of Anglicanism (Lanham, 2015), pp. 287–9.

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The world of witches is not simply a product of the horror movies of Hollywood, but is real in the Majority World—where people still hold to the belief that spirits and powers exist in this world and where there is a valid fear of childlessness, the occult, and sorcery. Christians often refer to Ephesians 6, Psalms 31 and 35, and Luke 10 (Satan’s fall from heaven) as evoking the spiritual world. To keep watch for one’s safety and alertness, night vigils and prayer towers or mountains are commonly practised or seen in Africa, South Korea, China, and Malaysia. Jenkins, quoting Jean Marc Ela, writes of the significance of night vigils: ‘In black Africa, the world of the Night or of the Invisible is perhaps the privileged place in which we must understand the good news of the descent of Jesus into hell (1 Pet. 3:19–20) in order to announce liberation to the African menaced by occult power.’¹³² Christians in the Majority World imitate Jesus retreating to prayer at night. Indeed, the role of prophets in Africa (such as William Wadé Harris, who was referred to as the ‘Black Elijah’) and apostles in Asia (among independent Churches) is still common enough to discomfit secularists wherever they dwell. How the members of such mass movements (now also widespread among ‘apostolic networks’ in the world) read the biblical accounts of ‘power encounters’ with evil forces, is thus conditioned by indigenized ecclesiologies.

THE L AST, THE L EAST, AND THE L OST: THE P OOR, THE DALIT, M INJUNG, WOMEN, AN D CHILDREN The Bible is popularly regarded as the book of the people, the mythos of the poor, and the memory of those who struggle with life.¹³³ To give dissenting voice to the voiceless and to make visible the invisible in academia, Gerald West, a South African biblical scholar, has accentuated these ‘ordinary readers’ who are ‘trained’ by their local contexts, primarily families and local communities.¹³⁴

¹³² Jenkins, ed., New Faces of Christianity, p. 109. ¹³³ See the Latin American journal, A Bíblia como Memória dos Pobres (The Bible as Memory of the Poor). ¹³⁴ Gerald O. West, ‘Reading Other-wise: Socially Engaged Biblical Scholars Reading with Their Local Communities: An Introduction’, in Gerald O. West, ed., Reading Other-wise: Socially Engaged Biblical Scholars Reading with Their Local Communities (Leiden, 2007), pp. 2–3. West rejects the term ‘nonscholar’ because of its nonexistence in the South African experience. See Mercedes Lopes, ‘Seed of Hope: Grassroots Bible Reading in the Communities of Latin America’, in Dennis Gira, Diego Irarrazaval, and Marie-Theres Wacker, eds., The Bible as Word of God (London, 2010), pp. 71–81 on the ‘see, judge, act’ method (seeing the reality of poverty, judging the system, creating a just and equal society). Many authors mention similar method as women read the Bible in the Majority World: see Phyllis A. Bird, ed., ‘Reading the Bible as Women: Perspectives from Africa, Asia, and Latin America’, Semeia 78 (1997).

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Ordinary readers enable ‘familiar texts to be read in unfamiliar ways and . . . unfamiliar texts . . . to provide alternative lines of connection between local community contexts and biblical texts’.¹³⁵ In contrast to scholars who are trained in the academy, and whose works are ‘interpretive experiment or scholarly research’, marked often by modernist abstraction, ordinary readers embody ‘liberation paradigm praxis’, i.e., contextual Bible study which is a ‘community-based action’.¹³⁶ West himself has worked for such reading as director of the Ujamaa Centre for Community Development and Research in KwaZulu-Natal for at least ten years. Mogomme Alpheus Masoga describes a ‘conversational, performance driven, interpretation mukhukhu [shelter] hermeneutics’ in South African settings.¹³⁷ Eric Anum, teaching at the Department of Religion and Human Values at Ghana’s University of Cape Coast, provides a few highlights regarding ordinary readers: these are mostly poor and marginalized groups, residual oral cultures, and grass-roots groups who (as the parable of the shrewd farmer in Luke 16 by the Nigerian Catholic theologian, Justin Ukpong, describes¹³⁸) are closing the gap between biblical text and themselves through spontaneous, intuitive, and subconscious readings.¹³⁹ It is important to remember that these communities remain a majority of the world’s population. As Ostling notes, ‘Only 44 percent of the world’s people are living comfortably, with 10 percent “scraping by,” 28 percent “poor and needy” and 18 percent “destitute.”’¹⁴⁰ The hermeneutic common to these communities is the grass-roots concern for the plight of the poor: in Korea, with Minjung theology;¹⁴¹ in India, with Dalit theology; ¹⁴² or in Latin America, with the emergence of mestizo theology. The lost sheep of India are the dalits, as are ‘the Burakim of Japan, the aboriginals of Australia . . . Adi Vasis or tribals of India, the Maoris of New Zealand, the Orangs of Malaysia, the First Nations of Canada, the national minorities of the Philippines’.¹⁴³ Each

¹³⁵ West, ‘Reading Other-wise’, p. 2. ¹³⁶ West, ‘Reading Other-wise’, p. 3. ¹³⁷ Mogomme Alpheus Masoga, ‘ “Dear God! Give Us Our Daily Leftovers and We Will be Able to Forgive Those Who Trouble Our Souls”: Some Perspectives on Conversational Biblical Hermeneutics and Theologies’, in West, ed., Reading Other-wise, pp. 19–27. ¹³⁸ Justin S. Ukpong, ‘The Parable of the Shrewd Manager (Luke 16:1–13): An Essay in Inculturation Biblical Hermeneutic’, Semeia 73 (1996), pp. 189–210. ¹³⁹ Eric Anum, ‘Ye Ma Wo Mo! African Hermeneuts, You Have Spoken at Last: Reflections on Semeia 73 (1996)’, in West, ed., Reading Other-wise, pp. 7–18. Werner Kahl, ‘Growing Together: Challenges and Chances in the Encounter of Critical and Intuitive Interpreters of the Bible’, in West, ed., Reading Other-wise, pp. 147–58 describes the hermeneutic as ‘intuitive’. ¹⁴⁰ Ostling, ‘Researcher Tabulates World’s Believers’. ¹⁴¹ Committee on Theological Education, ed., Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History (Maryknoll, 1983); Volker Küster, A Protestant Theology of Passion: Korean Minjung Theology Revisited (Leiden, 2010). ¹⁴² Arvind P. Nirmal, A Reader in Dalit Theology (Madras, 1991); V. Devasahayam, Doing Dalit Theology in Biblical Key (Madras, 1997). ¹⁴³ Jenkins, ed., New Faces of Christianity, p. 137.

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of these has developed readings of the Bible ‘from the margins’, whether as explanation or as a means of escape. Widely circulated globally, Bruce Wilkinson’s The Prayer of Jabez (2001), whose teaching that wealth and health are guaranteed for the godly, is ‘in sync’ with the prosperity gospel of the Central Full Gospel Church (with one million members) in Seoul, whose members believe in ‘the threefold blessings of Christ, i.e. health, prosperity, and salvation’ (3 John 2). When Nigerian evangelist David Oyedepo preaches in his 50,000-seat Chapel (Faith Tabernacle in Lagos, Nigeria), his sermons include the promise to make his people rich.¹⁴⁴ Counter to this material focus, Lee Kyung Sook (Methodist, South Korea) focuses on 1 and 2 Kings to delineate two apparent trends in the biblical text that both reinforce and critique the prosperity gospel in Korea,¹⁴⁵ while Jon Sobrino (a Spanish Jesuit) argues for a theological solution to the problem of the poor, especially in the Latin American context.¹⁴⁶ As Richard Stearns (a former marketing executive who went on to head the global aid NGO, World Vision) preaches, if poverty and justice are taken from Christian mission, then there is a ‘hole in our gospel’.¹⁴⁷ Given the social and economic poverty of the Majority World, asymmetry of wealth and oppression of the poor are serious problems.¹⁴⁸ Thus, asymmetry of power becomes the preunderstanding for Majority World Christians to read from 1 Timothy and James.¹⁴⁹ Victorio Araya (Methodist, Costa Rica) accordingly affirms that God is the God of the poor in the Bible.¹⁵⁰ Poverty and violence are intertwined, as Daniel Patte writes of Majority World scholars who read the Bible: For many contributors of the GBC [Global Bible Commentary] . . . a reading of the Bible that would ignore the cruelty and starkness of poverty, hunger, devastating diseases, injustices, cultural decompositions, social and political chaos would be both meaningless and irresponsible. In an AIDS context, Botswana, the postcolonial feminist theorist Musa W. Dube cannot read “Mark’s Healing Stories” without taking into account this situation. Similarly, one cannot ignore the spotlight that each biblical text puts on one or several particular features of the economic, social, political, cultural and religious crisis in Argentina when reading “Deuteronomy” with Mercedes García Bachmann [Lutheran], [or] “Ezekiel 1–39” with Samuel Almada [Baptist]. . . . ¹⁵¹ ¹⁴⁴ Jenkins, ed., New Faces of Christianity, p. 91. ¹⁴⁵ Lee Kyung Sook, ‘1 and 2 Kings’, in Patte et al., eds., Global Bible Commentary, pp. 105–18. ¹⁴⁶ Jon Sobrino, The True Church and the Poor (Maryknoll, 1984). ¹⁴⁷ Richard Stearns, The Hole in Our Gospel (Nashville, 2010). ¹⁴⁸ Pedrito U. Maynard-Reid, Poverty and Wealth in James (Maryknoll, 1987). ¹⁴⁹ Elsa Támez, The Scandalous Message of James (New York, 1990); Elsa Támez, Struggles for Power in Early Christianity: A Study of the First Letter to Timothy (Maryknoll, 2007). ¹⁵⁰ Victorio Araya, God of the Poor (Maryknoll, 1987). ¹⁵¹ Daniel M. Patte, ‘Introduction’, in Patte et al., eds., Global Bible Commentary, p. xxvii. See also the work of Fernando F. Segovia, ed., Reading From This Place, vol. 2 (Minneapolis, 2000).

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Poverty is a global epidemic, for more than one billion people in our world live on less than a dollar a day and have no access to clean water. For them, identifying with Job in overcoming the suffering of the innocent is a message of hope.¹⁵² In the Latin American context, the biblical critique is aimed at Anglos or Latino elites who feel pride in their Spanish descent and despise the mestizo.¹⁵³ Mestizo Christianity regards Jesus as a Galilean Jew, a mixed and marginalized one, yet his ministry to Jerusalem is a direct challenge and critique of the powerful, wealthy, ‘pure-blooded’ religious leaders. Oppression of a targeted group is an injustice that the Bible inveighs against. ‘You shall not oppress a resident alien’, says the author of Exodus: ‘you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt’ (Exod. 23:9). Unfair and oppressive practices of the wealthy and the powerful result in poverty among the masses.¹⁵⁴ In Latin America, therefore, Támez repositions ‘justification by faith’ as humanization and dignity, the amnesty of God’s grace for all humanity.¹⁵⁵ In India, the biblical message of dignity and freedom speaks to dalits who carry night soils and remove trash and who do not have access to basic necessities such as running water. It is no surprise that 70 per cent of Indian Christians are dalits, who have used conversion as a mode of communal resistance and uplift.¹⁵⁶ Kirsteen Kim writes, ‘Nirmal began dalit Christology by describing Jesus not as friend of dalits but as a dalit himself. The dalitness of Jesus was shown by his ancestors, which included Tamar and Rahab; he was referred to disparagingly as a “carpenter’s son”; and he identified with dalits—publicans, prostitutes, lepers and Samaritans.’¹⁵⁷ World hunger and infant mortality are another result of an imbalance of power and wealth,¹⁵⁸ and children and women are often the most vulnerable targets. Female dalits are thrice alienated: polluted, powerless, in poverty. Women in the Majority World read the Bible differently from those from the former colonial powers.¹⁵⁹ For example, Mercy Oduyoye (Methodist, Ghana) argues that African socialization often maintains the status quo through cultural narratives;¹⁶⁰ thus women’s theology¹⁶¹ seeks to restore dignity.¹⁶² Mary Judith Ress,

¹⁵² Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job: God-talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (Maryknoll, 1987). ¹⁵³ Arturo J. Bañuelas, ed., Mestizo Christianity (Eugene, 2004). ¹⁵⁴ Hanks, God So Loved the Third World: The Biblical Vocabulary of Oppression. ¹⁵⁵ Elsa Támez, The Amnesty of Grace: Justification by Faith from a Latin American Perspective, trans. Sharon H. Ringe (Nashville, 1993). ¹⁵⁶ Jenkins, ed., New Faces of Christianity, p. 136. ¹⁵⁷ Kirsteen Kim, ‘India’, in Parratt, ed., An Introduction to Third World Theologies, p. 63. ¹⁵⁸ Jack A. Nelson, Hunger for Justice (Maryknoll, 1980). ¹⁵⁹ Musa W. Dube, ed., Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible (Atlanta, 2001). ¹⁶⁰ Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy (Maryknoll, 1995). ¹⁶¹ Ursula King, ed., Feminist Theology from the Third World (Maryknoll, 1994). ¹⁶² Ivone Gebara and Alida Verhoeven, Women Doing Theology in Latin America (New York, 1991).

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a Maryknoll sister who founded in Chile the ecofeminist review Conspirando, appropriates the biblical wisdom traditions and constructs the ecofeminist theology of Latin American liberation.¹⁶³ First Timothy 2, 1 Corinthians 11, and Ephesians 5 are used to reinforce traditional norms of patriarchal cultures, citing biblical Sarah, Rebeccah, Milcah, Ruth, and Mary as excellent women and Delilah as one who lead Samson astray.¹⁶⁴ In fact, 1 Timothy 2:11–12 is either neglected as part of the Bible or understood contextually as dealing with the Gnostic myth.¹⁶⁵ Child theology also is a key issue in Majority World theology, where infant death rates and child marriage rates remain significant social indices. Biblical scholars often draw upon narratives of sibling rivalry between Ishmael and Isaac, the killing of babies in Egypt and Bethlehem. The horror of barrenness in the stories of Abraham and Sarah or of Samuel’s mother Hannah reflects the pain of childlessness even today.¹⁶⁶ African women’s biblical reading sees the Bible as a two-edged sword. To address child marriage in Africa, the story of Boaz and Ruth is used to encourage young girls to marry old men. Yet as the Malawian ecumenist theologian, Isabel Apawo Phiri, writes about Madipoane Masenya, she ‘has read the book of Proverbs to challenge the cultural teachings on the relationship between husband and wife that promotes the infidelity of men and yet treats women as pollutant’.¹⁶⁷ She draws on the work of Denise Ackerman [who] has dealt with the issue of sexist language, the Bible, theology and church liturgies. She rightly protests against the liturgy that makes women say they are ‘sons of God’. The focus is on the liberative potential of the Bible. The Bible is seen and read from a woman’s perspective to enlighten their role in the struggle for human dignity and Christian womanhood; particularly important are the stories of women in the Bible and their life-giving encounters with Jesus and his response to women in the Gospel.¹⁶⁸

Majority World women find communal biblical reading and enactment liberative: ‘Africa has a vibrant tradition of women prophets, including such fiery leaders as Alice Lenshina Mulenga, founder of the Zambian Lumpa Church, and prolific author of vernacular hymns.’¹⁶⁹ A village girl, Xiaomin, has gained

¹⁶³ Mary Judith Ress, Ecofeminism from Latin America (Maryknoll, 2006). ¹⁶⁴ Tokunboh Adeyemo, ‘A Woman of Excellence’, in Judy Mbugua, ed., Our Time has Come (Grand Rapids, 1994), pp. 17–22. ¹⁶⁵ K. K. Yeo, What Has Jerusalem To Do With Beijing? Biblical Interpretation from a Chinese Perspective (Harrisburg, 1998). ¹⁶⁶ Dora Rudo Mbuwayesango, ‘Childlessness and Woman to Woman Relationships in Genesis and in African Patriarchal Society’, Semeia 78 (1997), pp. 27–36. ¹⁶⁷ Isabel Apawo Phiri, ‘Southern Africa’, in Parratt (ed.), An Introduction to Third World Theologies, p. 156. ¹⁶⁸ Phiri, ‘Southern Africa’, 157. ¹⁶⁹ Hugo Hinfelaar, ‘Women’s Revolt: The Lumpa Church of Lenshina Mulenga in the 1950s’, Journal of Religion in Africa 21.2 (1991), pp. 99–100.

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fame as a Christian song writer in China, producing more than 2,000 popular songs. Feminist theologies are also responsive to contexts.¹⁷⁰ Some Indonesian Christian women (such as the ‘Presbyterian Marxist’ Marianne Katoppo) highlight compassion,¹⁷¹ and some Korean women (such as Presbyterian pastor and theologian Meehyun Chung) interpret the text to resist patriarchy.¹⁷² Japanese Christians stress the motherliness of God; Anne Nasimiyu-Wasike (Catholic) speaks of the nurturing mercy of God given to all without discrimination.¹⁷³ Similarly, the Ugandan Catholic John Mary Waliggo speaks of Christians as true relatives in the wider clan of Christ.¹⁷⁴ As Japanese UCCJ theologian Atsuhiro Asano writes, ‘what one finds on the face of Christ is not, or at least not only, the paternity of God which defines and concretizes sin on the cross for condemnation, but the maternal body of God which internalizes the sin of humanity and groans with it’.¹⁷⁵

PUBLIC TH EOLOGY, E COLOGY, A N D MI N O RI TY F AI TH What stands out as a distinctive mark of Majority World theologies is their understanding of the ‘global God’,¹⁷⁶ which steers away from imperialistic and hegemonic tendencies. In this understanding, theology and praxis are inseparable.¹⁷⁷ Many Majority World Christianities indeed start from a ‘conservative’ posture but, because of the harsh reality of living in a pluralistic society, the ‘private faith’ normally associated with ultra-conservative Christianity in many rich countries remains a minority position. Despite social constraints and political pressures, Christians in the Majority World tend to bear witness to their faith by engaging with public issues, as they take seriously the identity of being called a ‘royal priesthood and holy nation’ (Exod. 19.6; 1 Pet. 2.9). They want to follow the God of the prophets and Jesus in abounding ‘in steadfast love and faithfulness’ (Exod. 34.6; also Lam. 3.23; 1 Thess. 5.24; ¹⁷⁰ Kwok Pui-lan, Introducing Asian Feminist Theology (Bloomsbury, 2000). ¹⁷¹ Marianne Katoppo, Compassionate and Free: An Asian Woman’s Theology (Maryknoll, 1979). ¹⁷² Meehyun Chung, ed., Breaking Silence: Theology from Asian Women (Delhi, 2006). ¹⁷³ Anne Nasimiyu-Wasike, ‘Witnesses to Jesus Christ in the African Context’, Propositum 3 (1998), p. 23. ¹⁷⁴ John Mary Waliggo, ‘The African Clan as the True Model of the African Church’, in J. N. K. Mugambi and Laurenti Magesa, eds., The Church in African Christianity: Innovative Essays in Ecclesiology (Nairobi, 1990), p. 125. ¹⁷⁵ Asano, ‘Motherliness of God’. ¹⁷⁶ Aída Besançon Spenser and William David Spenser, eds., The Global God: Multicultural Evangelical Views of God (Grand Rapids, 1998). ¹⁷⁷ Clodovis Boff, Theology and Praxis: Epistemological Formulations (Maryknoll, 1987).

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2 Thess. 3.3). Indeed, what shames God is when ‘justice is turned back, and righteousness stands at a distance; for truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter’ (Isa. 59.14). The way individual piety overflows into the public realm of life means translating personal faith into social justice, communal righteousness, and shining truth. As James teaches, ‘Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world’ (1.27). Yeo writes: The publicity of faith and theology is rooted in the covenantal theology of neighbourliness and instrumentality or agency. In other words, we are blessed for the blessing of others (Gen. 12.2; 1 Pet. 3.11; 4.19). Once the Church is true to its identity and lives out its calling, then public theology is incarnated . . . Christians live in a world where global flows of ideas and money, people and disease, virtue and vice provide a context for everyday existence. Twenty-firstcentury Christians have been called into this world to make a difference for the good . . . As our own horizons are pulled away from our immediate communities to tsunamis in India, earthquakes in China, nuclear disaster in Japan, wars in the Middle East and genocide in Africa, we are wrested away from our centripetal tendencies to linger in the comfort zones of the local and are propelled into the centrifugal tendencies to participate in the global.¹⁷⁸

Public theology of the Majority World draws on the Bible and provides a common basis from which Asian theologians can, for instance, address issues of migration, trafficking, liminality, and resilience in that part of the world.¹⁷⁹ The call of Abraham to leave his hometown, the city of Ur (Gen. 11:31), the wilderness-wandering of the Exodus generation, the exilic experience of the people of God in various captivities, and the diaspora of God’s people in the first century (see Heb., 1 Pet., and Jas.) speak of ‘normative’ life in God’s kingdom. Real-world issues—such as state brutality and police persecution, urban crisis, rural famine, corruption, meltdown of law and order, confronting totalitarian regime—are all too common in the Majority World. Public theology in the Majority World, though reading the Bible less ‘critically’, often embraces more universal narratives of the Bible, rather than the more narrow ethnocentrisms of Jewish election theology. Majority World readers read Genesis for the universality of the creation story (as well as Adam and Eve), and they read Exodus Mosaic laws/rules of life and leadership for the basic human right of freedom. They prefer Isaiah’s conviction of God’s expansive mercy and inclusive love for the world to the ‘warlike’, ‘tribal’ narratives in Joshua and Judges. They look to Proverbs and Ecclesiastes for

¹⁷⁸ Yeo, ‘Theology and the Future of Global Christianity’, pp. 57–8. ¹⁷⁹ Park, Wounded Heart of God; Lee, Marginality; Sang Hyun Lee, From a Liminal Place: An Asian American Theology (Minneapolis, 2010).

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wisdom instruction for daily living. They like Matthew for its inter-textual hermeneutic between the Old Testament and the teachings of Christ. They find John’s evangelistic purpose (‘have abundant life’) and philosophical wisdom persuasive. They follow Acts’ charismatic mission of the world in the face of empire to evangelize the world. They honour the book of Romans for its alleged comprehensive teaching about Christian faith and its influence on Luther’s justification by faith. They love James for its practical instruction in the matter of faith. They find Revelation’s message of hope illuminating to those living in sociopolitical uncertainty and persecution.¹⁸⁰ The ecological concern of Revelation continues to be relevant to the Church universal. The American Cherokee pastor, Randy Woodley, for example, offers a Native North American biblical interpretation, focusing on shalom with creation and with community, liberation with cosmic Spirit,¹⁸¹ and creative embrace of what he calls ‘living in color’ as one embraces ‘God’s passion for diversity’. In another book, Woodley talks about a human existence and a theology that is ‘mixed blood, not mixed up’.¹⁸²

CONCLUSIONS: READINGS THAT ARE HOPEFUL, ‘ALREADY AND NOT-YET ’ ESCHATOLOGY What wisdom of biblical readings does the Majority World offer the Church universal? These theological emerging voices¹⁸³ continue to make new marks on and through their interaction with the biblical text. Whether we lift every voice or not,¹⁸⁴ it seems, there are new voices everywhere.

¹⁸⁰ See K. K. Yeo, ‘Hope for the Persecuted, Cooperation with the State, and Meaning for the Dissatisfied: Three Readings of Revelation from a Chinese Context’, in David Rhoads, ed., From Every People and Nation: The Book of Revelation in Intercultural Perspective (Minneapolis, 2005), pp. 200–21. ¹⁸¹ See Clara Sue Kidwell, Homer Noley and George E. Tinker, A Native American Theology (Maryknoll, 2001); George E. Tinker, Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation (Minneapolis, 2004); Richard Twiss, Culture, Christ, and the Kingdom (Vancouver, 1996); Randy Woodley, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous View (Grand Rapids, 2012). ¹⁸² Randy Woodley, Living in Color: Embracing God’s Passion for Diversity (Downers Grove, 2004); Randy Woodley, Mixed Blood, Not Mixed Up: Finding God-given Identity in a Multicultural World (Chambersburg, 2005). ¹⁸³ William A. Dyrness, Emerging Voices in Global Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, 1994); R. S. Sugirtharajah, Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World (Maryknoll, 2000). ¹⁸⁴ Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite and Mary Potter Engel, eds., Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside (Maryknoll, 1994).

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The lessons which a global (D)issenting Christianity faces in the new horizons presented by emerging theological voices are twofold. The first involves the identity and mission of the Church—how will it manage the tensions between ‘local’ and ‘universal/catholic’? Coming from two extremes will not form a Church according to the biblical paradigm: a ‘flying-high’ theology that speaks to all places and all times (i.e. one normative theology) or a ‘pinhole’ theology that is so particular it cannot engage with, and is irrelevant to, others beyond its context. Churches in the Majority World are part of the global Church that wishes to encourage faithful interpretations of biblical witnesses in their polyphonic, yet harmonized, proclamations of Jesus Christ from and for diverse cultures. Secondly, Majority World biblical readings raise new questions about biblical origin and authority, and thus ecclesiological questions about Church form and unity. In hierarchical Churches, such issues have become the catalyst for schism and public division. When the US Episcopal Church ordained Gene Robinson, a non-celibate homosexual, as bishop of New Hampshire, the reaction from the Majority World Anglican communion was in stark contrast to that in many jurisdictions in Canada, the UK, and USA. Robinson said, ‘Just simply to say that it goes against tradition and the teaching of the church and Scripture does not necessarily make it wrong.’ Yet as Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi of Kenya replied, ‘Our understanding of the Bible is different from them. We are two different churches.’ Or, as Peter Akinola of Nigeria noted, ‘I didn’t write the Bible. It’s part of our Christian heritage. It tells us what to do. If the word of God says homosexuality is an abomination, then so be it.’¹⁸⁵ Dissenting traditions, which in many global and local settings had drawn close to their Anglican neighbours, relatives and friends, found themselves equally divided. When Sunday Mbang, prelate of the Nigerian Methodist Church and Chair of the World Methodist Council (WMC) called for a response to the issue of human sexuality, the WMC’s Executive Committee temporized. ‘It must be observed that there is no ethical consensus in the world at large on these and related matters . . . one Christian World Communion [the Anglican Church] has been internally disrupted as a result of the actions of certain individuals and conciliar bodies: its survival is at stake.’ While the WMC could not comment, for fear of also sparking division, its Executive Committee thus encouraged its churches to ‘hold firmly to the centrality of Scripture’.¹⁸⁶ Is this a necessary process, whereby the global Church must wrestle with an issue,

¹⁸⁵ Jenkins, ed., New Faces of Christianity, p. 3. ¹⁸⁶ ‘Unity and Sexuality: Statement from the Executive Committee of the World Methodist Council’, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 17 September 2004, http://worldmethodistcouncil.org/ wp-content/uploads/2012/04/World-Methodist-Council-Statement-on-Unity-and-Sexuality.pdf, accessed 3/11/2017.

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and by wrestling to forge ahead in its identity, mission and calling? Not to do so places the former missionizing Churches in the oddly hypocritical position of having ‘introduced’ a Bible to the Majority World which they themselves now do not know how to read. There are wide-ranging ways in which biblical reading in the Majority World, in contrast to the North Atlantic region, tends to be more respectful to the inspiration of the Bible as the Word of God, and so more respectful of the authority of the Bible in matters of religious and ethical living. Increasingly, lay and congregational readings of the Bible in the Majority World— lived theologies—continue to shape the nature of the Church. More and more, oral and rhetorical ways of understanding the biblical text—and less reliance on the historical-critical focus of (Post-)Enlightenment issues and methods— determine the view of the Bible as authoritative. There is greater interest in supernatural events in the Bible because of sensitivity to spiritual worlds in which readers live, prioritizing dreams, visions, miracles, exorcism, healing, and prophecy—because of the context of sociopolitical oppression, disease, and poverty/debt—as confirmations of the relevance and authority of the Bible. Biblical reading in the Majority World, in short, is more a source of help and hope for daily living than it is the intellectual speculation on systems of meaning, which it has become in the epistemological crises of nations permeated by Enlightenment thought. Majority World Churches also provide a more balanced use of the Old Testament together with the New Testament as inspiring daily living, partly because the Old Testament world (especially a Hebrew world view that is not yet heavily Hellenized) has so many similarities to the Majority World. Christians in these places feel a greater need, compared with the global North, for nurturing faith in God in biblical reading and therefore a distrust of the ‘secular order’, thus offering more sociopolitical readings of biblical spirituality, a more dialogical and contrastive reading of the Bible with world scriptures because of multi-religious contexts. The Majority World’s biblical reading is more cross-cultural linguistically but also contextually because of its rich traditions, a reading complicated by the question of how pre-Christian or pre-biblical revelation relates to the Bible. Majority World readers want to actively engage with public life rather than submit to a Christian secular divide that sees piety as purely personal. It may, in some instances, carry a necessary naïveté, in the beginning, innocent and curious. Responding to this, those in Western Europe and North America (whether liberal or conservative) often find themselves (in the tradition’s long, dry critical approach to the Bible) lurching back towards intellectual elitism and ‘we know best’. The continued interaction in a globalizing world will be challenging for all sides, at least in part because Majority World readings of the Bible are precisely shaped as (D)issent from those very elites.

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Adeyemo, Tokunboh, ed., Africa Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids, 2006). Ateek, Naim, A Palestinian Christian Cry for Reconciliation (Maryknoll, 2008). Bañuelas, Arturo J., ed., Mestizo Christianity (Eugene, 2004). Bediako, Kwame, Jesus and the Gospel in Africa (Maryknoll, 2004). Bujo, Bénézet, African Theology in its Social Context (Eugene, 2006). Chung, Meehyun, ed., Breaking Silence: Theology from Asian Women (Delhi, 2006). Cosgrove, Charles, Herold Weiss, and K. K. Yeo, Cross-Cultural Paul: Journeys to Others, Journeys to Ourselves (Grand Rapids, 2005). De La Torre, Miguel and Edwin David Aponte, eds., Introducing Latino/a Theologies (Maryknoll, 2001). deSilva, David, Global Readings: A Sri Lankan Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (Eugene, 2011). Devasahayam, V., Doing Dalit Theology in Biblical Key (Madras, 1997). Dube, Musa W., ed., Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible (Atlanta, 2001). Hanks, Thomas D., God So Loved the Third World: The Biblical Vocabulary of Oppression, trans. James C. Dekker (Eugene, 2000). Havea, Jione, David J. Neville, and Elaine M. Wainwright, eds., Bible, Borders, Belonging(s): Engaging Readings from Oceania (Atlanta, 2014). Jenkins, Philip, ed., The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (New York, 2006). Küster, Volker, A Protestant Theology of Passion: Korean Minjung Theology Revisited (Leiden, 2010). Míguez, Néstor, ‘Latin American Reading of the Bible: Experiences, Challenges and its Practice’, The Expository Times 118.3 (December 2006), pp. 120–9. Miyahira, Noxomu, Towards a Theology of the Concord of God: A Japanese Perspective on the Trinity (Carlisle, 2000). Nuñez, Emilio A. and William David Taylor, Crisis and Hope in Latin America: An Evangelical Perspective (Pasadena, 1996). Oduyoye, Mercy Amba, Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy (Maryknoll, 1995). Page Jr, Hugh R., ed., The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora (Minneapolis, 2010). Pui-lan, Kwok, Introducing Asian Feminist Theology (Bloomsbury, 2000). Raheb, Mitri, Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible through Palestinian Eyes (Maryknoll, 2014). Ress, Mary Judith, Ecofeminism from Latin America (Maryknoll, 2006). Rhoads, David, ed., From Every People and Nation: The Book of Revelation in Intercultural Perspective (Minneapolis, 2005). Stearns, Richard, The Hole in Our Gospel (Nashville, 2010). Stinton, Diane, Jesus of Africa: Voices of Contemporary African Christology (Maryknoll, 2004). Sugirtharajah, R. S., Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World (Maryknoll, 2000).

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Támez, Elsa, Struggles for Power in Early Christianity: A Study of the First Letter to Timothy (Maryknoll, 2007). Tinker, George E., Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation (Minneapolis, 2004). Walls, Andrew, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll, 1996). Woodley, Randy, Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous View (Grand Rapids, 2012). Yeo, K. K., Musing with Confucius and Paul: Toward a Chinese Christian Theology (Eugene, 2008). Yeo, K. K., ‘Theology and the Future of Global Christianity: Glocal and Public Theologies’, in Trevor Cairney and David Starling, eds., Theology and the Future: Evangelical Assertions and Explorations (Edinburgh, 2014).

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5 Dissenting Preaching in the TwentiethCentury Anglophone World Mark P. Hutchinson

Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century was a conundrum. Recent host for the 1893 World Columbian Exposition (featuring that great talkfest, the Parliament of World’s Religions), it was at once the centre of great industrial fortunes and poverty so persistent that it acted as the Petri dish for modern social reformism. The joke (repeated by William James in welcoming Dewey’s Studies in Logical Theory into the world) ran that ‘Chicago hasn’t had time to get round to culture, yet, but when she does strike her, she’ll make her hum.’¹ In the words of William Vaughan Moody, himself a migrant from the East to Chicago, the city was: . . . gigantic, wilful, young, Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates, With restless violent hands and casual tongue Moulding her mighty fates.²

The ‘violent hands’ in search of redemption, and the ‘casual tongue’ in search of rigour, met in the city’s churches, which would become the centre, across the twentieth century, for a succession of highly effective preachers. The archetypical nineteenth-century revivalist, Dwight Lyman Moody, harnessed the industrial and mercantile wealth of the city to found a global evangelistic empire.³ After Moody’s death, Chicago was home to R. A. Torrey, to Billy Sunday, to William Durham, and many others. It was in Chicago, too, where ¹ William James, ‘The Chicago School’, Psychological Bulletin 1.1 (January 1904), p. 1. ² W. V. Moody, The Poems and Plays of William Vaughn Moody, ed. John M. Manly, Vol. I: Poems and Poetic Dramas (Boston and New York, 1912), pp. 15–16. ³ His financial supporters included ‘Turlington W. Harvey, a millionaire lumber dealer; E. G. Keith, a banker and real estate investor; Nathaniel S. Bouton, owner of a large foundry and iron works; John V. Farwell, the well-known dry goods merchant; and the family of Cyrus H. McCormick, the pioneer farm implement manufacturer and inventor.’ James Findlay,

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Billy Graham finished his education, got his great break, discovered many of his life-long lieutenants, and first experimented with radio evangelism.⁴ In the practice of preaching, Chicago was a world-class city. It was in a Chicago Church in 1890 that the Reverend Frank Wakely Gunsaulus preached one of the most famous sermons of the late Gilded Age. Physically ‘a big, rollicking boy’, Gunsaulus’ ‘natural ebullience of spirit’ and remarkable command of culture and language made him ‘notably successful in the pulpit’.⁵ His sermon, ‘What would I do if I had a million dollars?’ was agenda-setting for three reasons. First, it was made famous by its use as a case study in the textbook for twentieth-century capitalist individualism, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (which would reputedly sell one hundred million copies).⁶ Secondly, its preaching at the Plymouth Congregational Church ensured that among its hearers were some of the wealthiest men of their time, including Philip Danforth Armour, co-owner of what was then the world’s largest food processing and chemical manufacturing enterprise.⁷ Armour was moved by Gunsaulus’ sermon, and gave him his million dollars. Finally, then, the sermon was important because it filled the ‘culture’ gap in Chicago’s cultural landscape in two ways. First, preaching itself was an important form of culture, by which young cities and states ‘talked themselves into being’; and secondly, this particular sermon acted as the means by which Gunsaulus raised the money to found what became the Illinois Institute of Technology, to help young men adapt to the challenges of the industrial age through ‘learning by doing’.⁸ If pragmatism was the challenge of the age, it would also prove the undoing of the sort of preaching that Gunsaulus himself practised. A century later, another sermon was preached in Chicago, which also made a mark on the public rhetoric of its day. The speaker was another Congregationalist who had grown a local Church from marginal status to a regional landmark. When Jeremiah Wright became pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in 1972, it had (in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr) a membership of eighty-seven, and a budget of $30,000. By 1989, it ‘Moody, “Gapmen,” and the Gospel: The Early Days of Moody Bible Institute’, Church History 31.3 (September 1962), p. 322. ⁴ Roger Bruns, Billy Graham: A Biography (Westport, 2004), pp. 24–5; Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, 2014), p. 8. ⁵ Charles W. Gilkey, ‘Address’, in S. P. Cadman et al., In Memoriam: Frank Wakely Gunsaulus 1856–1921 (Chicago, 1921), p. 15. ⁶ ‘100 years. 100 million copies. The Napoleon Hill Foundation and Sterling Publishing announce the next “Think and Grow Rich.” ’ PR Newswire, 7 October 2009, http://ezproxy. library.usyd.edu.au/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/450707990?accountid=14757, accessed 1/11/2017. ⁷ Gilkey, ‘Address’. ⁸ Robert H. Kargon and Scott G. Knowles, ‘Knowledge for Use: Science, Higher Learning, and America’s New Industrial Heartland, 1880–1915’, Annals of Science 59.1 (2002), pp. 9–10.

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was a 4,500-member behemoth with a budget of $2.1m (in largely black southside Chicago), the largest Church in its denomination ‘black or white’.⁹ Originally planted to promote integrationism, Wright had breathed life into its agenda-setting motto ‘Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian’.¹⁰ He did so through a combination of dynamic engagement with a community washed up on the tide of the ‘Great African American migration’ from the south to the north; clever use of technology, worship, and the issues of the moment; and firebrand preaching which united an unusual breadth of education with a passion birthed in the tragedies and hopes of the civil rights movement. He could draw upon a long tradition (referred to by Mountford as the ‘black jeremiad’), which ‘reverses a familiar trope in (white) American culture . . . ’ wherein righteousness is rewarded by domination, to focus on a ‘central narrative event [which] is justice and deliverance from evil’.¹¹ A visitor in 1994 captured the moment: ‘God was the center, thanksgiving the mood, and energy the core of the experience.’¹² It was, for liberal Christians, a sign of hope for fading white congregations: here was a liberal megachurch built around the ‘prophetic’ voice of its senior pastor.¹³ Wright’s most famous sermon, of the thousands he preached, was to become a reflection preached in 1990 on a lecture he heard from Frederick G. Sampson at the Virginia Union University School of Theology. Focusing on George Frederic Watts’ symbolist painting, ‘Hope’ (1886), ‘The Audacity to Hope’ was a rhetorical evocation of a rhetorical reflection on the memory of a painting, which in itself was driven by the emotion released by the death of Watts’ daughter. Wright’s verbal gymnastics, however, linked the movement in the viewer’s experience (whereby ‘the illusion of power gives way to the reality of pain’) to the moment of his hearers: This world is a ticking time bomb, with apartheid in one hemisphere and apathy in the other. . . . Our world cares more about bombs for the enemy than about bread for the hungry. This world is still more concerned about the color of skin than it is about the content of character—a world more finicky about what’s on the outside of your head than about the quality of your education or what’s inside your head. . . . There may not be any visible sign of a change in your individual situation, whatever your private hell is. But that’s just the horizontal level. Keep the vertical level intact, like Hannah [in the Old Testament]. You may, like the

⁹ Audra D. Strong, ‘Message remade to foster black faith: Trinity United Church of Christ bursts with pride and devotion’, Chicago Tribune 26 May 1989, S10. ¹⁰ Andrew Billingsley, Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform (Oxford and New York, 1999), p. 170. ¹¹ Roxanne Mountford, The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces (Carbondale, 2003), p. 97. ¹² ‘The Energy of God’s Presence,’ The Christian Century 111.12 (April 1994), p. 372. ¹³ Martin Marty, ‘Prophet and Pastor: To his Former Professor, Congregant, and Friend, Jeremiah Wright Has Been Both’, Chronicle of Higher Education 54.31 (April 2008), B24.

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African slaves, be able to sing, ‘Over my head I hear music in the air. Over my head I hear music in the air. Over my head I hear music in the air. There must be a God somewhere.’¹⁴

It was (in the great liberal modernist tradition which contributed to the thought leadership of the 1960s civil rights movement)¹⁵ a powerful transformation of a personal experience of culture and education, connected to biblical texts, and directed at the sons and daughters of the great migration. Even white university professor, Martin Marty noted, ‘my wife and I have always been awed to hear the Christian Gospel parsed for our personal lives’ amid this second Jeremiah’s jeremiads.¹⁶ It had an even deeper impact on a young civil rights attorney who was a member of Trinity at the time. After teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, and serving three terms as an Illinois senator, in 2007 Barack Obama borrowed the title of Wright’s sermon for his programmatic book The Audacity of Hope.¹⁷ Driven by the vast machinery of a presidential campaign, social media, and the enormous wealth, media presence, and near messianic hopes (‘I do believe he is the one’, quoth Oprah Winfrey) of reformist alliances in the American public culture, Wright’s local counter-colour line solutions seemed to be transforming a nation. The juxtaposition of Gunsaulus and Wright is instructive with regard to the context in which dissenting preaching developed across the twentieth century. Both were master rhetoricians at the end of an age of migration, turning points in both the rules of rhetoric and the contexts into which their preaching spoke. At the turn of the century Gunsaulus lived in the afterglow of great and seemingly effective preaching: Moody (died 1899) and Spurgeon (died 1892) continued to have great effect through the printed forms of their sermons, which circulated in newspapers, special editions, and cheap editions for working men. Their protégés (Harry Ironside, G. Campbell Morgan, R. A. Torrey, and William Bell Riley, among others) became some of the best known preachers of the early twentieth century. Gunsaulas himself went on to make Central Church ‘the foremost American pulpit west of New York City’,¹⁸ Wright to make Trinity United Church of Christ the largest Church in a majority white denomination,¹⁹ and for some time the most talked about church in the United States. Whether the great migration to the West, or the great migration from the South, in both moments the sermon played a critical role in providing the rhetorical framework for change—in the one case, ¹⁴ J. Wright, ‘The Audacity to Hope’, Preaching Today (2010), http://www.preachingtoday. com/sermons/sermons/2010/july/audacityofhope.html, accessed 31/3/2015. ¹⁵ Adam L. Bond, The Imposing Preacher: Samuel DeWitt Proctor and Black Public Faith (Minneapolis, 2013), p. 185. ¹⁶ Marty, ‘Prophet and Pastor’, B24. ¹⁷ (Edinburgh and New York, 2007). ¹⁸ Gilkey, ‘Address’, p. 15. ¹⁹ Billingsley, Mighty Like a River, p. 171.

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providing foundational responses to industrialization and the uneasy conscience of robber barons, in the other to the continuing social marginalization of the African American population and the uneasy consciences of white reformers. In both cases, however, the sermon (while effective) was already a fading form. Gunsaulus’ ‘Million Dollar Sermon’ was not recorded, and so entered memory only through a later appropriation after the fact; Wright’s sermon was to be torn to pieces (‘mercilessly chipped into for wearying television clips’, notes Marty)²⁰ by a critical conservative media seeking for the ‘smoking gun’, evidence that Obama’s reformism was in fact racial partisanship, and that this Chicago politician could not be a President for all Americans. The reappropriation of either sermon, however, was not merely a matter of politics. Both Gunsaulus and Wright lived at a time when, it might be argued, the rhetorical foundations of their effectiveness were already being undermined. Gunsaulus’ style was highly literary and cultural: even his ‘impromptu’ defences of the biblical text against the rationalist lawyer R. G. Ingersoll, for example, were layered, elliptical, full of literary references and assumptions about the shared classical education of his hearers.²¹ While his protégé and friend S. Parkes Cadman could claim that ‘his genius for sacred oratory rank him definitely among the masters of speech in our age’,²² the age itself was (through new modes of speech, migration, democratization, and technology) rapidly ridding itself both of sacred speech and of the rhetorical conventions which supported it. Writers influenced by Hegelianism and the higher critics, such as T. H. Green, were already having a significant impact in removing ‘the supernatural husk from the spiritual kernel of Christianity’,²³ a tendency which would become fully blown in dissenting churches in Gunsaulus’ lifetime, and (by his death in 1921) would lead to schism. The problem now, it seemed to people such as Hugh Black, at Union Theological Seminary, was to find a way to preach which was still authentic. He found it in personal spirituality, ‘listening to what God was saying’,²⁴ and though his sermons were (according to Gunsaulus’ contemporary at the University of Chicago, T. G. Soares) ‘not brilliant . . . they are manifestly the expression of the personality and the experience of the preacher. And that after all is the only preaching that counts.’²⁵ Many Protestants (such as the Scottish-born ²⁰ Marty, ‘Prophet and Pastor’, B24. ²¹ F. W. Gunsaulus, ‘The Bible vs. Infidelity [preached as an impromptu reply to R. G. Ingersoll. Printed from an unrevised stenographic report]’, in G. Kleiser, ed., The World’s Greatest Sermons, vol. 10: Drummond to Jowett (New York, 1908). ²² Cadman et al., In Memoriam: Frank Wakely Gunsaulus 1856–1921, p. 1. ²³ ‘Notes of Recent Exposition’, The Expository Times 1.3 (December 1889), p. 52. ²⁴ Hugh Black, Listening to God (New York, 1906). ²⁵ Theodore G. Soares, ‘Modern Preaching’, American Journal of Theology 11.4 (October 1907), p. 711.

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Congregationalist teacher of preachers, P. T. Forsyth of Hackney College) did not agree that the only response to the crisis of biblical faith in the academy was a retreat into subjectivism. Wary of philological attacks on revelation wrapped in Greek oratory (which treated the Bible as ‘mere literature’), and the tendency among ascendant ritualists to replace the pulpit with the altar, Forsyth sought to reinforce biblical revelation by rebuilding the preacher more in the image of the Hebrew prophet.²⁶ The orator, at most, may urge men to love their brother, the preacher beseeches them first to be reconciled to their Father. With preaching Christianity stands or falls because it is the declaration of a Gospel. Nay more—far more—it is the Gospel prolonging and declaring itself.²⁷

The Bible may indeed be the national library of the people of Israel, but the purpose of that people was providential. The Bible was the preacher’s book, quoth Forsyth (perhaps reflecting his surprising debt to debates among the followers of Charles Gore) because it was itself ‘a preachment’, centred on the objective act of salvation by God in history, which was continued in the pulpit by the preacher.²⁸ As the century progressed, evangelical preachers of Forsyth’s ilk were heard less in the public square, and (having built a moat around the pulpit) were less inclined to seek a hearing there. Those who made their church life an extension of the welfare state, or were prepared to emphasize the aesthetic or social justice elements of the biblical narrative, such as T. D. ‘Ted’ Noffs (1926–95) in Sydney’s King’s Cross, would still command attention, but the focus was rarely their preaching per se. If, as Forsyth noted, ‘The orator . . . has for his business to make real and urgent the present world and its crises, the preacher a world unseen, and the whole crisis of the two worlds’, then public presence required bending to the new public rhetorics of the Western nation state rather than the Thatpredigt at the core of Christian soteriology.²⁹ In the United States, however, the tradition of reformed, exegetical preaching remained strong, though increasingly only in intentionally combative and determined subcultures. This, too, was not unassociated with mobile populations: some of the strongest fundamentalist subcultures emerged, for example, in California (at Westmont College, Fuller Theological Seminary, Talbot School of Theology, and today in the ‘Orange County circle’ of large churches), in the northern Scandinavian revivalist belt (centred on the Swedish–Norwegian Evangelical Free Churches, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, which constituency also provided foot soldiers important in the

²⁶ P. T. Forsyth, Positive Preaching and Modern Mind: The Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching (New York, 1907), pp. 4–5. ²⁷ Forsyth, Positive Preaching and Modern Mind, p. 5. ²⁸ Forsyth, Positive Preaching and Modern Mind, p. 10. ²⁹ Forsyth, Positive Preaching and Modern Mind, pp. 5, 12.

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rise of Billy Graham), among reformed Dutch and German migrants (which gave rise to Calvin College, and were strong supporters of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia), as well as among Canadian and American Mennonites and other New World migrant flotsam of the Radical Reformation. In the British world, Protestant migration from the Celtic Rim (Cornish, Irish, Welsh, and Scots) was essential to the establishment of Reformed theological positions, and the preachers which emerged from the institutions they founded. While the current prominence of Sydney Anglican evangelicals in GAFCON, for example, has been shown to be intrinsically connected to the leavening effect of Trinity College, Dublin, graduates (particularly T. C. Hammond)³⁰ through the early part of the twentieth century, the same may be said of the effect of Scottish evangelistic societies and colleges on the continuing Reformed position of Presbyterianism throughout the British world. Closely associated with the influence of Scottish-born clergy in the tradition of Chalmers, McCheyne and the Bonar brothers (and spread abroad by disciples such as John Dunmore Lang), the Moody preaching tradition had continuing influence through such graduates of the Glasgow Bible Training Institute as Hugh Paton, the ‘talented Scottish evangelist’ who preached in First World War trenches, evangelistic tent missions, and Sydney’s leading Presbyterian Church, St Stephen’s Macquarie Street.³¹ It was Paton’s preaching of John 21 (‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’) which prompted fifth-year medical student, Catherine Hamlin, to spend her life serving women in Ethiopia,³² and which ensured the centrality of St Stephens to city life for the next generation. In London, at a Church already of considerable stature, it was the Welsh Calvinist tradition of expository preaching under Martyn Lloyd Jones (once called ‘the greatest Bible expositor in the English speaking world’)³³ which made Westminster Chapel a central factor in the emergence of British neo-Evangelicalism in the 1950s. Preaching for fortyfive minutes on a Sunday morning, and an hour at Sunday night services, his even longer Friday night Bible Studies would draw up to 1,200 people. It demonstrated the thirst (particularly among London’s educated professional class—Lloyd-Jones was himself a medical doctor) for a ‘scientific’ appropriation of the text in the midst of a ‘disciplined congregation’ which also had a tradition (under predecessors John Hutton and G. Campbell Morgan) of

³⁰ Peter Jensen, ‘T. C. Hammond no Arian: A Response to Peter Carnley’, St Mark’s Review 199 (2005), p. 44. ³¹ Susan Emilsen, ‘Paton, Hugh (1870–1949)’, in B. Dickey, ed., Australian Dictionary of Evangelical Biography (Adelaide, 1994), http://webjournals.ac.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ADEB/article/ view/897/894, accessed 1/11/2017. ³² C. Hamlin, A Hospital by the River (Oxford, 2005), p. 26. ³³ M. Lloyd-Jones, in interview with Carl F. H. Henry, Christianity Today 24.3 (February 1980), p. 27.

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conversionism and the language of the Spirit.³⁴ J. I. Packer would remember growing up within sound of the ‘whale and elephant’ clashes between the great Calvinist voices of the period, Lloyd-Jones at Westminster and F. F. Bruce at Manchester. ‘Both were Celts (one Welsh, one Scottish), and both were Calvinists of sorts . . . ’ but ‘the Doctor’ was a Luther while ‘the Professor’ was an Erasmus: ‘They were not on the same wavelength, and could not work together at all well.’³⁵ While the impact of Lloyd-Jones’ separationism has moderated the evaluation of his legacy among ecumenical evangelicals,³⁶ his expository preaching made him a great hero of continuing British and American conservative evangelicalism, a model replicated among Baptist and conservative Presbyterian graduate students around the world. As a writer/ teacher, ‘the last Puritan’ James Packer himself would, first from Tyndale Hall, Bristol (1955–61, 1971–9), then at Latimer House, Oxford (1961–9) and then for many years at Regent College, Vancouver, become a significant contributor to that tradition.³⁷ Such preaching, however, was decreasingly public in nature. By the 1980s, gone were the days when a senior cleric could make a ‘call to the nation’ and break through into the press. By the time that Jeremiah Wright was a student at Chicago Divinity School, there were few instruction manuals which (as that of Henry Jones Ripley did a century before) would proclaim themselves ‘much indebted to Cicero and Quinctilian’,³⁸ on the one hand, or claim that the Bible ‘has force enough to make infidelity preach tearfully and well about man, woman, and child’.³⁹ For church-influenced public orators such as Barack Obama, therefore, the rhetorical assumptions of Jeremiah Wright’s preaching— reliant on a historical moment forty years gone—were already outdated. The fading passions aroused by a civil rights movement of the 1960s, after all, was a memory now under the custodianship of semi-public establishments such as the ACLU and African American elites (Revd Al Sharpton, for example, or Revd Jesse Jackson) whose moral authority had been compromised by long involvement in the full glare of public life.⁴⁰ Most hearers would have recognized Martin Luther King, Jr’s 1963 sermon ‘I Have a Dream’, referenced by Wright in his statement that ‘This world is still more concerned about the color of skin than it is about the content of character.’ The phrase itself had ³⁴ See Morgan, The Spirit of God, p. 10. ³⁵ J. I. Packer, ‘The Whale and the Elephant’, Christianity Today 37.11 (October 1993), p. 11. ³⁶ See J. F. Brencher, ‘David Martyn Lloyd-Jones 1899–1981 and Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism’, thesis, University of Sheffield (United Kingdom), 1997. ³⁷ The term is Mark Noll’s, ‘The last Puritan’, Christianity Today 40.10 (September 1996), p. 51. ³⁸ Henry Jones Ripley and Henry Ware, Sacred Rhetoric; or, Composition and Delivery of Sermons (Boston, 1849), p. 6. ³⁹ Gunsaulus, ‘The Bible vs. Infidelity’. ⁴⁰ Manya A. Brachear, ‘Activist gets pulpit with higher profile’, Chicago Tribune 3 October 2003: 2C.10.

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entered American conversation, and become so common that it was now taken as ‘one of America’s bedrock values, its language almost sounding like a constitutional amendment on equality’.⁴¹ The socio-economic development of the African American population, its presence in the structures of power, its Weberian veralltäglichung (quotidianization) and the mere passage of time, however, were even then diminishing its power. It did not mean for Wright, and could not mean for Obama, what it had meant for the crowds arrayed before the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963. After the Nuremberg rallies, post-Second World War intellectuals were far less inclined than their nineteenth-century colleagues to permit either the ‘great’ or ‘heroic’ to express itself in public speech.⁴² At the same time alternative democratizing technologies (mass print, radio, and the rise of the image through television and later the Internet) swamped the individual voice in a sea of opinion, analysis, and commentary. While Obama was brought into office on a wave of metaphorized hope and highly effective social media strategies,⁴³ some commentators were quick to point towards a gap between content and reality. The very term ‘rhetoric’ in a post-pragmatic world had taken on a negative slant: ‘mere rhetoric’ became ‘ . . . a term of abuse in the ordinary political arena’.⁴⁴ In 2010, one commentator (Roger Bate, of the American Enterprise Institute) complained of rhetorical inflation among northern European liberals who seemed to hold that if ‘you seem to care and say the right things, it doesn’t matter if you don’t actually achieve anything worthwhile’.⁴⁵ (He predicted that Europe would be disappointed in a US president who talked like a liberal but who would be forced to act internationally as an American president.) The gap between public rhetoric and the ability to produce solutions to ‘wicked problems’ has become a defining element of political analysis: Most important, the declining quality of presidential rhetoric is exactly what unifies several scholarly accounts of the contemporary presidency. What connects the scholarly characterizations of the ‘permanent campaign,’ the ‘sound of leadership,’ the ‘presidential spectacle,’ the ‘symbolic presidency,’ the ‘public presidency,’ and the ‘rhetorical presidency’ is the consensus that the pressure

⁴¹ Associated Press, ‘MLK’s “content of character” quote inspires debate’, CBS News, 20 January 2013, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mlks-content-of-character-quote-inspires-debate/, accessed 1/4/2015; the quotation is from Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC. ⁴² Jill Graham, ‘Servant-Leadership in Organizations: Inspirational and Moral’, The Leadership Quarterly 2.2 (1991), p. 111. ⁴³ James Katz, Michael Barris, and Anshul Jain, The Social Media President: Barack Obama and the Politics of Digital Engagement (Basingstoke, 2013), p. 7. ⁴⁴ C. A. Finkel, ‘Reason and Rhetoric: The Influence Upon Rhetoric of Major Philosophic Changes in the Concept of Reason’, Northwestern University, PhD dissertation, p. 1. ⁴⁵ R. Bate, ‘Obama’s Nobel Prize for Rhetoric’, Economic Affairs 30.2 (2010), p. 88.

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on presidents to go public has created a pathology of vacuous rhetoric and imagery that has impoverished our public deliberative sphere.⁴⁶

Presidents, preachers, and professors rode the same waves, the same oscillations in receptivity to socially constructive speech acts. What varied was the position of their ‘pulpit’ with regard to the public being addressed. The sliding public status of preachers and ministers (the obverse of the rise of the scientific and technical professions) was directly related to their ability to sustain a plausible link between their rhetoric and pragmatic outcomes. So, on the one hand, the rise of healing movements, or on the other, the emergence of Christian social gospel movements, in Christian traditions in the West took place in decades which also gave birth to one of the most influential tomes of the period, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. This too began as an act of speech (a series of radio talks on the BBC) before being published between 1942 and 1944 in a volume deliberately made to ‘be as like real talk as possible’, ‘popular’, ‘colloquial’.⁴⁷ The Oxford don and linguist achieved his success by refusing to ‘expound something which I call “my religion”, but to expound “mere Christianity”, which is what it is and what it was, before I was born and whether I like it or not’.⁴⁸

OURS IS A V OICEFUL E RA (F. W. GUNSAULUS, 1900) It was not just the ideas of Gunsaulus and of Wright, then, which were under siege even as they entered the public memory. It was the nature of public rhetoric itself: the problems faced through the twentieth century proved decreasingly tractable to the leadership and energies available to rhetorically constructed communities. As V. E. Simrell noted in 1928, even as the century’s archetypical daemonic rhetorician heaved onto the horizon in Germany, ‘Rhetoric [in Socrates’ time] held its prestige not from any moral or intellectual virtue but simply because it was deemed irresistible, indispensable, heroic. The rhetorician might be good or he might be evil, wise or foolish, but he was always to be feared by his enemies and admired by his friends.’⁴⁹ The ‘message-centred rhetoric’ dominant in the nineteenth century was powerful when attached to a social consensus which sought, through the oratorical

⁴⁶ Elvin T. Lim, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush (Oxford and New York, 2008), p. 4. ⁴⁷ C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, 2000), p. vii. ⁴⁸ Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. ix. ⁴⁹ V. E. Simrell, ‘Mere Rhetoric’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 14.3 (1928), p. 359.

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moment, an ideological spur which ‘truth’ gave to self-forming action.⁵⁰ Gunsaulus saw no contradiction between high-flown references to Plato, Shakespeare, or Thackeray, on the one hand, and a fundamentalist defence of evangelical soteriology in a church which he was all the while spurring to energetic social works and institution building.⁵¹ This was the flood tide of highly successful preachers such as Hugh Price Hughes (Methodist) and R. W. Dale (Congregationalist), whose public oratory (formed in the mode established by older practitioners such as Thomas Binney)⁵² was legendary in their own day, and did much to reinforce both the trend towards disestablishment, and to an association of public Christianity with non-denominational social concern. The reputation of such preachers was sustained despite the fact that, in retrospect, many authors did not remember them to be particularly good.⁵³ This gap, between contemporary effect and later assessment, points to the importance of reception, of the moment in oratory. As Dale’s reflective (‘Great Preachers and Great Hearers’) essay noted, ‘great preachers’ are made by ‘great hearers’: If preachers form and discipline their congregations, it is equally true that congregations form and discipline their preachers; and even those men who have a rigid strength which refuses to be bent and moulded by influences alien to their ideal excellence, and to their conception of what their fidelity to their awful trust demands—even they find their work limited and conditioned by their people.⁵⁴

If Dale’s reputation lasted longer as a preacher (though, due to the Forward Movement, not necessarily as a social activist) it was in part because, as a means of reining in his enormous energy as an extemporaneous preacher, he was wont to construct his sermons in print first. By way of contrast, the editor of The Expository Times declared that ‘no preacher . . . owes a deeper grudge to the printing-press than Mr. Hugh Price Hughes’: when printed, his sermons seemed to have ‘had the fervour and the charm squeezed out of them’.⁵⁵ Also, one might suspect, the personal or organizational ‘speaker-centred’ charisma was ‘squeezed out’ through the disembodiment of the medium. Around the same time, John Daniel Jones would fill Richmond Hill Congregational Church at Bournemouth, and draw 350–500 ‘strangers’ to the hear sermons which had ‘no dramatic moments’. One American hearer remarked:

⁵⁰ Craig R. Smith, The Quest for Charisma: Christianity and Persuasion (Westport, 2000), p. viii. ⁵¹ Gunsaulus, ‘The Bible vs. Infidelity’. ⁵² A. W. W. Dale, The Life of R. W. Dale of Birmingham (London, 1899), p. 50. ⁵³ W. M. King, ‘Hugh Price Hughes and the British “Social Gospel” ’, Journal of Religious History 13.1 (June 1984), p. 66. ⁵⁴ R. W. Dale, ‘Great Preachers and Great Hearers’, The Expository Times 1.3 (December 1889), p. 54. ⁵⁵ ‘Notes of Recent Exposition’, The Expository Times 11. 4 (January 1900), p. 14.

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It was ‘different’ from an American sermon, exegetical and expository rather than topic, quiet and simple, but holding the throng as the preacher made them sit in the heavenly places with Christ Jesus. . . .⁵⁶

The declining power of preaching was thus a larger problem than simply the disconnection between speech and print. Contextually, the disconnection was a result of urbanization and the development of related alienating mass cultures. The social status of the clergyman, pinned in the early nineteenthcentury British world to a hierarchy with Anglicans at the top, frayed significantly with urbanization and broader increases in educational level,⁵⁷ and then even more so with disestablishment in Ireland and the First World War. People such as Hugh Price Hughes won a place on the national stage for nonconformist clergy just in time to see the stage itself invaded by rising professional and technical guilds. While Anglican Clergy in England maintained much of their status until the 1960s, Nonconformist traditions held only so much status as they could generate influence on government or in the media. One survey during the Second World War discovered that no more than 15 per cent of Britons felt the Churches were playing well their part in national life, twice that number claiming they were playing no part at all.⁵⁸ However many ‘disciplined congregations’ (to use Dale’s description in his jeremiad against the apparent decline among audiences of the ability to listen to lengthy intellectual discourses)⁵⁹ there may be in any particular denomination, no amount of preaching within churches could impact whole cities. The preaching that survived had roots in a profound personal transformation (in P. T. Forsyth’s case, like R. A. Torrey, a self-conversion out of German theology, but unlike Torrey, carrying with him some of the intellectual riches thereof), which resonated with emerging communities of opinion, and found a mass outlet through teaching and print media. Preachers of all stripes, including leading Anglicans such as Donald Coggan,⁶⁰ would come back to Forsyth throughout the following century as the context for preaching hardened. Worse, while many labour organizations still appealed to a basis for common rights in ‘the Fatherhood of God’,⁶¹ and some even saw in Jesus the forerunner of human liberation, there was growing concern about the influence of materialism, Marxist or otherwise, on the mind of the working man. ⁵⁶ D. L. Larsen, The Company of Preachers: A History of Biblical Preaching from the Old Testament to the Modern Era, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, 1998), p. 644. ⁵⁷ viz. Barbara F. Reskin and Patricia A. Roos, Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women’s Inroads into Male Occupations (Philadelphia, 1990), pp. 87–8. ⁵⁸ C. D. Field, ‘Another Window on British Secularization: Public Attitudes to Church and Clergy Since the 1960s’, Contemporary British History 28.2 (April 2014), p. 194. ⁵⁹ Dale, ‘Great Preachers and Great Hearers’, p. 55. ⁶⁰ F. D. Coggan, ‘P. T. Forsyth’s “Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind” ’, The Expository Times 72.11 (August 1961), p. 324. ⁶¹ ‘Notes of Recent Exposition’, The Expository Times 31.4 (January 1920), p. 150.

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Christian socialism, particularly after the shock of the War, collapsed with the bubble of optimism which had given it birth in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. When R. B. Stirling, an early activist (with Philip Snowdon and Ramsay McDonald) of the British Labour Party, was converted to Christ in 1933 and became an itinerant preacher, there was great rejoicing.⁶² Not only did it breathe hope into the thought that the gospel was sufficient in the face of rising materialism, but it reaffirmed the now fading association (shattered by War and Depression) between the Christian self-help and temperance preaching traditions of the nineteenth century (wherein preachers and labour organizers were often the same people), on the one hand, and the role of the evangelist on the other. After Stirling, while there are resonances between trades union speechifying and Christian preaching, the traditions drifted apart. The shift in missiology required was associated with a shift in theology: around 1900, Binney’s model of breaking out of ‘straitened’ evangelical doctrinal approaches was increasingly matched by developments in pneumatology. Both the person of Christ and His Work (the means by which He could be preached convincingly in a setting of declining plausibility) were necessary.⁶³ In England, William Sanday (Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford) reaffirmed in the Bampton Lectures his understanding that, while the Church was not irrelevant to the formation of the Scriptures, its authority came from ‘The Divine force behind it [which] is one that can be felt—and felt directly— without the aid of any external sanction’.⁶⁴ From Scotland, William Lowe Walker (Congregationalist) could declare ‘That Calvary was followed by Pentecost was no accident . . . Pentecost, or the going out of the Holy Spirit for man’s salvation, was the designed sequence of Calvary’,⁶⁵ shortly after the influential pneumatological reflections of James Elder Cumming (Presbyterian).⁶⁶ On the other side of the Atlantic, Moody’s successor, Reuben Archer Torrey (Baptist), outlined the place that the Holy Spirit had in calling, preparing, and energizing the preacher’s message.⁶⁷ In South Africa, Keswick mainstay Andrew Murray declared, ‘The Spirit will reveal and glorify Christ and his love, Christ and his cross “as the Lamb slain standing in the midst of the throne”.’⁶⁸ This was no mere theological readjustment, but ‘a definite experience’ of the Wesleyan type,

⁶² R. Evans, The Evangelisation Society of Australasia: The Second Period, 1919 to 1945 (Hazelbrook, 2011), p. 297. ⁶³ ‘Notes of Recent Exposition’, The Expository Times 11. 4 (January 1900), p. 14. ⁶⁴ William Sanday, Inspiration: Eight Lectures on the Early History and Origin of the Doctrine of Biblical Inspiration; being the Bampton Lectures for 1893 (London, 1896), p. x. ⁶⁵ W. L. Walker, The Gospel of Reconciliation, or at-one-ment (Edinburgh, 1909), p. 4. ⁶⁶ J. Elder Cumming, Through the Eternal Spirit; a Biblical Study on the Holy Ghost (Chicago, 1896). ⁶⁷ R. A. Torrey, The Baptism with the Holy Spirit (Chicago, 1895). ⁶⁸ Andrew Murray, The Prayer Life (Chicago, 1912), p. 128.

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of which ‘one may know whether one has received it or not’.⁶⁹ Prefigured by this theology, Torrey took Moody’s revivalist technology, which essentially wrapped the core salvationist message in an envelope of popular hymnody, and applied it to the urban canvas. The Melbourne campaign of 1902, for example, saw the city ‘honeycombed with two-thousand prayer circles’ started by ‘the wife of a Melbourne doctor who had read a book on Prayer by Dr Torrey’.⁷⁰ Every house in Melbourne was visited twice, and to deal with the urban landscape in pre-radio days, the ‘Simultaneous Mission’ employed multiple evangelists preaching during the week in most parts of the city: Attendances totalled a quarter of a million each week when the population of the whole of Victoria was only one million. Meanwhile, in 1902–3 a tent mission crusade throughout 200 country towns of New South Wales reported 25,000 inquirers.⁷¹

It was fulfilment of Torrey’s rhetoric in his opening sermon: . . . I believe that the world-wide revival has begun. We have heard to-night that the big revival was coming in Australia. It is coming to all the earth! I used to wish I had lived in the time of the Wesleys; in the time of Jonathan Edwards, and of Charles G. Finney; in the time of the great revivals of ’57 in the United States, of ’57–9 in Ireland; and of the 80’s in Great Britain. I thank God that I live in the year 1902. Brethren, I say it from no confidence of my own, but because I believe I have heard the voice of God, that you and I are to see one of the mightiest movements in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ on earth.⁷²

The doctrine of the Holy Spirit (the ‘pre-pentecostal tinderbox’ noted by Donald Dayton)⁷³ was not in this context a merely theological construct, but a portable technology of revival which enabled the preacher to transport revival from place to place. It concatenated history, and made the present decision for Christ the only time that there was, a materialized meeting point between heaven and earth. At that point of experience (for the hearer) stood the preacher (for a time) immune from the sceptics and despisers. Its methodology externalized the rhetoric: by wrapping the content in music and ‘the masses’, the content could be simplified and addressed to a broader base. This was a significant shift from the place of preaching in traditions historically rooted in the Reformation, where the encounter was largely congregational, ⁶⁹ Torrey, The Baptism with the Holy Spirit, p. 10. ⁷⁰ George T. B. Davis, Torrey and Alexander, the Story of a World-Wide Revival; a Record and Study of the Work and Personality of the Evangelists R. A. Torrey, D. D., and Charles M. Alexander (New York, 1905), pp. 15–16. ⁷¹ S. Piggin, ‘The History of Revival in Australia’, in M. Hutchinson and E. Campion, eds., Re-Visioning Australian Colonial Christianity: New Essays in the Australian Christian Experience 1788–1900 (Sydney, 1994), p. 126. ⁷² Davis, Torrey and Alexander, p. 77. ⁷³ D. W. Dayton, The Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Grand Rapids, 1987), p. 174.

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intellectual, and theological/hermeneutical in nature. As Goh notes of Torrey’s lineal descendants, the continuous revival crusade which is the evangelical megachurch depends on the ‘performance of the mega’: The performance of this ambition of ‘greatness,’ enacted in a number of ways and in different media, coalesces into an experience of massive solidity and corporeality, which offers a reassuring presence as a supplement to (if not in lieu of) the experience of the presence of the invisible God.⁷⁴

Standing in the midst of the ‘mega’, the sermon is endowed with an organizational charisma, the forceful undeniability of material context. Torrey’s positing of a world-wide continuous revival stretching out to the temporal limits of the age answered the question (essential for premillennialists) of ‘when?’ (i.e. now), only to posit the question of ‘where?’ (i.e. materialization and glocality). The masses who gathered at Torrey’s campaigns, however, did not as a whole have access to the sort of contained, scholarly fundamentalist subculture which was possible in North America (Torrey was latterly the editor of the Fundamentals), and ultimately, those who took the materialized experientialism of his preaching too seriously were expelled from fundamentalist circles. The emergence of alternatives was at first on a small scale, and of diverse origins (depending on place and moment of foundation). In some places, it may have been the ‘disinherited’ who ‘made’ American pentecostalism⁷⁵ (though even here Wacker suggests a confluence of ‘stable middle class’ Wesleyan holiness and lower-middle-class Oberlin perfectionists and Keswick higher life members).⁷⁶ In the British world, however, the founders of pentecostalism tended to be educated middle-class actors disillusioned with the collapse of the Victorian unity of faith and citizenship, the collapse of Hugh Price Hughes’ non-sectarian Christian welfare state. These were urban actors, drawn from among the many hundreds of people leaving liberalizing Methodist and Salvation Army Churches in the 1920s, who found an energetic alternative in the healing and urban evangelistic missions which emerged just prior to and during the First World War. The blazing furnace of the First World War not only fed into these missions many more people now ‘on the edges’,⁷⁷ but made them as spiritually and mentally mobile as they were in the physical. The challenge of the War to the Christian ideal of God, noted W. B. Selbie of ⁷⁴ Robbie Goh, ‘Hillsong and “Megachurch” Practice: Semiotics, Spatial Logic and the Embodiment of Contemporary Evangelical Protestantism’, Material Religion 4.3 (November 2008), p. 296. ⁷⁵ See Robert Mapes Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (New York, 1979). ⁷⁶ Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, 2003), p. 4. ⁷⁷ Eddie O’Brien, ‘Jesus Saves a Returned Soldier’, Good News 19.11 (November 1928), p. 13.

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Mansfield College, Oxford, was that suffering on such massive scale denied either the goodness of God, or His omnipotence. The intellectuals were not helping: their formulations were of value, such as it is . . . for philosophy rather than for religion. Something warmer, more real and more vital is needed than a metaphysical theory. . . . The pragmatic test can never be sufficient by itself, and value is not a substitute for truth. It would help matters if modern theology were less shy of the idea of revelation than it has sometimes been in the past.⁷⁸

It would be some decades before the ‘modern theologians’ arrived at the same conclusions. In the meantime, ordinary folk in small missions (Good News Hall and the Southern Evangelical Mission in Melbourne, for example, or the Hebden Mission in Toronto) were creating a preaching culture which answered Selbie’s questions for themselves. It was (in G. Campbell Morgan’s words) a form of counter-revolt against the rationalization of the spiritual life of churches.⁷⁹ At such ‘missions to the margins’, the combination of social service, street preaching, and healing/prophetic practices strove to make the omnipotent, good God material through the Spirit. They were helped by the fraying of the old D/dissenting bodies and now formed a new type of (D)issent. The divisions within the Booth family, for example, also replicated themselves in a proliferation of Salvationist forms (Herbert Booth’s Christian Covenant Confederacy, for example) which preferred to follow the street preaching tradition of the movement’s origins rather than its increasing emphasis on social work.⁸⁰ Arthur and Kate Booth Clibborn’s children, in particular William, became preachers of some renown, and had a significant impact on early pentecostalism in various parts of the world.⁸¹ All preached a second (or third) infilling of the Spirit marked by physical manifestations and healing; most preached pacifism, holiness, and the soon coming of the eschatological Kingdom. As Donald Gee noted, the Pentecostal synthesis rested on scripture-proofed-by-experience: In the final analysis, the baptism of the Spirit is not a doctrine but an experience, and the test of whether I have received [it] is not a cleverly woven doctrine that will include me within its borders, but whether I know the experience in burning FACT in my heart and life. . . . the Pentecostal believer has an unanswerable

⁷⁸ W. B. Selbie, ‘The New Attitude to God’, The Expository Times 31.4 (January 1920), p. 154. ⁷⁹ G. Campbell Morgan, The Spirit of God (New York and Chicago, 1900), pp. 14–15. ⁸⁰ See James Robinson, Divine Healing: The Holiness-Pentecostal Transition Years, 1890–1906 (Eugene, 2013), pp. 92ff. ⁸¹ viz. William Booth Clibborn, The Baptism in the Holy Spirit (Portland, 1936); M. Hutchinson, ‘ “The Normal Vision”: Revival Thought in a Leading Australian Pentecostal Journal (Australian Evangel and Glad Tidings Messenger) 1928–1948’, Australasian Pentecostal Studies 8 (2004), http://aps-journal.com/aps/index.php/APS/article/view/75/72, accessed 20/3/ 2018.

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argument to all the artillery of modern pulpit higher critical doubt of God’s Word—he has the answer of an experience that proves the old Book true.⁸² No man possessed of a Scriptural experience needs be afraid of an argument; he is beyond its reach. Any man rejoicing in a living experience of God in his life has a power independent of, and mightily beyond, all external training in logic or theology.⁸³

The preachers who emerged from this doctrine of self-liberation tended to be boundary crossing, capable of following the flows of revivalist interest, and generative of the idea that ‘in these last days’ the only work worthy of Christ was the preaching of the Gospel. Unlike mainstream preaching, history among pentecostal preachers was used to occlude rather than reveal: the ‘new’ move of God was brought into relief by claims to be preaching an ‘old-time gospel’, a self-construction which dismissed the influence of modernism and the ‘human’ constructions of denominations for a restored, pure movement of the Spirit on a renewed People of God. Among the most famous would be the Canadian-born Aimee Semple McPherson, who built one of the first pentecostal megachurches in liminal California, and eventually an international denomination, on the basis of personal ‘magnetism’ (‘a joyous vitality that is mental as well as physical’),⁸⁴ showmanship, healing, and ‘the old message of the infinite love of Jesus Christ . . . with the old-time fervour in the old time way’.⁸⁵ In her early campaigns she would tone down her presentation when speaking among the mainline. In both San Diego, and in her 1921 Melbourne campaign, for example, the public services were purely gospel oriented, while healing services were quietly relegated to a nearby hall. Her platforms were ‘filled with ministers from Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian, Evangelical, Presbyterian, Christian, Salvation Army, Pentecostal, and Nazarene churches, sitting side by side; doctrinal differences forgotten in the great welling [of] love and pity for lost souls and the eager willingness to help draw the full nets to land’.⁸⁶ They wanted her power, but not her theology or her extraordinary practices. It is also to be wondered whether the male ministers sitting on stage with McPherson really wanted a woman with ‘a dainty feminine figure, with handsome features, fine eyes, and pale complexion’⁸⁷ to demonstrate greater effectiveness than they. Blumhofer notes that, while ‘Sister Aimee’ did not ⁸² Donald Gee, ‘The Baptism in the Holy Ghost’, Good News 14.10 (January 1924), pp. 2ff. ⁸³ Good News 16.11 (November 1925, p. 8), quoted in B. Chant, ‘Models of Ministry for Training and Education in Contemporary Australasian’, PCBC Journal 1.2 (January 1998), http://webjournals.ac.edu.au/ojs/index.php/PCBC/article/view/8937/8934, accessed 1/11/2017. ⁸⁴ Quoted in Edith L Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister (Grand Rapids, 1993), p. 199. ⁸⁵ Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson, p. 199. ⁸⁶ ‘The Churches’, Illawarra Mercury 16 September 1921, p. 7. ⁸⁷ ‘A Remarkable Woman Evangelist’, Table Talk 28 September 1922, p. 2.

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directly address the gender issue, her model drew on a rising tide of women’s leadership both in broader society (through, for instance, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union)⁸⁸ and in new church movements (the leading healing evangelist, Maria Woodworth Etter,⁸⁹ for example, and Blanche Brittain, who became ‘synonymous with the [Assemblies of God] in the northern Great Plains’).⁹⁰ McPherson’s leadership and notoriety, feted (and criticized) in the press and the new medium of radio, projected many other women into foundational roles. Anna Britton, for example, left Angelus Temple in 1927 and moved to Vancouver, founding a church which grew to nearly 1,000 members, while also planting Foursquare Churches in Western Canada.⁹¹ Mina Ross Brawner, a medical doctor who grew up in Nebraska, was possibly the most influential of Angelus Temple’s women leaders in Australia, founding churches, taking over the failing Apostolic Faith Mission (Australia) after the death of Sarah Jane Lancaster, and founding a number of Bible Standard Churches.⁹² Brawner was far less reserved than McPherson in mocking male privilege, and justifying the call of women to preach by the evidentiary effects of the Spirit’s manifestation.⁹³ The ‘headship’ of man was not, she held, the result of his specific endowments, but as a result of the Fall. In Christ, the Fall is reversed, and so the New Testament Church (the primitive Church in which the Spirit is paradigmatically ‘poured out on all flesh’) also bypasses headship where the gifts of the Spirit are present: Did I hear someone ask for the names of the women preachers? Very well, you shall have them. Phebe, Pricilla, Mary, Junia, Tryphena, and Tryphosa, Persis, Mother of Rufus, Julia, and the sister of Nereus. They are all prominent enough to be known of Paul in far off Corinth. . . . From the writings of the early Church Fathers, it seems clear that the ministry of women flourished during Apostolic times, and continued down through the first, second, and even into the third century; but as the Church became popular, and sought and obtained state favors, she lost her spiritual gifts and also the ministry of women. Then followed the dark ages.⁹⁴ ⁸⁸ viz. Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, 2010). ⁸⁹ Wayne E. Warner, Maria Woodworth-Etter: For Such a Time as This (Gainesville, 2004). ⁹⁰ D. J. Rogers, ‘Brittain, Blanche Elizabeth’, in S. Burgess and E. van der Maas, eds., New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids, 2001). ⁹¹ ‘In loving memory, Dr. Anna D. Britton, 1871–1961: a mother in the church, a minister of the gospel, a daughter of the king.’ Memorial Pamphlet, Flower Pentecostal Heritage Centre, Personal Papers, 80/5/3. ⁹² M. Hutchinson, ‘Brawner, Mina Conrod Ross (1874–1960?)’, Australasian Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, http://webjournals.ac.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ADPCM/ article/view/196/193, accessed 4/4/2015. ⁹³ Shane Clifton, ‘Pentecostal Hermeneutics and First-Wave Feminism: Mina Ross Brawner, MD’, Journal of the Pentecostal Charismatic Bible Colleges 2 (2006), http://webjournals.ac.edu.au/ ojs/index.php/PCBC/article/view/8854/8851, accessed 20/3/2018. ⁹⁴ Mina Ross Brawner, ‘Woman in the Word, part X’, Good News 20.12 (1 December 1929), p. 13.

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Here was (D)issent against the rationalizations and gender-compromises of the mainstream Church. Brawner’s sermons on ‘Woman in the Word’ were later reprinted as a single booklet, continuing to find circulation in charismatic circles down through the decades (for example) in various reprints by the Texas-based publishing house of ‘Christ for the Nations’. It received a reading because tens of thousands of women around the world were already liberating themselves by appealing to the Spirit and acting on the unchallengeable prerogative of God.⁹⁵ As Lawless noted of female ministers in Monroe County, Missouri, the ‘“call to preach” is an available strategy, perhaps the only strategy available to women in this milieu, to become independent— independent enough to leave their husbands and babies and travel far distances and stay away from home for weeks at a time’.⁹⁶ It was a call bought often at a high cost, though often a cost also borne by their male colleagues in the early years of the movement. And for a while, while women and men in the new religious movements were all visibly serving the same Kingdom, the equity of sacrifice was a sufficient basis for common action. As outreaches and missions became churches, however, and evangelists became pastors, it was clear that cultural norms influenced the selection of paid ministers, and therefore status and power within the emerging church structures.⁹⁷ The reverse was also true—during periods of economic downturn, or even the wholesale impoverishment of regions due to economic change, women found that the economy of sacrifice reopened opportunities for service. As Lawless notes of her central figure and community, ‘this is largely “cracker” country’.⁹⁸ In the sacred economy of preaching, extrinsic reward and preaching opportunity were inversely related, and justified as such from the biblical text.⁹⁹ This changed rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only was there (on the back of spreading welfare nets, and increased educational aspirations among both men and women in the West) a growing emphasis on equality, but there was a growing awareness of the gendered nature of preaching. Drawing on feminist theory (which recasts rhetoric to take account of the embodied nature of rhetorical performance), Mountford recounts a different experience from Lawless’s women Missouri preachers. Whether it was a rural camp meeting revivalist ‘shouting, then whispering’ under an ‘enormous graying tent with packed earth floors and wooden folding chairs’, or the ‘compassionate man who never shouted’ in the more liberal churches in the city, the preachers in ⁹⁵ Elaine J. Lawless, Handmaidens of the Lord: Pentecostal Women Preachers and Traditional Religion (Philadelphia, 1988), p. xx. ⁹⁶ Lawless, Handmaidens of the Lord, p. xx. ⁹⁷ Margaret M. Poloma, ‘The “Toronto Blessing”: Charisma, Institutionalization, and Revival’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36.2 (June 1997), p. 257. ⁹⁸ Lawless, Handmaidens of the Lord, p. 4. ⁹⁹ Paula D. Nesbitt, Feminization of the Clergy in America: Occupational and Organizational Perspectives (New York, 1997), p. 90.

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her life were all men.¹⁰⁰ Even those women who found their way into the ministry found themselves selectively marginalized by the denominational system, alienated by the masculinist rhetoric absorbed by the nation state in its nineteenth-century self-ordering, and battling against congregational expectations of size, voice, and delivery in rhetorical performance. Even spatially there were problems:¹⁰¹ architects design spaces for the male body. Women, whose bodies are smaller on the whole than men’s, are often dwarfed by pulpits, some needing step stools simply to see over the top. But more profoundly, church buildings themselves have a history written in stone and the social imagination that reminds even a casual passerby of the masculine authorities who dwell within.¹⁰²

Depending on the tradition, as the century progressed, issues of gender and biblical inspiration could become conflated. Dissenting traditions (on the one hand semper reformanda, on the other seeking biblical obedience) could thus find themselves arguing over issues which flowed into the public sphere from more ritualist, priestly traditions. The 1976 divisions over women’s ordination in the Episcopal Church of the USA, for example, and the international influence of the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church,¹⁰³ revived age-long debates in dissenting institutions about the reading of biblical passages involving headship, and the seeming contradiction between 1 Corinthians 14:34 and Joel 2:28. In Australia, it sparked a blazing row which divided the Anglican Church and ended up in court, leaving a lingering bitterness which resulted in continuing divisions.¹⁰⁴ The Congregational tradition (in which ordination occurs at the local level) recognized its first woman ministers in 1919 in the USA, and in 1927 in Australia; the United Methodist Church in 1956.¹⁰⁵ It was not until 1964 that a Southern Baptist woman (Addle Davis) was ordained, and then she had to leave for the American Baptists in order to find a Church which would install her as minister. By the 1990s, it was a condition of employment with most Southern Baptist agencies that an applicant was opposed to the ordination of women.¹⁰⁶ Elsewhere, the picture was more mixed: in 1978, Marita Munro became the first Australian woman to be

¹⁰⁰ Mountford, The Gendered Pulpit, pp. 1–2. ¹⁰¹ Mountford, The Gendered Pulpit, pp. 40, 66. ¹⁰² Mountford, The Gendered Pulpit, p. 3. ¹⁰³ Evident, for example, on the anti-women’s ordination site at http://thetruthinlove.net/. ¹⁰⁴ For instance, Muriel Porter, ‘Sydney Anglicans and the Threat to World Anglicanism’, http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/08/29/3304954.htm, accessed 8/4/2015; and Mark Thompson, ‘Serious Flaws in Muriel Porter’s Misguided Polemic’, http://www.abc.net.au/religion/ articles/2011/08/31/3306439.htm, accessed 8/4/2015. ¹⁰⁵ Harold W.Hoehner, ‘Can a Woman Be a Pastor-Teacher?’ Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50.4 (December 2007), p. 761. ¹⁰⁶ Carolyn D. Blevins, ‘Diverse Baptist Attitudes toward Women in Ministry: A Panel’, Baptist History and Heritage 37.3 (Summer–Fall 2002), p. 71.

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ordained a Baptist pastor.¹⁰⁷ ‘Baptist women in ministry sounds like an oxymoron to Primitive Baptists. Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) believe the idea is sheer heresy. To Freewill Baptists, it is sound doctrine.’¹⁰⁸ Based on critique and segmentation, it was not a debate which could be solved either by better feminist scholarship, or by ecclesial schism. As Kamitsuka notes, embodiment implied exclusion, which carried with it the tendency to division: Womanist, mujerista, lesbian, Asian American, two-thirds-world, and other selfnamed women’s theologies are rapidly developing their own discourses, agendas, constituencies—and fractures as well. Thus, feminist theology, with relatively new institutional standing within the field of Christian theology, has become divided . . .¹⁰⁹

The larger question, not usually addressed in such debates, was what this shift towards issues of embodiment meant for preaching in dissenting traditions. We lack the historical perspective from which to say anything definitive. Thinking forward to a time when the debates over male/female difference have been resolved, at least at the institutional level (a future which, given the conflict between the West and essentialist non-Western cultures over the treatment of women, is still beyond the horizon),¹¹⁰ historians looking back at the twentieth century may well point to broader trends. At the centre of all these debates was the nature of ‘embodiment’. The rise of the biological sciences and the related medical/scientific professions has certainly shifted the centre of intellectual attention (and so public expenditure and the related status systems). Anti-essentialism in philosophy, the broader decline of metaphysics, the recognition of the ‘metaphorical’ and even religious basis for much of science,¹¹¹ and the shift from values to design concentrations, have reflected this shift in the West. The fact that these trends began to make inroads at the same time as the rise of highly energetic healing movements in ¹⁰⁷ Darren Cronshaw, ‘A History of Women’s Ordination in the Baptist Union of Victoria’, MTh diss., Whitley College, Melbourne College of Divinity, 1998. ¹⁰⁸ Blevins, ‘Diverse Baptist Attitudes toward Women in Ministry’, 71, and Nancy Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (New Brunswick, 1990), p. 96. ¹⁰⁹ Margaret D. Kamitsuka, Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference (New York, 2007), p. 3. ¹¹⁰ ‘Boko Haram must be quaking in their boots. These “Islamic” militants have razed entire villages to the ground, hacked men to death and killed children as they slept, but now the West has a hashtag campaign’: Felicity Morse, ‘The Bring Back Our Girls Campaign is working: Boko Haram should be scared of a hashtag’, The Independent 8 April 2015, http://www.independent. co.uk/voices/comment/the-bring-back-our-girls-campaign-is-working-boko-haram-should-bescared-of-a-hashtag-9360830.html, accessed 8/4/2015. ¹¹¹ Matthew Stanley, Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science (Chicago, 2014), pp. 234ff.

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the USA, and increasingly abroad, is possibly not merely coincidental. With the collapse of the category (and gradually, the preaching) of ‘hell’ in the face of the twentieth century’s engagement with the problem of evil,¹¹² heaven declined as a plausible transcendental ‘other’: the problem of the ‘body’ and its movement through space and time became the centre for a re-evaluation of biblical preaching through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In part, it depended on educational opportunity. On the scholarly level, the ‘historical’ re-evaluation of biblical eschatology by Richard Bauckham and N. T. Wright trickled into the reading lists of pastoral training programmes, refocusing preaching on the physical world of the New Testament. In this view, the mid-century mythologizers of the Bible were not just too far out on a limb that was otherwise substantial. Rather, There is no limb . . . Bauckham refutes the form-critics’ arguments, denies the anonymity of the gospels, demonstrates the reliability of testimony in ancient as well as contemporary historiography, and rehabilitates Papias and other traditional sources on the gospels with fresh and careful readings. Yet he also uncovers new evidence that the gospels are eyewitness testimony, much of it unnoticed textual evidence from the gospels themselves. He uses all these to develop an understanding of the gospels’ character and origins that neither reverts to precritical naiveté nor indulges in a postcritical ‘second naiveté’ (the term is Paul Ricoeur’s) that affirms the critical conventional wisdom.¹¹³

Such readings, in debates between broad and conservative evangelicals, agreed on the traditional physicality of the resurrection but re-emphasized an earthly, rather than heavenly, denouement to the terrestrial story. ‘You are not going to heaven, and that is a good thing too’, noted John Stackhouse at Regent College, Vancouver, a lay theological institute with significant investments in theology of vocation.¹¹⁴ The ‘chief end of man’ was now to enjoy God together in the ‘new creation’, in which all things done in this life would be gathered up. The implication was that the works of now were pregnant with their fulfilment in the future, a teaching at odds with more rigidly reformed ‘sola gratia’ teaching of interpreters such as R. C. Sproul (Senior Minister of Preaching and Teaching at Saint Andrew’s Chapel, Sanford, Florida) or D. A. Carson (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Chicago).¹¹⁵ On the front lines of poverty, incarceration, disease, and physical danger, African American Churches have tended to be less aethereal in their approach ¹¹² Jonathan L. Kvanvig, The Problem of Hell (New York, 1993), p. 4. ¹¹³ Telford Work, ‘Review of Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony’, Biography 31.2 (Spring 2008), p. 291. ¹¹⁴ ‘Off-Campus: John Stackhouse at the Scots College Lectures’, http://www.regent-college. edu/about-us/events/event-details?event_id=310, accessed 1/11/2017. ¹¹⁵ viz. Mark A. Seifrid, ‘Blind Alleys in the Controversy over the Paul of History’, Tyndale Bulletin 45 (1994), pp. 73–95; and D. A. Carson, ‘Reflections on Salvation and Justification in the New Testament’, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 40.4 (December 1997), pp. 581–2.

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to the body. The problem they faced was not the future, but the present. Whatever the (widely debated) impact of Protestant Christianity on the rise of capitalism, there can be no doubt as to the centrality of Churches for the coherence and survivability of black communities. ‘Despite their ambiguity’, Sandra Barnes notes, ‘the indelible beneficence of the church on the attitudes and actions of believers was most apparent.’¹¹⁶ Black Churches were a response to hardship and marginalization, and black megachurches the response to the same factors in urban settings. Their adaptation of Weberian ‘inner asceticism’ to an externalized theology of positive confession has made such Churches, and their preachers, national (and even international) figures. Fred Price’s Crenshaw Christian Center, California, for instance, presents one of the top fifteen syndicated Christian programmes in the United States, while T. D. Jakes’ (Potter’s House, Dallas, Texas) Woman Thou Art Loosed became ‘a bestselling instructional manual on female self-esteem and healthy relationships’.¹¹⁷ Their rise and rise has not been without debate: critics have been quick to point to unwise investments (by the Faithful Central Baptist Church of Inglewood, California, which purchased the Los Angeles Forum for $22.5 million), or self-interested behaviour (for instance, Creflo Dollar’s appeal for a $65 million private jet).¹¹⁸ As Barnes notes, however, most megachurches are unknown to the wider community, placing disproportionate focus on the ‘overexposed’ few.¹¹⁹ (See Candy Brown’s discussion of megachurches in Chapter 1 of this volume.) The greatest challenge for such churches is the fact that, despite their size, activism, length of tenure, and demonstrable benefits for their direct members, they have not brought about substantial change to the actual ‘health and wealth’ profiles of black Americans as a whole. Inevitably, this has opened up opportunities for rivals: the rise of the Nation of Islam in the 1960s, for example, or its more ‘direct action’ proponents such as Louis Farrakhan.¹²⁰ The reach of the local preacher was now greater, but the range of audible ‘voices’ vastly greater still, leaving few with the sort of impact once wielded by Billy Graham or Charles Spurgeon. In all such traditions, including in the ‘third black diaspora’ which has fuelled the growth of Ghanaian and Nigerian anglophone Churches in Britain and other parts of the world, preaching is central. In American Churches of diverse

¹¹⁶ Sandra L. Barnes, Live Long and Prosper: How Black Megachurches Address HIV/AIDS and Poverty in the Age of Prosperity Theology (New York, 2013), p. 1. ¹¹⁷ Barnes, Live Long and Prosper, p. 1. ¹¹⁸ ‘Jesus wants me to have this jet’, The Daily Beast 14 March 2015, https://www.thedailybeast. com/articles/2015/03/14/jesus-wants-me-to-have-this-jet.html, accessed 1/11/2017. ¹¹⁹ Barnes, Live Long and Prosper, p. 2. ¹²⁰ David Boroff, ‘Louis Farrakhan refers to Ferguson as “Jefferson” in racially charged speech: “We’ll tear this goddamn country apart!” ’, New York Daily News 1 December 2014, http://www. nydailynews.com/news/national/farrakhan-refers-ferguson-jefferson-speech-article-1.2028896, accessed 8/4/2015.

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sizes, the traditional ‘call and response’ style of preaching can still be found, alongside (at least in smaller Churches) the parallel style in worship (including the ‘lining out’ of hymns, contextually triggered ‘trance’, extempore prayer interspersed with song, clapping, prostration, and other physical responses).¹²¹ Pitts notes the ‘antiphonal rhythm between preacher and congregation’ which permits melodic and immediate response from the congregation: [T]he sermon owes much of its emotional quality to the rhythm and tune of the preaching. In turn, the rhythm and tune of the sermon depend on verbal repetition and audience response, which launch the preacher’s words onto a new level of expression. When shouting results, members at St. John Progressive are fond of saying, ‘Don’t give me no religion I can’t feel.’ . . . ‘You invite the Holy Spirit to come in. . . . That’s why people shout.’ Sister Rosie explains her ecstatic behavior when she says, ‘I shout when the Holy Spirit comes on me. . . . I feel so joyous. I can’t sit down.’¹²²

It is a stereotype so common that it has been harpooned in film (as in Arsenio Hall’s ‘Reverend Brown’ in Coming to America), celebrated in news media (it provides, for instance, much of the cadence of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have been to the Mountaintop!’), and adopted across cultural lines by non-African Americans (the practice of standing and applauding the preacher before preaching, for example). While the highly effective megachurch preachers (such as T. D. Jakes) have varied their use of such rhetorical tropes, the continuities are there to hear: They will, in effect, lapse into syncopation, coming closer to the chanting rhythms typical of liturgical performance. Recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. display this movement from what might be called conversational prosody to something closer to metered syncopation, as do the sermons of some preachers who often command large audiences, like Bishop Eddie Long and T. D. Jakes. Jakes in particular will work himself up from unmetrical conversational prose to powerful rhythmic repetition.¹²³

If David Garrick would pay ‘a hundred guineas if I could only say “O!” like Mr. Whitefield’, what would he have paid to hear Jakes roar ‘God!’, or chant ‘one thing . . . one thing . . . one’?¹²⁴ The power of such rhetorical mastery, combined with a contextually pointed theology of self-empowerment and relentless use of promotional media has been sufficient to erase Jakes’ frank ¹²¹ Walter F. Pitts, Old Ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist Ritual in the African Diaspora (New York, 1996), pp. 12–13. ¹²² Pitts, Old Ship of Zion, p. 25. ¹²³ Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion (New York, 2011), p. 257. ¹²⁴ J. B. Wakeley, The Prince of Pulpit Orators: A Portraiture of Rev. George Whitefield, M.A. (New York, repr. 1899), p. 226; T. D. Jakes, ‘The Power of One’, Lakewood Church, 7 March 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3y03RvS2eE, accessed 20/3/2018.

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unorthodoxy on core doctrines (such as the Trinity). By 2001, Time Magazine was asking ‘Is This Man the Next Billy Graham?’, a remarkable statement given the national importance of Graham in the American psyche.¹²⁵ His involvement in Africa, his appearance on stages alongside Rick Warren and Joel Osteen in the Presence and Hillsong Conferences in Australia, and elsewhere in the world, combined with the marketing drive connected with the related commodities (film, plays, DVDs, podcasts, books, and even greeting cards), have reinforced not only his theological influence but the base Free Church model of the global megachurch at the top of which sits a ‘Bishop’.¹²⁶ In short, the Bishop manifested ‘power’: the power of community leadership, the power of the ‘mega’ to suggest potential futures yet unformed, the power of the self-made man, the power of rhetorical individualism in an age of homogeneity, the formal power of network recognition, the iconic power of possessions and material ‘bling’. In Weberian terms, Jakes converted rhetorical performance into organizational charisma, and so into the sort of mobile institutional hierarchy suited to an oil town (Dallas) connected to a global petroculture. On the other side of the Atlantic, another black preacher is making the running. The preaching is in a spellbinder’s adopted faux American overlying a Nigerian accent. Introduced by a lengthy ‘praise session’ led by a big band, the congregation is asked to clap, and then raise one arm as ‘a point of contact with the Holy Spirit tonight . . . Let there be uncommon favour, uncommon grace, uncommon blessing. [screams] Baptize this convention with your favour!’¹²⁷ So the words of ‘businessman and mentor’ of the current African diaspora in London, Matthew Ashimolowo, senior pastor of Kingsway International Christian Centre (KICC). Drawing some 12,000 attendees a week, Kingsway is the largest Church in Western Europe, from which Ashimolowo’s preaching is magnified by his television presence, in Britain, in Europe, and in Nigeria. His language is full of prophecy of things about to occur in the Kingdom—at Mike Okonkwo’s Redeemed Evangelical Mission (TREM) in Lagos, these included ‘a great institution’, land which would come into the hands of the Church (‘In America or the United Kingdom, I do not know which’), and a jet for the Bishop (‘I can see it, it’s a white one.’) Such promises

¹²⁵ Shayne Lee, T.D. Jakes: America’s New Preacher (New York, 2005), p. 1. ¹²⁶ Lee, T.D. Jakes: America’s New Preacher, 146. Jakes had held episcopal office in two existing non-trinitarian networks, the Greater Emanuel International Fellowship and the Higher Ground Always Abounding Assemblies. Not all of his followers have felt the need for broader associations, the power of the rhetoric being converted into organizational charisma, and so institutional hierarchy. ¹²⁷ Matthew Ashimolowo, ‘Maximizing The Grace Of God’, Kingdom Life World Conference, The Redeemed Evangelical Mission, Lagos, November 2014, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9aqmV7Ed8WI, accessed 8/4/2015.

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of blessing and material prosperity, fixed to the end points of global migration, are the basis of a circulating international economy. Ashimolowo brings his charisma to TREM, and reinforces Okonkwo’s authority at the origin point of Nigerian migration; Okonkwo in return acts as a father figure from the homeland reinforcing Ashimolowo’s authority in London, at the receiving point. In 2007, there were 380,000 Africans, and 344,000 Afro-Caribbeans living in London:¹²⁸ the power of Ashimolowo’s rhetoric to frame the community, therefore, is relative. On one hand, it is clear that the Church is one element in a much larger migrational ecology, which (in addition to movement from Africa and the Caribbean) includes movement between the other large Churches in England (Hillsong London, for example, which also meets in a disused theatre), and to and from the existing Anglican substrate of British society. On the other hand, it remains a matter of remark for British media and scholars, who stumble across such Churches and are surprised to find that ‘religion’ has managed to somehow survive the 1960s in the global city. For such people, the rhetorical importance of the Church is less important than its black-ness, its appearance in repeated inquiries by the Charities Commission, the fact that its pastor earns more than the Archbishop of Canterbury and is ‘Richer than St Paul’s’.¹²⁹ Such observers—comforted that by the fact that the ‘real’ issue is the domestication of Islam rather than migrant Christian entrepôts¹³⁰—miss the point. It is in such places that the traditional forms of preaching survive, alongside adaptive religious innovation. Up the road from Kingsway, for example, is Kensington Temple, an Elim Pentecostal Church pastored by Colin Dye. The congregation is typical of multicultural London: Indian, Chinese, Caribbean, African. Between 2000 and 2005, Dye introduced the controversial ‘G12’ cell church schema, which emerged from César Castellanos in Bogotá, Colombia. Highly charismatic, it also reinforced an ‘apostolic’ form of Church governance. Yet in the same congregation, Dye preaches alongside R. T. Kendall, for twenty-five years the fundamentalist senior pastor of Westminster Chapel. The home pulpit of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, George Campbell Morgan, and others, Westminster gained (and to some extent retains) a reputation as a major centre for expository preaching. Kendall explains the seeming contradiction by referring to the need to overcome the division between preachers of ‘the Word’ and preachers of ‘The Spirit’: ‘We believe that the need of the hour is not one or the other—but both! It is

¹²⁸ Lamin Sanneh, ‘Can Europe Be Saved? A Review Essay’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 31.3 (July 2007), p. 124. ¹²⁹ Robert Booth, ‘Richer than St Paul’s: church that attracts 8,000 congregation to a disused cinema’, The Guardian 11 April 2009. ¹³⁰ Philip Jenkins, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe’s Religious Crisis (New York, 2007), p. 98.

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our view that this simultaneous combination will result in spontaneous combustion! And then, but almost certainly only then, will the world be shaken once again by the message of the church.’¹³¹ The theological conundrums of both the liberal Jeremiah Wright in Chicago, and Kentucky-born conservative R. T. Kendall in London, reinforce the need to understand early twenty-first-century anglophone preaching in the dissenting tradition within its context of reception. Preaching, as a cultural commodity¹³² addressed to ‘consumers’ in a globally mediated market, serves a spiritual ecology quite unlike that addressed by F. W. Gunsaulus. Increasingly mediated by podcasts and live streaming, Christian communities are much more likely to encounter ‘searchers’ who have first heard their pastor preach online or on cable television (such as the Hillsong Channel on the Trinity Broadcasting Network). Every time they stand up, local pastors and preachers inevitably enter a mediated realm dominated by ‘the spectre of comparisons’, knowing that a significant proportion of their congregation will have heard sermons by some of the ‘best’ preachers in the world during the week. Not only does this vary the way in which the rhetoric of preaching acts in a ‘live’ setting, it also varies the range of ways in which a congregation might (in Dale’s words) be amenable to becoming ‘disciplined’. Doctrinal distinctives, for instance, are clearly not nearly as powerful a channelling device as in previous generations: the pugnacious doctrinal tussling between charismatic, Pentecostal, and evangelical preachers has (mostly) given way to a willingness to appear alongside one another on the same stage, recognition, perhaps, that this is the way that their ‘bricolaging’ congregants ‘hear’ them in any case; it is certainly recognition that the connection between the pulpit and the public in the West has been distinctively severed, and that influence needs to be pursued by other means. One natural consequence has been the active movement of preachers into online and televisual environments and the vast expansion of ‘Christian channels’ (in cable, on satellite, live-feed or even freeto-air formats), and onto the political stage; another has been the proliferation of contextualizing bridges (‘cross-over’ worship music, for example) as ‘places’ for preaching to occur. The resulting questions are really beyond the ambit of a chapter such as this. What happens to the sermon, for example, when it is no longer fundamentally referenced to and by the congregation? And for that matter, what happens to the congregation? What happens when it becomes merely one digital umbilical cord on iTunes among a million others? The experience of the migrant churches in London may not, in the end, be simply that of Africans and Caribbeans, but of all Christians set afloat on the global sea. ¹³¹ See http://rtkendallministries.com/about, accessed 9/4/2015. ¹³² Pradip N. Thomas and Philip Lee, ‘Global and Local Televangelism: An Introduction’, in Thomas and Lee, eds., Global and Local Televangelism (Basingstoke, 2012), p. 4.

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S E L E C T B I BL IO G R A P H Y Barnes, Sandra L., Live Long and Prosper: How Black Megachurches Address HIV/AIDS and Poverty in the Age of Prosperity Theology (New York, 2013). Billingsley, Andrew, Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform (Oxford and New York, 1999). Blumhofer, Edith L., Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister (Grand Rapids, 1993). Bond, Adam L., The Imposing Preacher: Samuel DeWitt Proctor and Black Public Faith (Minneapolis, 2013). Casey, Michael W., Saddlebags, City Streets, and Cyberspace: A History of Preaching in the Churches of Christ (Abilene, 1995). Edwards, Jr, O. C., A History of Preaching (Nashville, 2004). Field, C. D., ‘Another Window on British Secularization: Public Attitudes to Church and Clergy Since the 1960s’, Contemporary British History 28.2 (April 2014), pp. 190–218. Harp, Gillis J., Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism (Lanham, 2003). Jenkins, Philip, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe’s Religious Crisis (New York, 2007). Kamitsuka, Margaret D., Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference (New York, 2007). Larsen, D. L., The Company of Preachers: A History of Biblical Preaching from the Old Testament to the Modern Era, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, 1998). LaRue, Cleophus J., I Believe I’ll Testify: The Art of African American Preaching (Louisville, 2011). Lee, Shayne, T. D. Jakes: America’s New Preacher (New York, 2005). Lim, Elvin T., The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush (Oxford and New York, 2008). Miller, Donald G., Browne Barr, and Robert S. Paul, P. T. Forsyth—the Man, the Preachers’ Theologian, Prophet for the 20th Century: A Contemporary Assessment (Pittsburgh, 1981). Mountford, Roxanne, The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces (Carbondale, 2003). Nesbitt, Paula D., Feminization of the Clergy in America: Occupational and Organizational Perspectives (New York, 1997). Pitts, Walter F., Old Ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist Ritual in the African Diaspora (New York, 1996). Robinson, James, Divine Healing: The Holiness-Pentecostal Transition Years, 1890–1906 (Eugene, 2013). Smith, Craig R., The Quest for Charisma: Christianity and Persuasion (Westport, 2000). Stanley, Matthew, Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science (Chicago, 2014). Stolz, Jörg, ed., Salvation Goods and Religious Markets: Theory and Applications (Bern, 2008). Thomas, Pradip N. and Philip Lee, Global and Local Televangelism (Basingstoke, 2012).

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Tyrrell, Ian, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, 2010). Wacker, Grant, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, 2014). Wacker, Grant, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, 2003). Warner, Wayne E., Maria Woodworth-Etter: For Such a Time as This (Gainesville, 2004).

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6 Preaching in the Global South Jason A. Carter

Kwame Bediako surmised that surprise best characterized the spectacular growth of African Christianity in the twentieth century.¹ The 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh held in tension a thoroughgoing pessimism about the future of Christianity in Africa (‘Here, as in no other continent, there is a mass of dark, illiterate, dissevered and degraded Paganism’) and a strident triumphalism based on the missionary spirit of the high imperial age as viewed through its famous slogan (‘The evangelism of the world in this generation’).² The World Missionary Conference did not escape ‘the racial prejudices and cultural myopia’ of its era and accordingly ‘ascribed far too much power to western missionaries’ in the task of world evangelization.³ Yet with all its inevitable shortcomings, Edinburgh 1910 displayed an uncompromising commitment towards the preaching of the gospel ‘to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8). Nestled in the World Missionary Conference documents is even a certain level of prescience which foresaw indigenous preachers (no doubt arising from the ‘heroic efforts’ of western missionaries!) becoming the most vital agents in the global diffusion of the Christian faith: The church on the mission field must be the chief evangelistic agency if the Gospel is to be preached to all men in our day. The evangelisation of the non-Christian world is not alone a European, an American, an Australasian enterprise, it is equally an Asiatic and an African enterprise. While the number of well-qualified foreign missionaries must be greatly increased in order to plant Christianity, to establish the native church . . . the great volume of work involved in

¹ Kwame Bediako, Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (Edinburgh, 1995), p. 192. ² James L. Barton et al., eds., World Missionary Conference, 1910: Report of Commission 1, To Consider Missionary Problems in Relation to the Non-Christian World, vol. 1 (Edinburgh and New York, 1910), p. 242. ³ Brian Stanley, ‘When the World Church Came to Edinburgh’, Life and Work (June 2010), p. 5.

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making Christ known to the multitudinous inhabitants of the non-Christian world must be done by the sons and daughters of the soil.⁴

The extent to which indigenous preachers not only worked inside the Western missionary machinery but also outside and beyond missionary oversight often caught self-appointed guardians of Western orthodoxy by surprise.⁵ Some indigenous preachers, raised in the swaddling clothes of missionary Christianity, left the garments behind to present the message of Christ in hues and tones more suited to non-Enlightenment cosmologies. Refusing to be ‘weighed down by Saul’s armour’, these indigenous preachers preferred to challenge the cultural Goliaths of Africa, Asia, and Latin America with their own slingshots and with the stones of their own choosing. Already by 1913–14, one native son of the soil conducted such a dynamic one-man preaching crusade in West Africa that, when missionary methods were being discussed at the International Missionary Conference of 1927 more than a decade later in Le Zoute, Belgium, his name leapt to the fore. As Dr Edwin W. Smith (an accomplished former missionary to Rhodesia in his own right) remembers in his printed account of the meeting, The man who should have talked at Le Zoute about preaching to Africans is the prophet Harris who flashed like a meteor through parts of West Africa a few years ago. Africa’s most successful evangelist, he gathered in a few months a host of converts exceeding in number the total church membership of all the missions in Nyasaland now after fifty years of work. What was his method?⁶

The rise of indigenous preachers who courageously preached the gospel within the contexts of their own cultures was undoubtedly the single greatest reason for the rise of Christianity in the global South in the twentieth century. But while much ink has been spilled over Western preaching phenomena such as Charles Haddon Spurgeon or Billy Graham, preachers in the global South, while dramatically affecting the development of global Christianity, nevertheless have often been overlooked despite their own contribution to the nature and character of Christianity in the twentieth century. By peering into the careers of three ‘sons of the soil’ arising from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the ways in which preachers in the global South staked out new thematic territory for Protestantism based on their engagement with indigenous cultures, and simultaneously reshaped existing Western narratives about the very ⁴ Barton et al., eds., World Missionary Conference, 1910: Report of Commission 1, p. 368 (italics added). ⁵ With respect to African Christianity, Andrew Walls has observed: ‘Modern African Christianity is not only the result of movements among Africans, but it has been principally sustained by Africans and is to a surprising extent the result of African initiatives. Even the missionary factor must be put into perspective.’ Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, 1996), p. 89. ⁶ Edwin W. Smith, The Christian Mission in Africa (London, 1926), p. 42.

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identity of Protestantism itself, sheds critical light on the ongoing tradition of Protestant dissent in the twentieth century.

WILLIAM WADÉ HARRIS: THE BLACK ELIJAH OF WEST AFRICA William Wadé Harris (1860–1929) was a Glebo (Liberian) prophet who baptized more than 100,000 people in eighteen months in 1913–14 during his initial itinerant preaching ministry amidst the coastal villages of the Ivory Coast and the western Gold Coast (Ghana).⁷ Leaving Cape Palmas, Liberia on 27 July 1913, Harris crossed the Cavally River into Ivory Coast with two women singers playing calabash rattlers, calling traditional religionists to abandon their charms and amulets. Harris urged his fellow West Africans to believe in one God, observe the Sabbath, be baptized, join (or build) churches, live in peace, and wait for a ‘white man with the Book’ to teach his followers.⁸ The respected Catholic historian Adrian Hastings called Prophet Harris ‘the most extraordinarily successful one man evangelical crusade that Africa has ever known’.⁹ Harris was raised in a traditional Glebo village in Cape Palmas, a town often in the evangelistic crosshairs of both Methodist and Episcopalian missionaries. Educated in an American Methodist Mission, Harris was baptized by the Reverend John C. Lowrie (his maternal uncle) and eventually learned to read the Bible in both Glebo and English.¹⁰ In 1881, at the age of 21, Harris was converted through the preaching of the Liberian preacher, the Reverend Thompson, based on a sermon from Revelation 2:4–5 (‘Thou hast left thy first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent’). After his conversion, Harris married Rose Farr, with whom he had six children, and proceeded to work for fifteen years in various positions in Episcopalian circles as a catechist and school teacher before eventually becoming the warden of a small boarding school.¹¹ In 1910, Harris collaborated with an anti-Liberian government revolt in favour of British rule, and so landed in prison. It was while in prison that, according to Harris, the Angel Gabriel appeared to him in ⁷ Glebo is also variously referred to as Grebo, Gedebos, or G’debos. ⁸ David A Shank, ‘The Legacy of William Wadé Harris’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 10.4 (October 1986), p. 170. ⁹ Adrian Hastings, African Christianity (London, 1976), p. 10 as cited by Shank, ‘The Legacy of William Wadé Harris’, p. 170. ¹⁰ See Shank, ‘The Legacy of William Wadé Harris,’ p. 171; John Zarwan, ‘William Wadé Harris: The Genesis of an African Religious Movement’, Missiology 3.4 (October 1975), p. 433. ¹¹ Shank, ‘The Legacy of William Wadé Harris’, p. 171; Zarwan, ‘William Wadé Harris’, p. 434.

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a trance whereby he experienced the Holy Spirit as ‘ice descending on his head and all over him’ anointing him to be a prophet of the end times.¹² Shortly after his release from prison, and the death of his wife, Harris began his ministry in the Ivory Coast and Gold Coast, exchanging his ‘civilized’ Western clothing for a white robe and turban while carrying a bamboo staff adorned with a cross, a Bible, and a calabash bowl for baptism.¹³ Harris challenged tribal Africans to burn their fetishes, amulets, and traditional talismans of protection from evil and turn in repentance to the one true God in Jesus Christ. Like Elijah on Mount Carmel confronting the prophets of Baal in a public power encounter, the ministerial identity of Harris pulsated with a prophetic consciousness which collided with an end-times urgency. David Shank, the foremost scholar on Prophet Harris, described his ministry in these terms: There, dressed in a white cassock and turban with a cross-topped staff in one hand and a Bible and baptismal bowl in the other, he cut a striking and original figure as he attacked the local spiritual powers, disarming their practitioners, often in a contest where he proved to be the most powerful. In response all the village people would bring their religious artefacts to be burned, then they would kneel for baptism while grasping the cross, and receive a tap of confirmation with the prophet’s Bible.¹⁴

Traditions surrounding Harris suggested that he had the power to call down rain from heaven and the fire of judgement on sin and witchcraft.¹⁵ Harris once prophesied that a ship in the port of Grand Bassam, Ivory Coast would burn the next day when he saw kroo-boys working on the Sabbath—which, in fact, it truly did.¹⁶ Harris’ prophetic, confrontational style was a hallmark of his preaching ministry: Harris claimed to be a prophet with all the special powers that God bestows on those He chooses. These powers enabled him to drive out demons and spirits, the enemies of God. He cured the sick in body and in mind by driving out the evil beings preying on them. Those who practiced black magic had to confess and repent or he made them mad. He had all the power of the fetish men and more: with his basin of Holy Water he put God’s seal on those who repented and accepted baptism. If after that they fell into old wickedness, they died or went mad.¹⁷

¹² G. M. Haliburton, The Prophet Harris: A Study of an African Prophet and His Mass Movement in the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast, 1913–1915 (London, 1973), p. 35. ¹³ Cephas N. Omenyo, ‘Agenda for a Discussion of African Initiatives in Christianity: The West African/Ghanaian Case,’ Missiology: An International Review 39.3 (July 2011), p. 379. ¹⁴ Shank, ‘The Legacy of William Wadé Harris,’ p. 172. ¹⁵ Haliburton, The Prophet Harris, pp. 82, 85. ¹⁶ Shank, ‘The Legacy of William Wadé Harris’, p. 172. ¹⁷ Haliburton, The Prophet Harris, p. 3 (italics added).

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Harris’ ministerial legacy provided an exceptional breakthrough for Protestant and Catholic missions in the region, many of which reaped an extraordinary harvest in the wake of his itinerant preaching. The Reverend W. J. Platt, a British Methodist missionary, upon arriving in Ivory Coast in 1923, ‘was informed by a French lawyer of the existence of thousands of Christians who had been baptized but had never seen a missionary, and were still untaught’.¹⁸ These baptized followers of Harris had built village churches and were still waiting more than a decade later for the white man to teach them the Christian faith. Within sixteenth months, British Wesleyans organized 160 chapels as 32,000 new members came streaming into the Methodist mission.¹⁹ In Apollonia, Ghana in 1914, there were no baptized Catholics, but only a few years later—riding the ‘tidal wave of religious enthusiasm’ (as Frederick A. Price described the subsequent harvest resulting from Harris’ campaigns)—the Catholic Church by 1920 counted 5,200 members, 15,400 catechumens, 26 principal mission stations, and 36 secondary mission stations in that area alone.²⁰

The Preaching Message of Prophet Harris Years later, the scholar Gordon Haliburton captured the essence of Harris’ message through interviewing, in pidgin English, elderly men in a village in Ivory Coast. He writes that Harris ‘caused an immediate sensation’, and ‘appeared to the inhabitants to be a spirit, he was so unlike any humans they knew. His white gown and turban, his black sashes, his white beard and flashing eyes, filled all who saw him with awe, and it could be believed that a new god had arrived, more powerful than any preceding ones.’ Those who heard him reported (after many years) his message in these terms: ‘Fetishes dey in town, in bush, in wattah . . . God send me for come burn . . . let no man go worship de fetish for fetish no good.’ The people replied, ‘You come here to burn de fetish . . . you done burn all de fetish . . . suppose person be sick, how we gon’ to make medicine?’ Harris said: ‘If you believe God, all be nutting. Everyting be fit do you.’²¹

Western missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries working in Africa had experienced limited success in convincing people to

¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹

Zarwan, ‘William Wadé Harris’, p. 431. Shank, ‘The Legacy of William Wadé Harris’, p. 174. Shank, ‘The Legacy of William Wadé Harris’, pp. 174–5. Haliburton, The Prophet Harris, p. 37.

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abandon their amulets and fetishes.²² Yet Harris saw a mass movement of people enthusiastically burning their traditional objects of spiritual protection in exchange for a Christian baptism. (As Yeo also notes in Chapter 4 in this volume, this sort of disempowerment of fetishes elsewhere in Africa made way for the pre-eminence of biblical interpretation.) What was the unique style and message of Harris that afforded him such pioneering success? One answer lies in his openness to accept polygamy as an African way of life rather than making the issue a sociological stumbling block for Africans to accept the new faith (‘God did not intend to make the same law for black and white people. Blacks can take as many wives as they can look after’²³). The preaching of Harris upheld the traditional social fabric of African village life rather than tearing it apart. On the Ivory Coast, French colonialism was producing rapid social change as ‘people were removed from their numerous small hamlets’ and sent to larger villages in an effort to control the indigenous population.²⁴ Traditional fetishes and amulets of protection seemed increasingly incapable of providing the spiritual protection the people craved. On the Ivory Coast, Harris’ reputation preceded him with people awaiting a ‘messenger of God’ or, even more curiously, ‘a great fetish’ to arrive in their coastal villages.²⁵ Harris’ persona and preaching was the catalyst of a mass movement of fetish burning in the midst of this rapid social change. The ritual waters of Christian baptism offered by the Black Elijah offered a new kind of spiritual protection. The oft-told stories of people dying or being driven insane after refusing to relinquish and burn their fetishes as per Harris’ instructions only added to the aura of the Prophet’s mystique.

The Homiletics of Witchcraft in Sub-Saharan Africa In South Africa, the Scottish missionary Robert Moffat recalled that certain Batswana observers in the mid-nineteenth century confused his Bible with witchcraft bola: ‘My books puzzled them; they asked if they were my “Bola,” [or] prognosticating dice.’²⁶ In other words, Africans met neither the missionary ²² ‘Prior to this trip [by Harris], eighty years of Protestant and Catholic mission work in Cote d’Ivoire had produced only several hundred converts’: Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom, Clouds of Witnesses: Christian Voices from Africa and Asia (Downers Grove, 2011), p. 66. ²³ Harris as cited in Noll and Nystrom, Clouds of Witnesses, p. 76. Haliburton writes that Harris ‘kept his converts in the new faith by modifying their practices in intelligent ways, rather than by condemning them outright. A very important element in the lasting success of his work was that he did not have to drive wedges into the social body, as missionaries commonly did, to win over individual souls. Rather he won over the whole community and preserved its social structure intact’: Haliburton, The Prophet Harris, p. 3. ²⁴ Haliburton, The Prophet Harris, p. 31. ²⁵ Haliburton, The Prophet Harris, p. 33. ²⁶ Robert Moffat, Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (London, 1842), p. 384.

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Moffat nor the Prophet Harris in a cultural vacuum but with distinct preunderstandings of what exactly a ‘religious’ experience entailed in their cultural contexts. Bediako described Harris as ‘a trail-blazer and a new kind of religious personage on the African scene, the first independent African Christian prophet’.²⁷ The issue is not whether Harris himself conceived of his vocation as a prophet—he most certainly did. Harris envisioned himself as the Black Elijah of Malachi 4 inaugurating the end-time millennial rule of Christ as the storm clouds of the First World War began gathering overhead.²⁸ But perhaps a better moniker or epithet to describe Harris is that of a one-man anti-witchcraft eradication crusade. Haliburton observed that ‘Harris made the focus of his preaching an attack on the traditional religious beliefs of the people, and especially on witchcraft in all its forms.’²⁹ Christian baptism effectively served as a new talisman to alleviate witchcraft fears. The imprecatory homiletics of Harris railed against the devilish tomfoolery of fetishes and amulets and dared people to disobey—or else. No wonder the villagers awaited Harris as ‘a new fetish’—his imprecatory preaching messages had all the trappings of a Christianized anti-witchcraft cult. The villagers experienced Prophet Harris as the new Christian traditional healer or witchdoctor par excellence, one who arrived at a time of great social dislocation with both a new message (the Bible) and a new ritual (Christian baptism). As Andrew Walls has observed, ‘The conditions of Africa . . . are taking Christian theology into new areas of life where Western theology has no answers, because it has no questions.’³⁰ The same is true of the grass-roots homiletical enterprise in sub-Saharan Africa where the centrality of witchcraft often becomes continuously refracted through the prism of the Bible in the preaching task.³¹ The Prophet Harris did not simply interpret or preach from the Bible but lived within its pages. And that meant he brought Moses, Elijah, and Jesus to bear upon the concerns and fears of witchcraft which so bedevilled those who heard him. Today, in many sub-Saharan African communities, stories of witchcraft not only race through communities at astounding speeds but also represent one of the chief talking points of the entire society. Indeed,

²⁷ Bediako, Christianity in Africa, p. 91 (italics added). ²⁸ Shank, ‘The Legacy of William Wadé Harris’, p. 172. ²⁹ Haliburton, The Prophet Harris, p. xii. ³⁰ Andrew F. Walls, ‘Structural Problems in Mission Studies’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 15.4 (October, 1991), pp. 146–7. ³¹ See Jason Carter, Inside the Whirlwind: The Book of Job through African Eyes (Eugene, 2017): ‘The theme of witchcraft was so central for ordinary readers [of the Bible in Central Africa] that one can scarcely talk intelligently of popular African hermeneutics without acknowledging its controlling influence. As ordinary readers bring their concerns, questions, and preunderstandings of the cosmos to bear upon Christian scriptures, the theme of witchcraft is continuously refracted through the prism of their biblical interpretation . . . In short, witchcraft is ubiquitously present in the interpretation of Christian scriptures as ordinary readers approach biblical texts’ (pp. 238–9).

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anti-witchcraft actions in local communities have drawn international human rights attention, as well as anthropological analysis of the moral panics manufactured around the symbolic function of witchcraft.³² Homiletical reflection and ecclesial praxis tend, therefore, to circle constantly around witchcraft-related themes—an issue which presents Churches in Africa with unique opportunities and distinct contextual challenges.³³ In fact, the grassroots homiletical engagement with witchcraft may represent one of the most decisive developments for the future identity and character of African Christianity, itself a vital centre for the shaping of dissenting Protestant traditions in the global communion.

FROM M I N J U N G TO PENTECOSTALISM IN SOUTH KOREA On 13 November 1970, a 22-year-old textile worker and labour activist, Chun Tae Il, marched in a street demonstration against the oppressive and brutal sweatshops which beset (by the hundreds) the landscape of Seoul, South Korea. When excessive violence by the police blocked the demonstration, Chun Tae Il tossed gasoline on his body and burned himself to death. On the posters in his hands were the pleas: ‘We are not Machines’ and ‘Obey the Labor Laws’.³⁴ His death reverberated throughout college campuses, igniting a veritable wave of rallies and hunger strikes to condemn the government’s draconian labour policies. In the tumultuous decade of the 1970s in South Korea, Minjung theology was born. Although difficult to translate, minjung is an amalgamation of two Chinese characters, min (people) and jung (mass) which signifies ‘mass of people’ or simply ‘the people’.³⁵ The minjung are those ordinary people who are exploited sociopolitically, marginalized economically, and relegated to the sidelines in cultural matters and educational opportunities. Minjung theology argues that ‘Jesus lived as a minjung, and as a minjung he proclaimed the Kingdom of ³² S. Tendler, ‘Murdered boy’s torso found in Thames’, The Times 24 September 2001, p. 14; Nils Bubant, ‘From Head-hunter to Organ-thief: Verisimilitude, Doubt, and Plausible Worlds in Indonesia and Beyond’, Oceania 87.1 (March 2017), p. 42; Soma Chaudhuri, Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India: Tempest in a Teapot (Lanham, 2013), pp. 33–5. ³³ For example, see Abraham Akrong, ‘Neo-Witchcraft Mentality in Popular Christianity’, Research Review 16.1 (2000), pp. 1–12; Kenneth R. Ross, ‘Preaching in Mainstream Christian Churches in Malawi: A Survey and Analysis’, Journal of Religion in Africa 25.1 (1995), pp. 11–13. ³⁴ Chang-nack Kim, ‘Korean Minjung Theology: An Overview’, Chicago Theological Seminary Register 85.2 (1995), p. 3. ³⁵ Dong-kun Kim, ‘Korean Minjung Theology in History and Mission’, Studies in World Christianity 2.2 (1996), p. 167.

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God to the minjung of his time.’³⁶ The belief that the minjung are ‘the subject of history’ has been a hallmark of Minjung theology, a position which implies that minjung liberation movements reside as the messianic connecting points between God and humanity. For Ahn Byung-Mu, one of the fathers of Minjung theology, the Jesus-event becomes embodied in minjung events like Chun Tae Il’s self-immolation in protest against a repressive governmental ideology.³⁷ Yet much has changed in South Korea since the military dictatorships of the 1970s which bred widespread poverty and fuelled vehement anti-governmental labour movements. In the 1980s and 1990s, South Korea experienced the rise of a prominent middle class characterized by upward social mobility and economic stability. Thus, despite Minjung theology being the most widely known theological export of South Korea, in 1994 a survey found only 114 minjung churches, with a total membership of 4,000,³⁸ a comparatively small ‘drop in the ocean’ amongst the estimated fifteen million Christians in South Korea.³⁹ Thus, whilst the crisis of Minjung theology was being explored by a one-time leader of the movement,⁴⁰ and was widely absorbed by liberal dissenting movements (e.g. at the divisive 1991 Seventh Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Canberra, Australia)⁴¹ as an intellectualized response to world poverty, a vastly different expression of Christianity was emerging in South Korea itself—the rise of Korean Pentecostalism.

David (Paul) Yonggi Cho—Megachurch Pastor The explosion of Pentecostalism in South Korea can be viewed most prominently in the ascent of Yoido Full Gospel Church (YFGC) to the status of the world’s largest church with David (Paul) Yonggi Cho at the helm. Born in 1936, Cho was a sickly Buddhist child who experienced salvation and divine healing from tuberculosis at age 18: ‘The tuberculosis that had been weighing me down gradually disappeared from my body after I started believing that ³⁶ Kim, ‘Korean Minjung Theology: An Overview’, p. 173. ³⁷ Volker Küster, ‘Jesus and the Minjung Revisited: The Legacy of Ahn Byung-Mu (1922–1996)’, Biblical Interpretation 19.1 (2011), p. 10. ³⁸ Kim, ‘Korean Minjung Theology in History and Mission’, p. 169. ³⁹ For the numerical strength of Christianity in South Korea, see Jason Mandryk, Operation World, 7th edn (Colorado Springs, 2010), p. 509. ⁴⁰ See Suh Nam-Dong, ‘The Crisis of Minjung Theology’, Christian Thought 9 (1993), pp. 187–204. ⁴¹ ‘Evangelical perspectives from Canberra, 01 February 1991’, World Council of Churches, https://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/wcc-programmes/ecumenical-movementin-the-21st-century/member-churches/special-commission-on-participation-of-orthodox-churches/ sub-committee-ii-style-ethos-of-our-life-together/evangelical-perspectives-from-canberra, accessed 6/11/2017.

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Jesus would cure me . . . all because of the positive thoughts that God put inside my head.’⁴² After graduating from the Assemblies of God’s Full Gospel Theological Seminary, Cho inaugurated a church with his future mother-inlaw, Jasil Choi, on 18 May 1958. In attendance were five people in a povertystricken area of Seoul amongst a populace still recovering from the devastation of the Korean War. The ‘tent church’, as Cho called it, began on a humble foundation, meeting under an abandoned US military tent on a concrete slab. Both Cho and Choi laid the groundwork of the church through hours of prayer: Since we had no members to minister to in the beginning, we both got up at 4:30 in the morning and prayed together until seven, then after having breakfast we prayed again until noon. After a short rest, we prayed together until the evening. God allowed us to be partners and guided us to pray to Him daily for ten hours, because He was teaching us how to start His church and how to pray to him.⁴³

From humble beginnings, the ‘tent church’ eventually grew to 2,000 members over the next five years. By 1971, the church had grown to 15,000 members with Cho implementing a cell-group home structure utilizing women leaders, eventually triggering a staggering numerical explosion. In a patriarchal society where, according to Cho, women were supposed ‘to live a happy life of getting married, having children and making a happy home’, his vision of a cell-based church comprised predominantly of women cell-group leaders cut sharply against the grain of Korean culture.⁴⁴ After the completion of the 10,000-seat sanctuary built in Yoido in 1973, the membership of the church experienced exponential growth. By 1979, the church counted 100,000 members, doubling again in the next two years to 200,000. By 1984, the church was celebrating seven services with a membership of 400,000 and, by 1992, Yoido Full Gospel Church registered 32,000 cell groups with 70,000-plus lay leaders supporting a congregation of over 700,000 members.⁴⁵ In the 1990s, approximately 200,000–250,000 members regularly attended the Yoido site (which now seats 31,000) with the rest of the congregation spreading out over a dozen satellite chapels in Seoul.⁴⁶ At the time of writing, the YFGC (even after a ⁴² David Yonggi Cho, Dr. David Yonggi Cho, Ministering Hope for 50 Years (Seoul, 2008), p. 10. ⁴³ Cho, Ministering Hope for 50 Years, p. 31. ⁴⁴ David Yonggi Cho, ‘Church Growth and Cell Groups’, in Sung-Hoon Myung and YoungGi Hong, eds., Charis and Charisma: David Yonggi Cho and the Growth of Yoido Full Gospel Church (Eugene, 2011), p. 97. ⁴⁵ See Cho, Ministering Hope for 50 Years, p. 123; Hurston, Growing the World’s Largest Church, p. 88. Statistics for 1995 are more modest: 19,704 women’s cell groups, 3,612 men’s cell groups, and 569 children’s cell groups; see ‘Welcome to Yoido Full Gospel Church!’, http:// english.fgtv.com/a1/a1_063.asp, accessed 23/5/2017. ⁴⁶ Ig-Jin Kim, ‘History and Theology of Korean Pentecostalism: Sunbogeum (Pure Gospel) Pentecostalism: An Attempt to Research the History of the Largest Congregation in Church History and the Theology of Its Pastor Yonggi Cho’, Missiological Research in the Netherlands 35 (Uitgeverij Boekencentrum, 2003), p. 166.

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number of scandals and the retirement of its founding pastor), could still report some 830,000 registered members.⁴⁷

The Fivefold Gospel and Threefold Blessing When Cho originally planted the ‘tent church’, the minjung (the ordinary mass of people) were struggling to rebuild their lives after the devastation caused by the Korean War. Surrounded by people suffering from poverty, disease, and hopelessness, Cho confronted many of the same problems which Koreans typically took to shamans (traditional healers). Buoyed by his Pentecostal faith and unwavering belief in the Holy Spirit, Cho pioneered in Korea a distinctive ‘fivefold gospel’ which, according to Young-Gi Hong, was ‘the result of grafting the historical and theological doctrines of the Methodist and holiness’ churches into a ‘Korean aboriginal context’.⁴⁸ As Hurston notes, Cho developed a technique of prayer such that before he preached, he would say: ‘Dear Spirit of the Lord, Senior Partner, let’s go! I am just Your Junior Partner. I depend on You.’⁴⁹ For Cho, the fivefold gospel became a theological necessity born out of meeting the suffering of a devastated, war-torn nation.⁵⁰ The terminology ‘Full Gospel’ has its origins in the biblical text of Romans 15:8–9 wherein Paul refers to ‘mighty signs and wonders by the power of the Spirit of God’ as he ‘fully preached the gospel of Christ’. Classical Pentecostal leaders such as Aimee Semple McPherson essentially adapted the Full Gospel theology of the holiness movement (Christ the Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King as described by A. B. Simpson),⁵¹ by absorbing sanctification into the experiential category of ‘baptism in the Spirit’. As Ig-Jin Kim underscores, ‘the shift from Sanctifier to baptism in the Spirit (together with the glossolalia issue) resulted in a shift away from the Holiness movement, resulting in Pentecostalism—a radicalizing process in the spiritual realm.’⁵² Similarly, Yoido Full Gospel Church can be viewed as embodying a further radicalization of classical pentecostalism by incorporating the ideology of prosperity (referred to as the ‘gospel of blessings’) to dissent from earlier

⁴⁷ Dave Hazzan, ‘Why the World’s Largest Church Still Worships Its Embezzling Former Leader’, Vice News, https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/zn8be8/why-the-worlds-largest-churchstill-worships-its-embezzling-former-leader, accessed 6/11/2017. ⁴⁸ Young-Gi Hong, ‘The Influence of Rev. Cho’s Church Growth on Korean Society’, in Myung and Hong, eds., Charis and Charisma (Eugene, 2011), p. 199. ⁴⁹ Karen Hurston, Growing the World’s Largest Church (Springfield, 1994), p. 159. ⁵⁰ Hong, ‘The Influence of Rev. Cho’s Church Growth’, p. 201. ⁵¹ Robert Cornwall, ‘Primitivism and the Redefinition of Dispensationalism in the Theology of Aimee Semple McPherson’, Pneuma 14.1 (January 1992), p. 23. ⁵² Kim, ‘History and Theology of Korean Pentecostalism’, p. 195.

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twentieth-century expressions of pentecostal theologies. Therefore, the ‘fivefold gospel’ in Cho’s synthesis refers to salvation, baptism of the Holy Spirit, divine healing, the second coming of Christ, and prosperity, which (as Candy Brown notes in Chapter 1 in this volume) Cho often credits along with faith healing as a catalyst for Yoido’s explosive growth.⁵³ If the fivefold gospel is the doctrinal foundation for Yoido Full Gospel Church, the threefold blessing is its practical outworking.⁵⁴ The threefold blessing refers to spiritual blessings, material blessings, and the blessing of health, wherein 3 John 2 serves as the de facto exegetical template of Yoido Full Gospel Church through which the Christian faith is practised.⁵⁵ Cho writes: I cried and prayed with tears day in and day out, earnestly seeking. After I spent much time in supplication, God finally spoke to my heart . . . The word from God contained the truth of the threefold blessings of salvation, health, and prosperity, written in 3 John 2: ‘Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.’⁵⁶

This was, not coincidentally, the same text which had acted as an explanatory key for Oral Roberts and the Healing Revival in the USA, which was spreading through Asia at this time.⁵⁷ As Philip Jenkins suggests, ‘Comprehending the prosperity gospel might be the most pressing task for anyone trying to study the changing shape of global Christianity.’⁵⁸ Matters of influence in intellectual history are, of course, difficult and often much debated. Scholar Myung Soo Park, indeed, argues that the ‘word of faith’ prosperity preacher Oral Roberts has decisively influenced Cho, especially in his development of the threefold blessed based upon 3 John 2: ‘Cho’s thought and work have been rooted in the North American Pentecostal and Charismatic movements . . . his gospel of healing and wealth has been imported from that continent.’⁵⁹ Yet other scholars root Cho’s materialistic vision of salvation and blessings squarely within the context of Korean shamanism. In Fire from Heaven, Harvey Cox argues that YFGC ‘involves a massive importation of shamanic practice into a Christian ritual’,⁶⁰ while Walter Hollenweger contends that the ‘famous Korean Pentecostal pastor Paul Yonggi Cho . . . could be considered a Pentecostal ⁵³ See Cho, Ministering Hope for 50 Years, p. 43. ⁵⁴ See also Kim, ‘History and Theology of Korean Pentecostalism’, p. 202. ⁵⁵ Hurston, Growing the World’s Largest Church, p. 139. ⁵⁶ David Yonggi Cho, Our God Is Good: Scriptural Blessings in Christ (London, 1987), p. 11. ⁵⁷ David Harrell, All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America (Bloomington, 2017), p. 177. ⁵⁸ Philip Jenkins, ‘The Case for Prosperity’, Christian Century 127.24 (2010), p. 45. ⁵⁹ Myung Soo Park, ‘David Yonggi Cho and International Pentecostal/Charismatic Movements’, Journal of Pentecostal Theology 12.1 (October 2003), p. 108. ⁶⁰ Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (London, 1996), p. 226.

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Shaman par excellence’.⁶¹ In Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish, David Martin argues for a polycentric influence on Cho, citing that YFGC ‘is not shamed to fuse revivalism and prosperity theology with shamanistic practice’.⁶² In short, Cho had produced a forward-looking, albeit controversial, theological explanation for economic prosperity just as Korean national prospects were entering a ‘tiger economy’ phase. Thus, if the influence included a North American holiness template, the appropriation was distinctly an indigenizing act.

Preaching to Heal the Wounded Heart of Han It is nearly impossible to understand the explosion of Pentecostalism on the Korean peninsula without appreciating the centrality of han as a distinguishing feature of the Korean culture and its people.⁶³ Andrew S. Park defines han as ‘a wound to feelings and self-dignity’ or, more poetically, as a ‘wounded heart’.⁶⁴ In the words of Dongsoo Kim, han is ‘a feeling of defeat, resignation and nothingness’ which ‘is typically resolved by releasing, unraveling or healing . . . so the way to unravel han has become a form of religion or art’.⁶⁵ Through shamanistic practice, the ancestors or dead spirits which are thought to be blocking health, fertility, or success in life are ritually manipulated wherein the han of the living is released and healed in body, soul, and spirit. Cho’s positive preaching philosophy of ‘redemption and lift’⁶⁶ and ‘find need and meet need’⁶⁷ fits the goals and aims of shamanistic practice in the uplifting of the wounded and defeated heart of han. Boo Woong Yoo writes: ‘Why do the Korean working class and particularly women go to the shaman? Because they need health, wealth, fertility and success in their life ventures. Rev. Cho’s preaching meets those needs exactly.’⁶⁸ Cho’s preaching recipe of the threefold blessing from his favourite text of 3 John 2 consisting of business and material prosperity (‘all may go well with

⁶¹ Walter Hollenweger, Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide (Peabody, 1997), p. 100, fn 2. ⁶² David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford, 2002), p. 161. ⁶³ Dongsoo Kim, ‘The Healing of Han in Korean Pentecostalism’, Journal of Pentecostal Theology 7.15 (October 1999), pp. 125–6. ⁶⁴ Andrew S. Park, The Wounded Heart of God: The Asian Concept of Han and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (Nashville, 1993), p. 20. ⁶⁵ Kim, ‘The Healing of Han in Korean Pentecostalism’, pp. 126–7. ⁶⁶ Hong, ‘The Influence of Rev. Cho’s Church Growth on Korean Society’, p. 205. ⁶⁷ David Yonggi Cho, Church Growth 3 (Seoul, 1983), p. 30 as cited by Boo Woong Yoo, ‘Response to Korean Shamanism by the Pentecostal Church’, International Review of Mission 74.297 (January 1986), p. 73. ⁶⁸ Yoo, ‘Response to Korean Shamanism’, p. 73.

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you’), good health and longevity (‘that you may be in health’), and protection from evil spirits (‘well with your soul’) echoes the needs traditionally sought through the shaman by Koreans.⁶⁹ Cho’s personal story, especially his miraculous recovery from terminal tuberculosis, is a paradigmatic shamanic experience which makes him easily recognizable by minjung as having the spiritual charisma to successfully heal han. Cho’s theology of positivity viscerally connects with the wounded heart of han. Yoo argues that for Cho, ‘The Christian faith is positive thinking and Jesus is a positive thinker.’⁷⁰ In his early years of ministry, Cho remembers proclaiming positive results for his life and church: I stood in front of a mirror, and with my both fists clenched, and staring fiercely at myself, I began to shout: ‘Yonggi Cho, you are not poor!’ ‘Yonggi Cho, you are wealthy!’ ‘Our church shall reach one thousand members by next year!’ ‘Yonggi Cho, you suffered from tuberculosis in the past, but look at you now; you are healthy!’⁷¹

In The Fourth Dimension: The Keys to Putting Your Faith to Work for a Successful Life, Cho insists that dreams, visions, thoughts, and the spoken word have creative power over the material realm to produce positive results in life. Critics point to axioms such as ‘seeing is possession’,⁷² or ‘God wants to give you the desires of your heart’,⁷³ or ‘what you speak, you are going to get’,⁷⁴ to underscore their argument that the Christian faith at Yoido Full Gospel Church often borders on making God a means to an end—a diminutive ‘cosmic bellhop’⁷⁵ whose only job is to respond to the whims and wishes of Yoido members. In other words, has Cho essentially reduced Christianity to a ‘barter concept of religion’⁷⁶ insofar as God is primarily utilized to attain health, wealth, and success in life? In a country with a powerful reformed Presbyterian tradition, and well-articulated international links with both sides

⁶⁹ Yoo, ‘Response to Korean Shamanism’, p. 74. ⁷⁰ Yoo, ‘Response to Korean Shamanism’, p. 74. ⁷¹ Cho, Dr. David Yonggi Cho, Ministering Hope for 50 Years, pp. 68–9. ⁷² Paul Yonggi Cho, The Fourth Dimension: The Key to Putting Your Faith to Work for a Successful Life (Plainfield, 1979), p. 47. ⁷³ Cho, The Fourth Dimension, p. 65. Cho also maintains that ‘if you desire to live a successful life of wealth, you must always have a picture of yourself as a wealthy person . . . You must think it consciously. So let the mind of wealth always take its place in your heart’: David Yonggi Cho, Unleashing the Power of Faith (Alachua, 2006), p. 115. ⁷⁴ Cho, The Fourth Dimension: The Key to Putting Your Faith to Work for a Successful Life, p. 70. ⁷⁵ David W. Jones and Russell S. Woodbridge, Health, Wealth & Happiness: Has the Prosperity Gospel Overshadowed the Gospel of Christ? (Grand Rapids, 2010), p. 102, citing James R. Goff Jr, ‘The Faith That Claims’, Christianity Today 34 (February 1990), p. 21. ⁷⁶ Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, 1987), p. 54.

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of the fundamentalist–modernist debate, no one is unaligned, least of all with respect to the multitude of various opinions regarding such a controversial and catalytic figure as Cho.

Homiletics and Contextualization In an intriguing twist of Korean church history, then, as Minjung theologians were holding academic forums talking about God’s ‘preferential option for the poor’, many of the poor were themselves opting for the feel-good homiletics of Cho and his Pentecostal threefold blessing. The difference is noteworthy: Minjung theology conceives of the minjung as the ‘revelational subject’ of history whereas YFGC regards the minjung as the ‘evangelization object’ of the gospel.⁷⁷ Have pentecostal homiletics truly tapped into a deeper contextualization of the gospel for South Korean society than Minjung theology? Or, as Miroslav Volf suggests, are liberation theologies and pentecostalism more similar than they appear on the surface, since both accentuate the ‘materiality of salvation’?⁷⁸ Boo-Woong Yoo maintains that there is ‘Pentecostal minjung’ and ‘socio-political minjung’ and argues that the difference ‘is a matter of emphasis, not substance’.⁷⁹ The homiletical practices emerging from the global South have renewed discussions centring upon the delicate balance between contextualization and syncretism. Cho’s homiletics raise poignant issues of contextualization such as (1) to what extent can Cho’s sermons be interpreted as shamanistic applications of the Bible⁸⁰ and (2) can one faithfully accomplish the goals of shamanism through Christian homiletics and church praxis in a local church? As Hollenweger polemically observes, ‘In terms of the phenomenology of religion, a pentecostal pastor might be described as a modern shaman.’⁸¹ Hollenweger tagged this encounter between shamanism and the preaching of the gospel as ‘theologically responsible syncretism’ wherein the cultural context is absorbed into Christianity. Allan Anderson argues for a transformative contextualization of the culture by the Christian faith, choosing to view

⁷⁷ Kim, History and Theology of Korean Pentecostalism, p. 199. ⁷⁸ Miroslav Volf, ‘Materiality of Salvation: An Investigation in the Soteriologies of Liberation and Pentecostal Theologies’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 53 (1992), pp. 447–67. ⁷⁹ Boo Woong Yoo, Korean Pentecostalism: Its History and Theology (Frankfurt, 1988), p. 223. ⁸⁰ Park, ‘David Yonggi Cho and International Pentecostal/Charismatic Movements’, p. 108. ⁸¹ Walter Hollenweger, The Pentecostals (Peabody, 1988). Dongsoo Kim contends that ‘Pentecostalism has undertaken the role of shamanism in Korean society’ through its healing of han which accounts for much of the numerical explosion of Yoido Full Gospel Church: see Kim, ‘The Healing of Han in Korean Pentecostalism’, p. 135.

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‘Cho’s Pentecostalism as a contextual form of Korean Christianity interacting with shamanism’.⁸² Yet what Anderson regards as Cho’s ‘holistic view of salvation’⁸³ has also been criticized from another angle, as simply representative of the quintessential export of the North American prosperity gospel.⁸⁴ Inevitably, such debates represent institutional pre-commitments from both sides, represented by dissenting theologies and competing internationalisms within the global Protestant community. The line between the contextual transformation of culture and the syncretistic capitulation to culture is a dialogue that has been renewed in both the North and the South as the gospel has entered the various cultures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, a dialogue that preachers like Cho have embodied through their homiletical practices.

C. RENÉ PADILLA: M ISIÓN I NTEGRAL René Padilla was born on 12 October 1932 in Quito, Ecuador to a poor family of three girls and four boys. The son of a tailor who remembers his mother pawning her jewellery to feed the family, Padilla’s family moved to Bogotá, Colombia when René was 2 years old as his family sought a better life. In Bogotá, his family experienced religious persecution as a Protestant minority: René was expelled from third grade for not attending a Roman Catholic procession and his older brother was expelled from high school after arguing with a Catholic priest in religion class.⁸⁵ Due to the persecution, his family moved back to Quito when René was 12 years old, where he finished high school amidst various Marxist and atheist teachers which prompted him to ‘read the New Testament from beginning to end’.⁸⁶ The amalgamation of a robust evangelical faith based on the Bible coupled with questions of social injustice arising from the sociopolitical conditions of Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s came to define the trajectory of Padilla’s ministerial life. ⁸² Allan H. Anderson, ‘The Contribution of David Yonggi Cho to a Contextual Theology in Korea’, Journal of Pentecostal Theology 12.1 (October 2003), p. 97. ⁸³ Anderson, ‘The Contribution of David Yonggi Cho’, p. 100. ⁸⁴ Park, ‘David Yonggi Cho and International Pentecostal/Charismatic Movements’. In addition, the links between Cho and American prosperity preachers reach further than their shared theology. Like the scandals of televangelist prosperity preachers Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker in the late 1980s, Cho was indicted in 2014 for embezzling 13 billion won (US$12 million) in a stock scheme with his son: see Ruth Moon, ‘Founder of World’s Largest Megachurch Convicted of Embezzling $12 Million’, Gleanings, 24 February 2014, http://www. christianitytoday.com/news/2014/february/founder-of-worlds-largest-megachurch-convictedcho-yoido.html, accessed 21/3/2018. ⁸⁵ C. René Padilla, ‘My Theological Pilgrimage’, Journal of Latin American Theology 4.2 (January 2009), pp. 92–3. ⁸⁶ Padilla, ‘My Theological Pilgrimage’, p. 94.

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After graduating high school, Padilla was accepted into Wheaton College (outside of Chicago, Illinois), graduating in 1957 with a BA in philosophy and in 1960 with an MA in theology. In July 1959, he joined the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) where he travelled extensively throughout his ‘parish’ of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.⁸⁷ From 1963 to 1965, Padilla pursued his PhD in New Testament under renowned evangelical scholar F. F. Bruce who (as noted elsewhere in this volume) had firmly established evangelical scholarship at the University of Manchester. After his doctoral studies, Padilla became the first Latin American General Secretary of IFES for Latin America, travelling across the continent, speaking at student conferences, and organizing evangelistic rallies.⁸⁸ In 1970, Padilla became one of the founders of Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana (Latin American Theological Fellowship) and in 1976 became part of a pastoral team of a Baptist Church in Buenos Aires which he considered ‘a laboratory for the practice of integral mission’.⁸⁹ From 1984 to 1992, Padilla served as the General Secretary of Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana, and from 1995 to 2007 was the international president of the United Kingdom- and Irelandbased Tearfund agency; since 1999 he has also served as president of the Micah Network for integral mission.⁹⁰

Integral Mission at Lausanne 1974 In the post-war period in Latin America, universities had become a melting pot of pent-up frustrations which welded together social aspiration without attendant economic opportunities. With revolutionary leaders such as Fidel Castro in Cuba and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara in Argentina promoting an ideology of social justice, Padilla’s ministry amongst university students with IFES placed him on the front lines of conversations about a robust Christian response to the pull of Marxist ideology. As such, Padilla was quickly confronted with the reality that his Northern-based education, symbolized by his studies at the beacon of Western neo-evangelicalism—Wheaton College—was insufficient to address the problems in the global South: ‘My years of studies in the United States had not prepared me for the sort of theological reflection that was urgently needed in a revolutionary situation!’⁹¹ In the 1960s, dissenters such as Padilla increasingly became dissatisfied with the standard North American evangelical consensus which influential Dutch Reformed South ⁸⁷ Daniel Salinas, ‘Carlos René Padilla-Jijón’, Journal of Latin American Theology 4.2 (2009), p. 69. ⁸⁸ Salinas, ‘Carlos René Padilla-Jijón’, p. 69. ⁸⁹ Salinas, ‘Carlos René Padilla-Jijón’, p. 71. ⁹⁰ Salinas, ‘Carlos René Padilla-Jijón’, p. 71. ⁹¹ Padilla, ‘My Theological Pilgrimage’, p. 97.

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African missiologist, David Bosch, came to call a ‘two-mandate approach’, entailing the division of Christian mission into a primary spiritual mandate of evangelism and the relegation of social action to a subordinate position.⁹² For Padilla, social action was intertwined with the content of the gospel and not only a consequence of it. He noted: The proclamation of the gospel (kerygma) and the demonstration of the gospel that gives itself in service (diakonía) form an indivisible whole. One without the other is an incomplete, mutilated gospel . . . From this perspective, it is foolish to ask about the relative importance of evangelism and social responsibility. That would be the equivalent to asking about the relative importance of the right wing and the left wing of a plane.⁹³

Padilla’s adoption of the term misión integral (integral mission)—derived from the Spanish for home-made pan integral (whole wheat bread)—sought to reconcile the spiritual and social aspects of the gospel for a more holistic understanding of Christian mission.⁹⁴ David Kirkpatrick explains: ‘What has become known as integral mission is an understanding of Christian mission that posits that social action and evangelism are essential and indivisible components of Christian mission—indeed that both are central aspects within the Christian gospel. Put more clearly, integral mission synthesizes the pursuit of justice with the offer of salvation.’⁹⁵ The first time the term integral mission appeared on a world stage was at the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland.⁹⁶ A direct outcome of the global success of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), and the rise of the National Association of Evangelicals in the USA (which provided much of the organization and the funding), this was the third in a series of meetings intended to establish evangelical (D)issent on an equal footing with the World Council of Churches. The informal effects of attempting to build a formal global consensus across the various types of evangelicalism, however, could be unpredictable, and not always to the liking of some of the American sponsors. Historian Brian Stanley describes Lausanne 1974 as a watershed moment for global evangelicalism with respect to social justice: For many Evangelicals issues of social and economic justice remained marginal to their understanding of the mission of the Church. That situation only began to change once it became clear that Evangelicalism was a multi-cultural global community which included a large and growing sector that was neither white ⁹² David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, 1991), p. 403. ⁹³ C. René Padilla, ‘Teología Latinoamericana: ¿Izquierdista o Evangélica?’ Pensamiento Cristiano 17.66 (1970), p. 139, translation by author. ⁹⁴ David C. Kirkpatrick, ‘C. René Padilla: Integral Mission and the Reshaping of Global Evangelicalism’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2015, p. 30. ⁹⁵ Kirkpatrick, ‘C. René Padilla’, pp. 29–30. ⁹⁶ Kirkpatrick, ‘C. René Padilla’, p. 236.

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nor affluent. The point at which that realization dawned on some Evangelicals in the North can be identified quite precisely: it was at the International Congress on World Evangelization held at Lausanne in July.⁹⁷

In his plenary talk entitled ‘Evangelism and the World’ on the third day of the conference, Padilla passionately proclaimed to the delegates the theological hallmarks of integral mission: I refuse, therefore, to drive a wedge between a primary task, namely the proclamation of the Gospel and a secondary (at best) or even optional (at worst) task of the church. In order to be obedient to its Lord the Church should never do anything that is not essential; therefore, nothing that the Church does in obedience to its Lord is unessential. Why? Because love to God is inseparable from love to men; because faith without works is dead; because hope includes the restoration of all things to the Kingdom of God.⁹⁸

Padilla was convinced that the global evangelical leaders gathered at Lausanne should forcefully push back against the tendency to simply discuss evangelistic strategies and methodologies which were forged primarily by Western evangelicals without first recovering a holistic view of the gospel. A year after Lausanne, when the IFES General Committee met in Austria, Padilla addressed the gathering with the theme ‘The Gospel Today’ with the following words: The most important questions that should be asked with regard to the life and mission of the Church today are not related to the relevance but to the content of the gospel. To be sure, there is a place for the consideration of the ways in which the gospel meets man’s needs in the modern world. Far more basic however is the consideration of the nature of the gospel that could meet man’s needs. The what of the gospel determines the how of its effects in practical life.⁹⁹

In his ministry as a preacher, conference speaker, and university student worker, Padilla sought to eliminate what he saw as an artificial barrier in the evangelical world between proclamation and social justice.

The Homiletics of Integral Mission The theology of integral mission which drove Padilla’s preaching and teaching ministry with university students in Latin America—and was promoted ⁹⁷ Brian Stanley, ‘ “Lausanne 1974”: The Challenge from the Majority World to NorthernHemisphere Evangelicalism’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 64.3 (2013), p. 534. ⁹⁸ C. René Padilla, ‘Evangelism and the World’, in J. D. Douglas, ed., Let the Earth Hear His Voice: International Congress on World Evangelization Lausanne, Switzerland (Minneapolis, 1975), pp. 144–5. ⁹⁹ As cited by Kirkpatrick, ‘C. René Padilla: Integral Mission and the Reshaping of Global Evangelicalism’, p. 95.

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through international conferences—was forged through vigorous dissent against both the increasingly dominant ideologies of Marxism, which underpins liberation theology, and of the pragmatic individualism which informs Western evangelicalism. With respect to liberation theology, Padilla believed it represented an ‘“ideologization” of the faith that is entirely consistent with a Marxist philosophical framework but bears little resemblance to the Gospel of Christ’.¹⁰⁰ In Padilla’s words, ‘I do not believe it is possible to be a Christian Marxist nor a Marxist Christian . . . the socialist ideology based on the myth of revolution is not the answer that the Third World needs.’¹⁰¹ On this point, Padilla agreed with his Western co-religionists, for whom Marxism was one of the ‘unholy trinity’ which threatened post-war international societies (the other two being theological liberalism and Catholic internationalism).¹⁰² But for Latin Americans, this position simply raised another. In an article written in 1973 for Christianity Today responding to liberation theology, Padilla asked: ‘Where is the evangelical theology that will propose a solution with the same eloquence [as liberation theology] but also with a firmer basis in the Word of God?’¹⁰³ For Padilla, integral mission was his constructive theological answer to his own question, as he sought to situate social justice more centrally within an evangelical (d)issenting community which was increasingly conscious of itself as global. Daniel Salinas argues that integral mission has become ‘the evangelical alternative to liberation theologies’ and ‘the theological and praxiological agenda of many churches and Christian organizations in Latin American and around the world’.¹⁰⁴ Yet Padilla’s dissent cut both ways. He was equally critical of the individualism of Western evangelicalism, which he believed severely blunted the social implications of the gospel.¹⁰⁵ Padilla soon found that both his ministerial praxis and preaching ministry amongst university students needed an entirely new hermeneutical basis than was offered by the historical–grammatical approach he learned at Wheaton College.¹⁰⁶ For Padilla, Western cultural ¹⁰⁰ C. René Padilla, ‘Theology of Liberation’, Christianity Today 18.3 (November 1973), pp. 69–70. ¹⁰¹ Salinas, ‘Carlos René Padilla-Jijón’, p. 80. See also C. René Padilla, ‘Liberation Theology: An Evaluation’, Reformed Journal 33.7 (July 1983), pp. 14–18. ¹⁰² See Harold J. Ockenga, ‘The Unvoiced Multitudes’, in J. Carpenter, ed., A New Evangelical Coalition: Early Documents of the National Association of Evangelicals (New York, 1988), p. 19. ¹⁰³ Padilla, ‘Theology of Liberation’, p. 70. ¹⁰⁴ Salinas, ‘Carlos René Padilla-Jijón’, p. 81. ¹⁰⁵ For example, see C. René Padilla, Mission between the Times: Essays on the Kingdom (Carlisle, 2010), p. 108. ¹⁰⁶ Padilla, ‘My Theological Pilgrimage’, p. 98: ‘The fact was that if I were going to help Christian university students witness to Jesus Christ in a context of injustice and poverty, it was not enough to teach them to study the Scriptures with the focus on the message in its original contexts. I had to help them relate biblical teaching to human life in all its dimensions. Necessarily, that meant going beyond the historical–grammatical approach to Bible study; it implied a rather different view of the hermeneutical task, an expanded view that in the

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categories and values, including unbridled capitalism, rampant materialism, pragmatic individualism, and the subject/object schema of the Enlightenment, needed to be removed from the gospel so that Latinos could appropriate the Christian faith in their own context. The exportation of a privatized Western gospel to Latin America, according to Padilla, has meant that ‘the Gospel has a foreign sound or no sound at all, in relation to many of the dreams and anxieties, problems and questions, values and customs of the people’.¹⁰⁷ For Padilla, the homiletical enterprise involves both a robust faithfulness to the Word of God and a socially conditioned exegesis which makes preaching both faithful and relevant in the here and now. ‘The real problem of preaching’, he notes, is how to be faithful to the Word of God and relevant to human life now—both at the same time—in other words, how to be in the world but not of the world. Whenever preaching attempts to be relevant by conforming to the world, it has no more relevance than a mere rhetorical exercise. On the other hand, whenever preaching attempts to be faithful to the Word of God by simply repeating seemingly biblical concepts, it is a far cry from the Word that became flesh. The only way for preaching to be relevant is by being faithful to the Word of God; and the only way for it to be faithful is by being relevant to life in the world today.¹⁰⁸

As Kirkpatrick has observed, Padilla’s diffusion of integral mission has profoundly influenced global evangelical thought and practice, an increasingly significant slice of worldwide dissenting Protestantism. Contrasting the gathering of evangelicals at the Berlin Congress in 1966, which ‘clearly defined mission as evangelism, relating social action to a secondary, muted status’, Kirkpatrick argues that integral mission in many respects came to the forefront of evangelical discourse by the Third Lausanne Congress of World Evangelization held in Cape Town, South Africa in 2010, where the gathering included integral mission in its official statement (known as ‘The Cape Town Commitment’).¹⁰⁹ This ‘massive shift in evangelical mission that took place within a 50-year period’ clearly owes much to the dissent of Latin American leaders and preachers like Padilla who courageously pushed back against the individualism and anti-social gospel orientations of Western mission leaders, interpretative process would keep the inextricable link between Scripture and the present-day context and between theology and social ethics.’ ¹⁰⁷ C. René Padilla, ‘La Palabra Interpretada: Reflexiones Sobre Hermenéutica Contextual’, Boletín Teológico (2nd Series) 1 (1981), p. 7, translation by author. ¹⁰⁸ C. René Padilla, ‘God’s Word and Man’s Myth’, Themelios 3.1 (September 1977), p. 4. ¹⁰⁹ Kirkpatrick, ‘C. René Padilla: Integral Mission and the Reshaping of Global Evangelicalism’, p. 288. See especially Part 1.10 of The Cape Town Commitment entitled ‘We Love the Mission of God’ for Padilla’s influence: ‘The Cape Town Commitment’, Lausanne Movement: Connecting Influencers and Ideas for Global Mission, https://www.lausanne.org/content/ctc/ ctcommitment, accessed 25/5/2017.

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a poignant example of leaders in the global South not only significantly affecting the entire discourse of conciliar evangelical Christianity but also deftly navigating the global evangelical communion into uncharted waters.¹¹⁰

CHRISTIANITY ALIVE I N THE GLOBAL SOUTH On 8 April 1966, Time magazine unfurled one of its most iconic and controversial magazine covers as ‘Is God Dead?’ appeared in stark red letters on an ominous black background. As the first Time magazine cover to utilize only text, the article represented a genuine snapshot of Western Christianity wrestling with ‘Dachau’s mass sadism and Hiroshima’s instant death’.¹¹¹ As K. K. Yeo notes in Chapter 4 of this volume, such catastrophic events (and their impact on interpretations of the role of Israel, ancient and modern, in sacred history) played an important role in distinguishing between Western and Majority World biblical interpretation and preaching. Much like Harvey Cox’s Secular City, the cover story often veered into secular prophetic announcements signalling the coming end times of Christianity.¹¹² The ‘Death of God’ movement was the epitome of Western-centrism, which failed to fully account for the ascendency of Christianity in the global South over the course of the twentieth century. As Andrew Walls has observed, the nature of the transmission of the Christian faith is a ‘process of recession and advance, of withering heartland and emergence within a new cultural setting’,¹¹³ which means that ‘the demographic and geographical centre of gravity of Christianity is subject to periodic shifts’.¹¹⁴ Preaching has played an important role in this shift. As the Christian faith has entered into the cultures of the global South, indigenous preachers have been challenged to present the gospel in cultural contexts quite distinct from their Northern counterparts. Preachers interacting with witchcraft, shamanism, and traumatic socio-economic and political injustices are part and parcel of generating culturally effective social movements which tap into the core concerns of their ‘neighbours’. In their own unique ways, the ministries of ¹¹⁰ Kirkpatrick, ‘C. René Padilla: Integral Mission and the Reshaping of Global Evangelicalism’, p. 288. ¹¹¹ Lily Rothman, ‘Is God Dead? At 50’, Time 8 April 2016, http://time.com/isgoddead/, accessed 23/5/2017. ¹¹² Though Cox, in a later edition of his work, denied the associations people made between him and the ‘death-of-godders’: Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (Princeton, 2013), p. xii. ¹¹³ Andrew F. Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (Maryknoll, 2002), p. 31. ¹¹⁴ Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process, p. 30.

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William Wadé Harris, David Yonggi Cho, and René Padilla all symbolize the unique cultural challenges and incredible contextual opportunities of preaching in the global South. Harris’ preaching involved a form of culture charisma, whereby a personal spiritual encounter empowered an indigenized form of a (D)issenting orthodoxy (Methodism) to construct a powerful personal charismatic persona. Wrapped in his prophetic personality, Harris was particularly effective in engaging a core disconnect in cosmic ‘capacity’ in traditional religions facing the pressures of colonialism and early globalization. His attack on witchcraft and fetishes cleared the ground for an indigenized preaching and interpretive tradition, which successfully institutionalized as one of the earliest African independent Churches. As such, Harris established a model (directly, in the case of some Churches in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, and indirectly elsewhere) which helped underpin the indigenization of Christianity for millions of Africans. For all his critics (and the all too common organizational and moral problems which followed the transition from Church to social, political, and economic power), the preaching of David Yonggi Cho was likewise the basis for a religious revolution. Not only did the fact that he grew the largest congregation in the world impact his own Pentecostal movement within Korea, but Cho also helped shape the response to Church forms and possibilities among Methodist and Presbyterian Churches within Korea, and contributed to the disproportionate presence of Christianity among the Korean diaspora (an essential element in Korea’s internationalization). In Cho’s case, the technique of preaching and its connectivity to the core concerns of Korea’s ‘underlying shamanic layer’ was wrapped in a powerful spiritual technology involving intense personal and group experiences in prayer mountains, cell groups, international missions, and regional churches. While the focus on Cho himself tends to reductionist accounts of his theology, it is important to see that theology in its broader context. Cho’s ‘method’ (particularly cell groups) was a powerful contributor to the growth of pentecostalism in the neocharismatic movement in other parts of the world (both anglophone and otherwise),¹¹⁵ and the Full Gospel movement has continued to plant Churches and institutions around the world which contribute to the remarkable impact of Korean missions. For about twenty years, Yoido Full Gospel Church was also a paradigmatic contributor to the evangelical missiology emerging from Fuller and other theological training institutions, a test case for the ‘church growth theory’ of Donald McGavran and Peter Wagner.¹¹⁶ His preaching ¹¹⁵ Shane Clifton, Pentecostal Churches in Transition: Analysing the Developing Ecclesiology of the Assemblies of God in Australia (Leiden, 2009), p. 116; Hans Geir Aasmundsen, Pentecostals, Politics, and Religious Equality in Argentina (Leiden and Boston, 2016), p. 145. ¹¹⁶ David Lim, ‘A Missiological Evaluation of David Yonggi Cho’s Church Growth’, in Wonsuk Ma, William W. Menzies, and Hyeon-sung Bae, eds., David Yonggi Cho: A Close Look at His Theology and Ministry (Eugene, 2016), p. 182.

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(particularly prosperity, but also from the authority provided him by the response his Church seemed to provide to broader issues of secularization in industrializing countries), therefore, was part of a larger impact which facilitated pentecostal–charismatic indigenization in other settings around the world. Padilla likewise reflected broader trends: the globalizing self-conception of evangelical (d)issent, conflicts over the roles of individualist consumerism, Marxism and Catholic populism and internationalism, and the cultural divisions within and between Majority World and Western (D)issenting Protestantism, were all inflamed by key post-Second World War events such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the youth revolutions of the 1960s, the rise of the charismatic and pentecostal movements, and environmental/development threats on a vast scale. Padilla’s correction of the Western individualism rampant among the resurgent, and well-organized and funded American evangelical push out into the world was an essential contribution to that movement’s ability to become true global citizens. Ultimately it would also prepare evangelical dissenters to adapt, in the period of post-evangelicalism and post-pentecostalism in the West, to the enormous demands of mission in the great, teeming global cities. This sort of homiletic was based on a revised, Majority World perception of the mission of the Church as the carrier of the Christian gospel. It birthed a new form of dissent, a ‘third force’ in Christian global engagement that was quite unlike the Dissent defined against the magisterial churches emerging from state church-dominated Europe. As the axiom of Andrew Walls has expressed it, ‘Christendom is dead, and Christianity is alive and well without it.’¹¹⁷

SEL E C T B I B L I OG R A P H Y Aasmundsen, Hans Geir, Pentecostals, Politics, and Religious Equality in Argentina (Leiden and Boston, 2016). Anderson, Allan H., ‘The Contribution of David Yonggi Cho to a Contextual Theology in Korea’, Journal of Pentecostal Theology 12.1 (2003), pp. 85–105. Bediako, Kwame, Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (Edinburgh, 1995). Bubant, Nils, ‘From Head-hunter to Organ-thief: Verisimilitude, Doubt, and Plausible Worlds in Indonesia and Beyond’, Oceania 87.1 (2017), pp. 38–57. Carter, Jason, Inside the Whirlwind: The Book of Job through African Eyes (Eugene, 2017). Chaudhuri, Soma, Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India: Tempest in a Teapot (Lanham, 2013). ¹¹⁷ Lim, ‘A Missiological Evaluation of David Yonggi Cho’s Church Growth’, p. 34.

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Clifton, Shane, Pentecostal Churches in Transition: Analysing the Developing Ecclesiology of the Assemblies of God in Australia (Leiden, 2009). Gutiérrez, Gustavo, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, 1987). Haliburton, G. M., The Prophet Harris: A Study of an African Prophet and His Mass Movement in the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast, 1913–1915 (London, 1973). Harrell, David, All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America (Bloomington, 2017). Kim, Dong-kun, ‘Korean Minjung Theology in History and Mission’, Studies in World Christianity 2.2 (1996), p. 167. Kirkpatrick, David C., ‘C. René Padilla: Integral Mission and the Reshaping of Global Evangelicalism’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2015. Küster, Volker, A Protestant Theology of Passion: Korean Minjung Theology Revisited (Leiden 2010). Ma, Wonsuk, William W. Menzies, and Hyeon-sung Bae, eds., David Yonggi Cho: A Close Look at His Theology and Ministry (Eugene, 2016). Myung, Sung-Hoon and Young-Gi Hong, eds., Charis and Charisma: David Yonggi Cho and the Growth of Yoido Full Gospel Church (Eugene, 2011). Noll, Mark A. and Carolyn Nystrom, Clouds of Witnesses: Christian Voices from Africa and Asia (Downers Grove, 2011). Padilla, C. René, Mission between the Times: Essays on the Kingdom (Carlisle, 2010). Padilla, C. René, ‘La Palabra Interpretada: Reflexiones Sobre Hermenéutica Contextual’, Boletín Teológico s2.1 (1981), pp. 1–10. Padilla, C. René, ‘My Theological Pilgrimmage’, Journal of Latin American Theology 4.2 (2009), pp. 91–111. Park, Andrew S., The Wounded Heart of God: The Asian Concept of Han and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (Nashville, 1993). Park, Myung Soo, ‘David Yonggi Cho and International Pentecostal/Charismatic Movements’, Journal of Pentecostal Theology 12.1 (2003), pp. 107–28. Ross, Kenneth R., ‘Preaching in Mainstream Christian Churches in Malawi: A Survey and Analysis’, Journal of Religion in Africa 25.1 (1995), pp. 3–24. Shank, David A., ‘The Legacy of William Wadé Harris’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 10.4 (1986), pp. 170–6. Volf, Miroslav, ‘Materiality of Salvation: An Investigation in the Soteriologies of Liberation and Pentecostal Theologies’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 53 (1992), pp. 447–67. Walls, Andrew F., The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (Maryknoll, 2002). Yoo, Boo Woong, Korean Pentecostalism: Its History and Theology (Frankfurt, 1988).

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7 Emergent and Adaptive Spiritualities in the Twentieth Century Andy Lord

INTRODUCTION The nature of Dissent inevitably changed when, in the long twentieth century, its ‘lived’ reality shifted away from a focus on relationships between individual European states and a few dominant Churches. The transnational, interconnected world into which European Protestant Dissent moved was typified by huge diversity in the number of different Churches and of different states, many developing within postcolonial contexts. It was as if the limited and known options of the early nineteenth century had exploded across a global canvas to form a multiplicity of ways of being Church and state. One way in which these mobile Christians ‘managed’ this scattering was through an upsurge in emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit: the ‘wind of God’ that blows where it wills (John 3:8) and the ‘fire of God’ that falls in many tongues for the nations (Acts 2). This chapter considers some of the Spirit movements that went out into the world bringing dissent/(D)issent to the assumptions of dominant cultural and ecclesial forms.¹ These represent movements of spirituality within and outside existing Churches that contrast with and adapt existing patterns of faith. Within a century these have begun to transform the nature of the Christian Church across the world and may (despite sometimes trenchant criticism from those they left behind) represent much of the energy of Christianity for its global future.

¹ By ‘Spirit movement’ (capitalized) this chapter refers only to pneumatological movements with Christian origins. There are many other ‘spirit movements’, some of which share the same contextual drivers. The focus in this series, however, is particularly on the successors to the Protestant Dissenting movements which have their origins in ‘dissent’ from post-Reformation European religious establishments.

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The origins of many of these Spirit movements are often traced to Pentecostalism and in particular its North American roots in the Azusa Street Revival in 1906. More recently, however, it has been recognized that even in their origins the modern Christian ‘Spirit movements’ had a number of points of origin around the world,² drawing on diverse ecclesial and theological traditions. As numbers have risen to (or even above, on some estimates) 500 million worldwide so there has developed a range of terminologies in the attempts to articulate the diversity of the movement.³ For the present purposes we follow others in adopting the term ‘pentecostalism’ as a shorthand for the variety of Spirit-movements that fall under categories such as Pentecostal, charismatic, neo-charismatic, ‘renewalist’, and indigenous Churches. Our interest is in considering examples within this variety that highlight contemporary movements of dissent/(D)issent that see themselves to be driven by the Spirit. Central to such ways of dissent is an understanding of the Spirit as disruptive to the usual ways of existence. The Spirit is often spoken of as ‘breaking in’ and ‘disrupting’ the current experience of worship, church, and social life.⁴ This is an eschatological viewpoint in which an emphasis on the final transformative kingdom of God requires and enables change in the present kingdoms of this world. The Spirit brings the ‘first-fruits’ of the future kingdom into the contemporary church and world (Rom. 8:23)—we can glimpse in Spirit movements the desire for the biblical future ‘kingdom’ of love, justice, and peace that challenges our present experience in which these are limited. At the same time Spirit movements are rediscovering the work of the Spirit in creation (cf. Gen. 1:2), overcoming the dualism between spirit and matter. They speak of the ‘creative work’ of the Spirit, bringing ‘sustaining life’ to the people of today and thus overcoming all that gets in the way of abundant life, particularly in the current structures of Church and state (cf. Ps. 104:30).⁵ These movements are thus practical expressions of spiritualities that connect with biblical theologies of the Holy Spirit. The term ‘spirituality’ is a slippery one that has changed meaning over the years but covers aspirations ² M. Hutchinson, ‘From Corner Shop to Boutique Franchise: The Dilemmas of Australian Pentecostalism’, in Vinson Synan and Amos Yong, Global Renewal Christianity: SpiritEmpowered Movements Past, Present, and Future, vol. I: Asia and Oceania (Lake Mary, 2015). ³ Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 1–7. ⁴ For a Latina/o account of this, see Oscar Garcia-Johnson’s use of the term ‘pneumaloquence’, in his The Mestizo/a Community of the Spirit: A Postmodern Latino/a Ecclesiology (Eugene, 2009), p. 67; for popular Catholic uses of ‘spirit language’ connected to indigenization, see Marie T. Farrell, ‘Reclaiming the Spirit’, The Australasian Catholic Record 76.3 (July 1999), p. 271. ⁵ There are many Majority World theologians working in this field, but perhaps the most systematic has been Amos Yong, as described in Wolfgang Vondey and Martin William Mittelstadt, eds., The Theology of Amos Yong and the New Face of Pentecostal Scholarship: Passion for the Spirit (Leiden, 2013).

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and behaviours oriented towards living the whole of life with God.⁶ It is often utilized in a personal sense but is inescapably corporate in Christian life where a variety of people are drawn to Jesus and together are inspired by the Spirit. The centrality of the Holy Spirit to Christian spirituality has been increasingly recognized at the same time that there has been a desire to integrate spirituality and theology.⁷ Indeed, terms for the twentieth century such as ‘The Century of the Holy Spirit’ are not uncommon in both Catholic and Protestant literatures.⁸ In broad terms I want to suggest that contemporary Spirit movements represent the development of spiritualities of dissent shaped by the biblical witness to the disrupting and life-giving work of the Holy Spirit.⁹ In terms of specific contexts it is helpful to explore such spiritualities in terms of their emergent and adaptive characteristics. We can thus see how new spiritualities emerge to disrupt existing assumptions with prophetic and often critical voices that condemn aspects of the existing culture, state, and church life. At the same time they are never completely separate from the surrounding culture and often bring change through adapting what already exists, if in the direction of what seems to bring more life and hope. As the number of reflexively self-conscious global cultures has multiplied, so fresh dissent has arisen that takes the form of emergent and adaptive spiritualities that see themselves rooted in movements of the Spirit as shaped by the biblical witness. This chapter seeks to introduce some of these spiritualities of dissent as evidenced in seven different parts of the world. Rather than provide an exhaustive list of all such spiritualities, the aim is to explore examples that highlight particular challenges and debates that these typically give rise to. These examples are well recognized in the literature and reference will be made to scholarship on pentecostalism that has developed over the last forty years. For historical reasons, such scholarship cannot avoid Azusa Street and so we start there (without necessarily prioritizing it as causative) before moving to the connected spiritualities in the UK. We then move to India where a parallel but connected spirituality developed and then to Africa where issues of colonialism come into sharper focus. Latin America is a focus for many spiritualities of dissent arising out of poverty and countries in Asia (such as Indonesia and South Korea) provide an example of a spirituality of dissent

⁶ Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, and Edward Yarnold, eds., The Study of Spirituality, reprint, 1986 (London, 1992), pp. xxiv–xxvi. ⁷ Robert Davis Hughes, III, in his Beloved Dust: Tides of the Spirit in the Christian Life (London, 2008). ⁸ For example, Vinson Synan, The Century of the Holy Spirit: 100 Years of Pentecostal and Charismatic Renewal, 1901–2001 (Nashville, 2012); or Raymond R. Pfister, ‘Ecumenism of the Spirit: Toward a Pentecostal Pedagogy of Reconciliation’, in Wolfgang Vondey, ed., Pentecostalism and Christian Unity: Ecumenical Documents and Critical Assessments (Eugene, 2010). ⁹ These two ways of approaching the work of the Spirit within Pentecostalism are explored in Andrew M. Lord, Spirit-Shaped Mission: A Holistic Charismatic Missiology (Carlisle, 2005).

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born of poverty and ethnic marginalization that has become a significant force in national modernization. Finally, we turn to Australia to consider how such spiritualities are themselves starting to change as they engage in contexts separate from their origins.

P EN T ECO ST A L I S M I N T HE US A By the start of the twentieth century, incipient Holy Spirit movements began to take form as distinct Christian ‘movements’ and church denominations. The variety of such movements helps to explain the huge growth in Christian denominations worldwide, from an estimated 500 in 1800 to 1,600 in 1900 to 34,200 in 2000.¹⁰ The growth in Spirit movements thus needs to be placed in the context of the wider movements that were already established by the start of the century. These were inevitably shaped by the Western Church and culture where the centre of gravity of Christianity was at the time. We will focus here on the Protestant movements which, given their fissiparous nature, tended to be more numerous. These movements of reformation and revival continue to shape Christian life, particularly with an emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit to illuminate Scripture and bring the experience of life to ‘spiritually dead’ individuals and churches. The evangelical movement (particularly Methodism) arose out of such forms of renewal, and shaped pentecostalism in many ways (notably in its biblical and Christological focus as well as its activism and missionary motivation).¹¹ The missionary movement was particularly central to the spread of pentecostalism because it provided the motivation, personnel, and networks for transmitting a message and experience across the world.¹² The need to share Jesus with all nations had a biblical urgency that was coupled with the practical provision of greater ease of travel across the world. In 1793, it took William Carey five months to reach India, after having established a whole network of support to ‘hold the ropes’ in his absence, and loaded his Danish ship with all the necessaries to sustain life.¹³ In August 1973, Alan Langstaff and Alan Alcock of the charismatic service agency ‘The Temple Trust’ could relatively casually load thirty people on a plane which would take them to charismatic seminars in Hawai’i and ¹⁰ See Todd Johnson et al., ‘The Status of Global Mission, 2014’, http://www.gordonconwell. edu/resources/documents/StatusOfGlobalMission.pdf, accessed 30/09/2014. ¹¹ Mark Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys (Nottingham, 2004). ¹² Allan Anderson, Spreading Fires: The Missionary Nature of Early Pentecostalism (London, 2007). ¹³ George Smith, The Life of William Carey, D.D: Shoemaker and Missionary (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 57–60.

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Los Angeles, and they would yearly visit such other sites as New York and London, and thence back to Australia, the whole tour comprising only a couple of weeks.¹⁴ Forty years later, churches regularly live-stream their services to multiple locations around the world. In many places this technological compression of time and distance has been combined with patterns of migration which became increasingly important in the spread of pentecostalism through the century (see Chapter 14 in this volume). Alongside such missionary movements developed more settled holiness movements that grew out of different Wesleyan traditions. The Spirit of holiness was central to these, bringing together disciplined lives with personal transformation on a journey of sanctification.¹⁵ This was a theological category, but it was more distinctly an experiential category which set Methodists apart from their Anglican colleagues (where experience was socially constrained). It was the case in early Methodism. Edward Payson, Harvard graduate and the Wesleyan minister of Portland, portrayed his progression from the ‘comfortable doctrine for the elect’ (Calvinism) to the fiery baptism which was ‘entire sanctification’.¹⁶ After this experience, he had ‘been an inhabitant of the land of Beulah for some weeks . . . I rejoice. I triumph!’¹⁷ It was still the case with those progeny of transatlantic Methodism, the Pentecostals, who were still being ‘lifted out of themselves with great joy’ some 150 years later.¹⁸ Such journeys in the Spirit required critical events in which transformation was evident and the term ‘baptism in the Spirit’ became associated with such personal encounters with God. Other movements picked up this theme of transformation but linked it with the witness to signs, wonders, and miracles in the New Testament.¹⁹ As Candy Brown has noted (in Chapter 1 in this volume), miracles of healing were often a focus, both alongside evangelism and in the establishment of healing homes that provided a materialization of the power of Jesus in the present.²⁰ Such a holistic witness to the materializing

¹⁴ ‘Temple Trust American Tour’, Vision Magazine 4 (July–August 1974), p. 12. ¹⁵ Anderson, Pentecostalism, pp. 25–30. ¹⁶ ‘Review: Edward Payson’s Life and Writings’, Methodist Magazine and Quarterly Review 20.4 (October 1838), p. 384. ¹⁷ Richard Davies, Strong Meat for Healthy Christians; or, Entire Sanctification Defined, Explained, Proved, Experienced, and Enforced; being the Substance of an Essay Read before the Associated Ministers of the Brinkworth District, Primitive Methodist Connexion (London, 1863), p. 54. ¹⁸ Douglas Jacobsen, Thinking in the Spirit: Theologies of the Early Pentecostal Movement (Bloomington, 2003), p. 189. ¹⁹ Gary B. McGee, Miracles, Missions and American Pentecostalism, American Society of Missiology Series, No. 45 (New York, 2011). ²⁰ Jacobsen, Thinking in the Spirit, p. 23; Jennifer A. Miskov, Life on Wings: The Forgotten Life and Theology of Carrie Judd Montgomery (1858–1946) (Cleveland, 2012).

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and transforming work of the Spirit was particularly evident in the African spirituality, which stressed the presence of the Spirit and supernatural in all of life.²¹ Here were spiritualities of music and dance, and a conciousness of the spirit world in which God’s power was immediately available. In short, the context of many of the twentieth-century Spirit movements were the prior evangelical, missionary, holiness, miracle, healing, and African Christian movements. We now need to consider how pentecostalism grew as a spirituality of dissent within such a context, particularly (but not solely) in the USA where such movements were widely evident. The iconic story revolves around William Seymour, an African American pastor, who studied by listening in at the door of the Bible school run by Charles Parham.²² Seymour was then invited to be a holiness pastor to a small church in Los Angeles in 1906. It was a time when the number of churches in the city was growing (there were about 180 churches in Los Angeles when he arrived), and stories from the Welsh revival were encouraging an expectancy of God at work. Los Angeles was also shaken by a ‘great earthquake’ in 1906 that encouraged many to seek God. Seymour brought with him a message of ‘Pentecostal blessing’ with the Holy Spirit poured out to empower service. This involved a baptism in the Spirit that was not primarily about sanctification, a controversial form of theological divergence from prevailing holiness belief, one which ultimately led to the church doors being locked to him. Seymour met with a group each evening to pray for a move of the Spirit until they felt it was the right time to ask God to baptize them in the Spirit. On one of these occasions a man fell to the floor and rose up again speaking in tongues, in line with how they interpreted the story of Pentecost in Acts 2. This witness to the Spirit’s working through tongues was a significant change from existing understandings of baptism in the Spirit. A new Spirit movement emerged the self-narrative of which emphasized its divine origins– sought in prayer but made a reality through a sovereign work of God breaking into their lives. As readers of the Book of Acts, they saw themselves as an embodiment of the authentic primitive Church. Seymour and his group sought a place to meet together and took over an unused building in Asuza Street. Services and prayer meetings grew quickly with each day providing opportunity for prayer, worship, and teaching. There was much testimony to joyful praise, speaking in tongues, and evidence of divine healing. This caused a stir (particularly with regard to its interracial nature) when reported by the local newspaper and more people began to come and see what was happening. A journal, Apostolic Faith, was started and this ²¹ Estrelda Alexander, Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African American Pentecostalism (Downers Grove, 2011). ²² The definitive work on this is Cecil M. Robeck, The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement (Nashville, 2006).

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spread the message of the pentecostal blessing far and wide. Although this was seen as a divine outpouring of the Spirit it went alongside careful planning, training, teaching, and enabling volunteers to share the faith. Pentecostalism seemed to easily enable lay leadership and (in marked contrast to existing Churches) particularly the leadership of women. It also broke racial assumptions, the multi-racial theological vision of Seymour encouraging black and white together in worship, to the consternation of many outside the movement (and eventually some polarization within). It was also a missionary movement from the start, just as in the initial Pentecost power was given to witness to people from ‘all nations’ gathered in Jerusalem.²³ As languages had been given to enable witness in the Early Church, so it was believed that tongues were a sign of (and effective provision for) the call to share the gospel amongst those of many languages and nations. One later pentecostal stated it simply: ‘the Spirit bade me go’. Pentecostals sought to see the fire of the Spirit go out into all the world.²⁴ Within two decades pentecostal missionaries were found in at least forty-two countries outside of North America and Europe. They utilized existing missionary networks, but remarkably developed without any central Pentecostal organization or even great coordination. As David Martin has pointed out, this was in part because of their ability to ‘mobilize’ local populations where there were resonant underlying spiritualities.²⁵ The revival at Azusa Street carried on for about three years before it began to cool. The story carries with it the mix of the human jealousies, competitiveness, and division that mark any human endeavour. A number of schisms followed, motivated by differences in doctrine and conflicts over racial integration.²⁶ In effect, denominations began to be formed around particular beliefs and racial makeups and it was only much later that many of these were challenged. Yet despite the shortness of the initial ‘move of the Spirit’ and the divisions that followed, the movement marked broader beginnings. It was a Spirit movement that emerged in contrast to the existing Churches whilst also adapting much that was already there. With the benefit of hindsight we can observe some of the roots of this new movement of dissent which aimed to change the world. The pentecostal call to ‘come to the altar’ for salvation, sanctification, and Spirit baptism provides a helpful symbol.²⁷ The ‘altar’ adapted a common Catholic emphasis (indeed it is possible that a Catholic provided the first altar at Azusa Street!). It picked up also the holiness call to seek God in sanctification and yet transformed it into the place for ²³ Anderson, Spreading Fires. ²⁴ David J. Du Plessis, The Spirit Bade Me Go (Oakland, 1963). ²⁵ David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford, 2002), p. 28. ²⁶ Margaret M. Poloma and John C. Green, The Assemblies of God: Godly Love and the Revitalization of American Pentecostalism (New York, 2010), p. 99. ²⁷ Daniel Tomberlin, Pentecostal Sacraments: Encountering God at the Altar (Cleveland, 2010).

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seeking the Spirit for empowered witness. Pentecostal altar spirituality represents a spirituality of dissent against the Protestant social contract of the Gilded Age, one that emerges as a new force in Christian life and yet adapts existing practices and beliefs. It was to continue adapting and creating new emerging spiritualities as the message spread.

P EN T ECO ST A L- CHARISMATIC MOVEMENTS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM We have already noted the importance of the Welsh revival to expectations of those seeking the Holy Spirit in Los Angeles. Connections between churches and leaders were vital to the spread of Spirit movements, often seen as relating to the nature of the Spirit as the ‘go between’ who brought people together for mission.²⁸ Local leaders, such as Joseph Smale at First Baptist Church, had visited Wales and formed relationships with the leaders there, newspapers covered its course fulsomely, and after the outbreak of the revival at Azusa Street, people touched by the Welsh Revival also found their way to Los Angeles.²⁹ Alexander Boddy was a key leader in enabling the early Pentecostal message and experience become rooted in the UK.³⁰ Boddy was an Anglican minister in Sunderland who visited Wales and Norway to experience fresh movements of the Spirit, returning to Britain to organize the first Pentecostal conferences and (as importantly) a widely read Pentecostal newspaper (Confidence) in the tradition of the ‘revival chronicles’ of the previous centuries. His approach both stood out against the majority of Anglicans of the day whilst also definitively shaping the British Pentecostal movement in a very Anglican way, particularly through his work with younger leaders.³¹ His influence waned through the First World War as he took a more nationalist stance, the resulting tensions breaking down relationships in his transnational networks. Boddy’s ministry ultimately seemed to leave the Church of England unchanged, provoking the formation of the Pentecostal Elim and Assemblies of God denominations. These linked together small congregations confident in the divine blessing granted them whilst being separated from the wider evangelical and ecumenical Churches. As in Los Angeles, the emergence of new Spirit-shaped Churches adapted existing spiritualities and yet became ²⁸ This is the later term used by John V. Taylor, The Go-Between God: The Holy Spirit and the Christian Mission (London, 1972). Another term more used by the ecumenical movement is that of koinonia also linked with the working of the Holy Spirit. ²⁹ Robeck, The Azusa Street Mission and Revival, pp. 57–8. ³⁰ Gavin Wakefield, Alexander Boddy: Pentecostal Anglican Pioneer (London, 2007). ³¹ Neil Hudson, ‘The Development of British Pentecostalism’, in William K. Kay and Anne E. Dyer, eds., European Pentecostalism (Leiden, 2011), pp. 41–60.

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over time more separate congregations dissenting from broader socialized patterns of Church life, in particular the defining tensions over Establishment, Old Dissent, tradition, creeds, and liturgy. Over time these grew, although numbers plateaued during the 1960s as this varied Spirit movement seemed to settle down and hesitantly seek to engage with wider Christian traditions (Fig. 7.1). The 1960s were a time of upheaval generally in the UK as cultural assumptions were challenged and changed.³² Despite radical liberalizations such as the ‘death of God’ movement, the period carried with it a fresh seeking after spiritualities that connected with the new situation, often drawing on varied religious traditions carried into Britain from around the world through revivalist, missionary, business, and immigration links. It was as if the often hidden movements of the Spirit that traced their roots to early Pentecostalism came to the surface in ways that brought people into new ways of spiritual life.³³ Individuals began to hear the pentecostal message and seek similar Spirit blessings and the exercise of spiritual gifts, beyond the bounds of the Pentecostal, and within the traditional, denominations. Groups began to form to pray for fresh moves of the Spirit, for revival to ‘sweep the nation’ once again as it had in popular accounts of the days of Whitefield and Wesley, the revivals of 1857–9, and in Wales. Also, within the wider picture, links were being made between Pentecostalism and existing Christian denominations. In this the ministry of David du Plessis, a South African Pentecostal dramatically called through prophecy to share the Pentecostal message beyond Pentecostalism, was particularly effective.³⁴ His relationships with mainstream traditions sparked his excommunication from the Assemblies of God for a time but provided a personal vision and understanding of pentecostalism to many who would have otherwise been hostile. The movements of individuals inspired by pentecostalism, prayer meetings for revival, and the person of David du Plessis came together in London in 1962. Michael Harper, an evangelical Anglican minister, experienced a revelation from God and sought a baptism in the Spirit which transformed his ministry. This came after similar experiences by the Anglican minister Dennis Bennett in California, and even earlier crossdenominational experiences in Latin America, Africa, Oceania, and Asia. Harper had to leave the Church he was part of, and developed the Fountain Trust, becoming the spokesman for the organized ‘Charismatic Movement’ in the UK. It is, again, a story which contains a mix of Spirit movements coming ³² The seminal authors in the field are Callum Brown (The Death of Christian Britain, London, 2009) and Hugh McLeod (The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, Oxford, 2007). See also Clive D. Field, ‘Another Window on British Secularization: Public Attitudes to Church and Clergy Since the 1960s’, Contemporary British History 28:2 (2014), pp. 190–218. ³³ For a helpful summary of these developments, see P. D. Hocken, Streams of Renewal: The Origins and Early Development of the Charismatic Movement in Great Britain (Exeter, 1997). ³⁴ Joshua R. Ziefle, David Du Plessis and the Assemblies of God (Leiden, 2013).

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30 20 10 0 –10 Pop_2010

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Fig. 7.1. % growth of members of Spirit movement churches per year in the UK (relative to 1970 totals) Source: World Christian Database: New Movements in the Context of Selected Traditions, 1970–2015, ed. Todd M. Johnson and Gina A. Zurlo (Leiden and Boston, 2017)

together in a fresh way through the renewed spirituality of individuals, although the charismatic movement overall represents more of an adaption of spiritualities within existing denominations than the emergence of new and separate communities of faith. As Ian Randall notes, the balance between ‘emergence’ and ‘adaption’ within the dissenting Spirit movements differed for each.³⁵ The charismatic movement has helped transform Anglican spirituality in the UK in its encouragement to engage with new styles of worship, prayer for healing, an emphasis on discovering the gifts of the Spirit for all people, and the development of discipleship courses that include space for being ‘filled with the Spirit’ (the term preferred to the Pentecostal ‘baptism in the Spirit’). A prominent example of this transformation can be seen in the Church of Holy Trinity, Brompton, in London and its promotion of the Alpha course in the UK and now round the world. At its best we can see something of dissent from existing Anglican spiritualities being expressed through the emergence of positive communities of Spirit-inspired spirituality that seek to keep an outward

³⁵ Ian M. Randall, One Body in Christ: The History and Significance of the Evangelical Alliance (Cardiff, 2001), ch. 12.

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focus on the Spirit’s movement into the world. At its worst we can see a spirituality overly shaped by the surrounding consumerist middle-class culture that stifles diversity and simplifies Christian faith. The outward focus is maintained through its working with the Diocese of London in the planting of churches that reinvigorate congregations in existing buildings. The Holy Trinity, Brompton (HTB) model is also a contributor to attempts by Archbishop Justin Welby (a former HTB staffer) to renew a Church of England facing plummeting attendances.³⁶ The Diocese of London has also embarked on a fast-growing training programme for leaders and clergy. It remains to be seen whether such examples of fresh spirituality can keep moving outwards in creative ways that allow for further dissent from the social status quo, or whether, as one nonevangelical churchman noted, the Church of England would become ‘a narrow sect “driven by mission-minded middle managers”’.³⁷ At the same time that these strands of charismatic renewal have been impacting existing denominations, other strands have taken a stronger form of dissent requiring the formation of new Christian networks. These share some of the same roots but have an emphasis on restoring what is seen as the biblical shape of the ‘primitive’ Church, and hence have been known as ‘restorationist’ movements, many of which organize themselves as House Church networks.³⁸ Again the pentecostal movement is a founding influence, alongside Brethren experience, but there is a greater stress on the radical nature of Christian faith and on apostolic ‘oversight’.³⁹ The kingdom of God is seen to be established through the restoration of the New Testament pattern of the Early Church which is led by divinely appointed apostles, prophets, and elders (Eph. 4:4–12). Although there is a variety of such restorationist churches they represent a more radical dissenting tradition than the charismatic movements amongst existing denominations. Encouraged (somewhat ironically) by the great Calvinistic Methodist preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who called Christians out of their denominations in 1966, restorationists formed their own networks of churches that were often led by an ‘apostle’.⁴⁰ The critical working of the Holy Spirit came to the fore rather than the transforming work. Here we glimpse how new spiritualities came into being

³⁶ Andrew Brown, ‘Justin Welby’s ascension shines light on powerful evangelical church’, The Guardian 21 March 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/20/justinwelby-powerful-evangelical-church. ³⁷ Harriet Sherwood, ‘Top cleric says Church of England risks becoming a “suburban sect” ’, The Guardian 14 August 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/13/justin-welbychurch-of-england-suburban-sect. ³⁸ The classic introduction remains Andrew Walker, Restoring the Kingdom: The Radical Christianity of the House Church Movement (London, 1988). See also William K. Kay, Apostolic Networks in Britain: New Ways of Being Church (Milton Keynes, 2007). ³⁹ Arthur Wallis, The Radical Christian (Eastbourne, 1981). ⁴⁰ Kay, Apostolic Networks, pp. 10–41.

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from similar influences but combined in different ways—in the language of mission studies, various ‘global processes’ (Spirit movements) combined in particular situations to form new ‘local identities’ (spiritualities).⁴¹ It is interesting to note that as Churches of all kinds have struggled to survive in the increasingly secular UK so dissenting forms of the Church have proliferated within, as well as outside, the existing denominations. It is as if the increasing distance between Christian faith and wider culture has forced a response that seeks to recognize positive Christian communal identities in contrast to others. The so-called ‘emerging church’ movement represents a number of small-scale experiments in being church that often take their inspiration from the prior moves of the Spirit.⁴² Here moves of the Spirit clash with changing culture, often termed the move from modern to postmodern (or late modern) culture. This has led to a seeking after new ways of being church, new communities of faith, that are emerging in ways that both challenge and adapt existing ways of being church. The Anglican and Methodist Churches in the UK have embraced forms of such communities through the ‘Fresh Expressions’ initiative that has seen a significant growth in numbers involved in Christian communities.⁴³ These seek a more holistic approach to Christian faith that combines social action with worship and discipleship, often picking up ancient spiritual practices to form ‘new monastic’ communities. As such they combine the evangelical, pentecostal and catholic strands into emerging communities of dissent that promise to transform the nature of church life in the UK.⁴⁴

SOCIAL REFORM AND REVIVAL IN INDIA Parallel to the early twentieth-century Spirit movements in the USA and UK was a revival movement based in Mukti in India. This has often been described as an expression of American missionary Pentecostalism, yet it is now thought to more accurately be described as a distinct development that for a time overlapped with pentecostalism.⁴⁵ Notable for our purposes is the way in ⁴¹ Ogbu U. Kalu and Alaine Low, eds., Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities (Grand Rapids, 2008). ⁴² Eddie Gibbs and Ryan K. Bolger, Emerging Churches (London, 2006). ⁴³ Archbishops Council, Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Context (London, 2004). ⁴⁴ For a positive presentation of this, see Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why (Grand Rapids and Oxford, 2008). For a helpful pentecostal example, see Margaret M. Poloma and Ralph W. Hood, Blood and Fire: Godly Love in a Pentecostal Emerging Church (New York, 2008). ⁴⁵ A. C. George, ‘Pentecostal Beginnings in Travancore, South India’, Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies 4.2 (2001), p. 220; Gary B. McGee, ‘ “Latter Rain” Falling in the East:

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which the Mukti revival built upon the existing leadership of Pandita Ramabai who was nurtured in a way that dissented from Indian caste expectations and later stood up for women’s education against the dominant cultural assumptions.⁴⁶ Ramabai was born in a remote corner of the Bombay Presidency in 1858: her father perhaps set the tone of her life by ‘dissenting’ from caste strictures to have her educated (she spoke seven languages) and did not arrange for her to be married by contract. Their lives involved times of great poverty and hunger but by the time she visited the University of Calcutta her character and learning made her stand out. After the early death of her husband she established a school society to promote female education, particularly for destitute girls, victims of child marriages who had become widows, and those rescued from famine. The early Ramabai was best known for her stance on Indian nationalism and women’s education, a leader in social reform with little religious basis but a good knowledge of the Bible. It was while visiting England from 1883 to 1886 that she found herself drawn to Christ in whom she found ‘rest’. Her baptism in the Church of England caused an angry reaction in India as Christianity was seen as a Western religion, although she never associated herself with any one church. Many doors opened in England and in the USA (which she visited in 1886), for her to speak on issues of social reform and India. Ramabai spoke at public, feminist, and Christian gatherings and raised funds for her school project. Prominent national leaders encouraged her work and gave her a platform to speak about the challenge to reform. Steadily her Christian faith developed (both abroad and on her return to India) through the influence of a variety of people and traditions. (She was particularly impacted in the USA with the transformation in inter-religious sociability and national unity sparked among dissenting traditions by the demands of the American Revolution.⁴⁷) A major change resulted from the conversion of some of the women at her school to Christianity. The school at Mukti (‘salvation’ or ‘freedom’ in Marathi) had grown to 2,000 women and girls by 1900 but conversions caused major disturbance and violence against the school and led to its reorganization as a specifically Christian enterprise. The stage was set for movement of social reform with a spiritual basis that would challenge existing assumptions yet also build on and adapt wider thinking. Early Twentieth-Century Pentecostalism in India and the Debate over Speaking in Tongues’, Church History 68 (September 1999), pp. 648–65. ⁴⁶ On this, see particularly Edith L. Blumhofer, ‘Consuming Fire: Pandita Ramabai and the Global Pentecostal Impulse’, in Kalu and Low, eds., Interpreting Global Christianity, pp. 207–37. More generally on the revival and its appreciation within pentecostalism, see Allan Anderson, To the Ends of the Earth: Pentecostalism and the Transformation of World Christianity (Oxford, 2013), pp. 25–33. ⁴⁷ Ramabai Sarasvati, Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter: The Peoples of the United States (Bloomington, 2003), 155–6.

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Although Ramabai drew on different Christian traditions she gained particular encouragement from leaders connected with the interdenominational ‘higher and deeper life movements’, particularly those emanating from Keswick in England which articulated a broader and growing hunger for revival. This was a great longing both for people to know Jesus but also for social reform in India, where 8.5 million (out of a total of 140 million) women were estimated to be child brides. India had already been the site of one of the earliest pentecostal revivals in the nineteenth century, ‘associated with the Tamil evangelist John Christian Arulappan in Tamilnadu in 1860–65’.⁴⁸ Inspiration then came from the revival in Wales, and from 1905 ‘prayer bands’ were formed to pray daily for a fresh renewal in the Holy Spirit. One early morning that year a student spoke of how ‘the Lord woke her with the fire coming down upon her’ which was both wonderful and frightening—as it looked just like flames of fire!⁴⁹ Thus the revival at Mukti started with fire, intense joy, and loud prayer. Students often found themselves on their knees confessing their sins publicly, finding salvation in Jesus, being granted gifts of tongues (speech in different languages), and healing. The revival lasted a year and a half with over a thousand baptisms at the school and 700 sent in teams to witness in the surrounding areas, about a hundred going out each day. Ramabai herself went with a band of girls to Poona and started prayer meetings there which resulted in revival starting at a boys’ home there. Given Ramabai’s connections and this powerful spiritual impetus it is not surprising that this move of the Spirit spread far and wide, including (through missionary connections) to South America.⁵⁰ Here was a move of the Holy Spirit that has many parallels and overlapping origins with that at Azusa Street the following year, but which started before news came from Azusa Street and shared with it a common connection to Wales and transnational ‘deeper life’ spirituality. There are similarities and differences, often played upon by the desire of many Pentecostals to trace Mukti to a point of single origin at Azusa Street. Yet Ramabai resisted some of the doctrine that came from both Wales and the USA, in particular that tongues were the distinctive evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit. Her emphasis on helping the poor had led to broader critiques of Western

⁴⁸ Allan H. Anderson, ‘Precursors to Pentecostalism in South India: John Christian Arulappan (1810–67) and the Christianpettah Revival’, https://www.academia.edu/6068814/ Precursors_to_Pentecostalism_in_South_India_John_Christian_Arulappan_1810-67_and_the_ Christianpettah_Revival, accessed 20/11/2017. ⁴⁹ According to the 1909 report of Minnie Abrams quoted in Blumhofer, ‘Consuming Fire’, p. 222. ⁵⁰ Gary B. McGee, ‘Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire! The Revival Legacy of Minnie F. Abrams’, Enrichment Journal (Summer 1998), http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/199803/index. cfm, accessed 22/8/2016.

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Christianity in general.⁵¹ She was thus more focused on the ‘fruit’ that resulted from encounters with the Holy Spirit and did not place emphasis on the often dramatic times of prayer that characterized the revival. Of course, she welcomed Pentecostal missionaries and had an ecumenical spirit that desired to work with all Christians. Ramabai enabled the spread of pentecostalism through her networks and yet she maintained her national and social concerns and ultimately did not see herself in Pentecostal terms. She was too committed to Indian national self-determination to be simply a voice for a Western experience of faith. This is illustrated in her life-long endeavour to translate the Bible into a local dialect—grounding the Word of God in India. Her desire for social reform gave a different measure of the value of Spirit movements to that of those Pentecostals who focused on seeing people ‘saved’. Ramabai embodied a (d)issenting approach that appreciated and adapted positive Christian experiences whilst creating a distinctive Christian environment for personal transformation and social reform through education. As Robert Frykenberg has noted, she was a true Mahatma, a ‘great soul’ who contributed to the emergence of modern India on the social scale much as Ghandi contributed to its political ‘freedom’.⁵² This portrait of a twentieth-century indigenizing Indian Spirit movement that engaged with movements in other parts of the world is something which can be observed in many countries. These represent a deeper engagement with the local context, its language, customs, and stories, in many cases with little engagement with the wider pentecostal movements.⁵³ They tend to value and engage more with other religious traditions, leading to more dissent from the Western Christian traditions that still dominate much of the training of leaders. This is often rooted in an emphasis on the Holy Spirit as the cornerstone of Christian theology.⁵⁴ Theological dissent from within and outside currently dominant Christian Churches will no doubt reshape Christian faith and practice in the coming century. The first shoots of this can be seen in the early twentieth century, but the close of the story is yet to be seen.

⁵¹ Meera Kosambi, ‘Multiple Contestations: Pandita Ramabai's Educational and Missionary Activities in Late Nineteenth-Century India and Abroad’, Women’s History Review 7.2 (1998), p. 194. ⁵² Robert Frykenberg, in Rowan Strong, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume III: Partisan Anglicanism and its Global Expansion 1829–c.1914 (Oxford, 2017), p. 314. ⁵³ See Angela Tarango, Choosing the Jesus Way: American Indian Pentecostals and the Fight for the Indigenous Principle (Chapel Hill, 2014); and Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism, p. 206. ⁵⁴ On this, see the significant works of Kirsteen Kim, Mission in the Spirit: The Holy Spirit in Indian Christian Theologies (Delhi, 2003); Kirsteen Kim, The Holy Spirit in the World (London, 2007).

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POSTCOLONIAL CHALLENGES IN AFRICA The nature of indigenous Spirit movements and their links with Western Spirit movements is also a central theme in the study of Christianity in Africa. There has been a tendency to study African Christianity through a Western lens and place greater emphasis on global movements than on local histories.⁵⁵ So, again, when it comes to the African pentecostal movement there is a temptation to start with Azusa Street and the missionaries influenced by the significant experiences of Spirit baptism to the detriment of prior African realities. Some movements (such as the Apostolic Faith Mission, for example), it is true, did have a connection to Azusa Street.⁵⁶ The vision of Africa was also central to both the African Americans central to the outbreak of the Revival, and to many others who later connected to it: the passion of Lucy Farrow, Julia Hutchins, and J. S. Mead (among others) for Liberia springs to mind.⁵⁷ In most cases, however, their success was largely due to spirit movements which had already begun before they arrived: there were many other elements to the story. What is needed are retellings of the African story rather than Western historiography, particularly drawing out the importance of indigenous missionaries to the spread of Christianity.⁵⁸ Dissent from Western meta-narratives is thus built in to the development of Christianity in Africa over the last century. It is important to recognize, for example, that the African American evangelization that started in West Africa in 1792 already had a charismatic spirituality that prefigured all that would come later. Here the Spirit movement was antistructural, resisting colonial Christianity and supporting a vibrant black nationalism.⁵⁹ There began the stirrings of an internal process of Christian mission that was African in character, that would later reconnect with the African American inspirations of Azusa Street and the wider charismatic movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The growth of the Church across Africa has always been a result of the efforts of indigenous evangelists and leaders, regardless of whether the initial impetus has come from Western missionaries. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the Spirit movements in twentieth-century Africa had indigenous roots and contexts, as well as links with the spreading global movements.

⁵⁵ A classic challenge to this is given by Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, 2003). ⁵⁶ Frank Chikane, ‘The Blessings of Azusa Street and Doornfontein Revivals and Pentecost’s Blind Spot’, in Harold D. Hunter and Cecil M. Robeck, eds., The Azusa Street Revival and Its Legacy (Eugene, 2009), p. 262. ⁵⁷ Gaston Espinosa, ‘Ordinary Prophet: William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival’, in Hunter and Robeck, eds., The Azusa Street Revival and Its Legacy, p. 46. ⁵⁸ On this, see the masterly presentation of Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism (Oxford, 2008). ⁵⁹ Badra Lahouel, ‘Ethiopianism and African Nationalism in South Africa before 1937’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 26.104 (1986), pp. 681–8.

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A pointer towards this profound indigenization is the fact that Christianity has grown much more in Africa since the end of colonial rule, despite this rule often being associated with nations from a nominally Christian heritage.⁶⁰ During the middle decades of the century missionary societies were forced to adjust to the realities of new nations and their power structures, and so to develop understandings of Christian mission.⁶¹ Many Western organizations struggled to keep up with the rate of change among movements of the Spirit. As one scholar suggests, Africans have historically opted for pneumatic forms of the Christian faith in which the action of the Spirit of God is primary.⁶² In many cases this has required the rediscovery of traditions hidden by centuries of Western Christian acclimatization in Europe, or the grafting on of other spiritualities. The ‘Spirit of Jesus’ as an impulse to evangelism and witness has leaked out of Western forms. In African forms, however, it points to the importance of a renewal of life rather than the sustenance of structures; and it is about a bringing together of the material and the spiritual in more holistic religious approaches. The reduced grip of colonial powers, structures, assumptions, and rationalism led to a greater growth in Christianity through Spirit movements that connected with indigenous outlooks. The missionary churches that were often against charismatic forms of Christian faith found themselves struggling to survive as new churches sprung up on the edges of, or beyond, their administrative oversight. Interdenominational movements such as Scripture Union, were particularly prone to charismaticization.⁶³ Many people simply chose dissent from Churches formed by traditional Western-based denominations and joined new Churches more adapted to the culture whilst still appreciating the power of the Bible to bring freedom and hope. This is not to say that the Spirit movements completely bypassed mission churches, many of which found themselves adapting to the pressures of people ‘voting with their feet’, or the growing influence of indigenous staff. Sometimes this has been simply a forced adaptation in order to survive—the adoption of newer forms of music or prayer, for example. Yet often it has been because of Spirit movements within existing denominations, such as the large balokole movement of the ‘saved ones’ in eastern Africa.⁶⁴ This started in a Rwanda mission led by evangelicals from England who had contact with the Keswick movement and developed as these leaders alongside African leaders ⁶⁰ Sanneh, Whose Religion, 19. ⁶¹ See the helpful summary in Timothy Yates, Christian Mission in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1994), 133–62. ⁶² J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, Contemporary Pentecostal Christianity: Interpretations from an African Context (Oxford, 2013), pp. 179–83. ⁶³ Matthews A. Ojo, ‘The Contextual Significance of the Charismatic Movements in Independent Nigeria’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 58.2 (January 1988), pp. 175–92. ⁶⁴ Kalu, African Pentecostalism, pp. 94–8.

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sought God for the state of the church. It was a spiritual revitalization movement in which confession of sin and the seeking of a fresh baptism in the Holy Spirit were central. It thus had a moral focus and was fairly conservative, yet challenged the existing ways of being church as well as assumptions of the surrounding culture. There was a subversive dissenting approach to culture and Church and the renewing of ethnic identities.⁶⁵ Students of one of the theological colleges involved called themselves ‘obedient rebels’, capturing something of the desire to stick with the good whilst protesting evil, and dissenting against social and political forms which ‘get in the way’ of God’s working. There were a number of revivalist movements that were particularly significant during the 1970s, sometimes combining, sometimes clashing, with those emerging out of the wider charismatic movements. These Churches were irrevocably changed by the political and spiritual changes of the century, adapting as a ‘Spirit empowered people’ to share Jesus in ways that better engaged with the context. It is this emphasis on the power of the Spirit that initially was a key differentiator between mission and more indigenous forms of church life. The reality of spiritual power to African world views naturally leads to a suspicion of forms of faith that do not teach and experience a spiritual power that overcomes the evil realities of everyday life. A Westernized rationalistic faith habituated to the ‘monopolization of knowledge’ by science is hesitant to speak of such spiritual power, and this lessened the contextual attractiveness of mission churches. The Humean criticism of the credibility miracles, so influential in Western thought, is just not an issue in societies such as the Karanga in Zimbabwe, where the resurrection of spirits from the dead (zvikwambo) is entrenched in the magical world view of traditional religion.⁶⁶ As Jason Carter notes (in Chapter 6 in this volume), the Christ who rescues people from demons and evil powers has been an essential key to the Spirit movements in Africa. This converts the biblical text into a form of social capital, overcoming the dualism between the material and the spiritual that has been assumed in privileged missionary proclamation, and so opposing that privilege. Interestingly, one of the results of this has been a rise in appreciation of sacramental approaches within African pentecostalism. The practice of Holy Communion has been seen by some as a ‘miracle meal’ thus retrieving a traditional Christian practice whilst adapting it for new cultures.⁶⁷ The realities of ‘power contextualization’ are important for pentecostal movements across Africa and also Asia and they are increasingly key to Christian

⁶⁵ Derek Paterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c.1935–1972 (Cambridge, 2012). ⁶⁶ Tabona Shoko, Karanga Indigenous Religion in Zimbabwe: Health and Well-Being (Aldershot and Burlington, Ashgate), p. 42. ⁶⁷ Asamoah-Gyadu, Contemporary Pentecostal Christianity, pp. 145–59.

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mission in ways that contrast to the approaches of the mission churches that began the century.⁶⁸ Given the diversity of Spirit movements across Africa it is important to draw attention to one debate often returned to in the literature: the links between pentecostalism and African Initiated Churches (AICs).⁶⁹ In considering the diffusion of Spirit movements is it appropriate to consider AICs as ‘pentecostal’ or do they represent a unique way of spirituality which relies upon ‘dissent’ from other approaches?⁷⁰ In approaching such questions it is important to differentiate the origins of AICs from the reasons for their growth: for example, there may be more Western influence in their origins, but this doesn’t explain their growth once this influence has waned. Both pentecostalism and AICs clearly share a context in which there has been a reaction against the dry formalism, rationalization, and connections to colonialism among the mission churches, in part driven by rapid social change. The breakdown of traditional society, and industrialization and urbanization are lived realities for many, sparking a search for more indigenous ‘havens of belonging’. They also share a sense of protest against European missions that ‘failed to love’ and understand the African culture, replacing this with a desire for the power of the Holy Spirit that addresses issues of evil, sickness, and healing. There are many continuities between these two overlapping views of the cosmos, which in a number of ways remain suspicious of each other. African denominational Pentecostals tend to be critical of AICs and accuse them of being undiscerning as to their appropriation of African culture, such as approaches to ancestor worship which Pentecostals would reject outright.⁷¹ AICs might suspect that Pentecostals are too shaped by cultures beyond Africa, and have no answers to the desire to respect ancestors. Perhaps both have ‘selectively reinterpreted African tradition in the light of their radical reformation of Christianity’,⁷² and in their implied competition for the same ‘religious markets’. Here the radical emergence of new forms of Christianity goes alongside the adaptation of local contexts and spirit-empowered biblical testimony. Although movement classifications can be debated, for our purposes it is sufficient to note the way in which Spirit movements have emerged in Africa in a great variety of ways, leading to new Churches as well as adaptations in all the existing Churches over the last century. ⁶⁸ For more on this, see Julie C. Ma and Wonsuk Ma, Mission in the Spirit: Towards a Pentecostal/Charismatic Missiology (Oxford, 2010). ⁶⁹ See Chapter 1 by Brown and Chapters 3, 5, 8, and 14 by Hutchinson in this volume for more detailed accounts of theoretical approaches. ⁷⁰ On these questions, see Kalu, African Pentecostalism, pp. 65–83; Allan Anderson, African Reformation: African Initiated Christianity in the 20th Century (Asmara, 2001). ⁷¹ Maria Frahm-Arp, ‘The Rise of the Megachurches in South Africa’, in Synan and Yong, eds., Global Renewal Christianity, p. 271. ⁷² Anderson, African Reformation, p. 254.

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RENEWING THE SO CIAL W ORLD IN LATIN AMERICA Questions relating to how Spirit movements dissented from existing denominations through indigenous engagement often take a more political twist in Latin America. It is notable that classical Pentecostalism flowed down from North America into Latin America with the result that about half the classical Pentecostals in the world are now to be found there. This was an adaptive faith that was ‘active, participatory, fissile, egalitarian and enthusiastic’.⁷³ It arrived at a time when there was a growing break in the close links between the internationalizing social fabric of countries and the dominant religious form, Roman Catholicism. This break created a space into which pentecostalism flowed as it empowered many of the minority ethnic groups who had been excluded from both secular and religious power. Pentecostalism represented not simply a personal faith but a renewed social world that gave meaning particularly to people who were moving from the countryside into the growing cities.⁷⁴ Although initially shaped by external sources, Latin American pentecostalism represents a Spirit movement that empowers ordinary people and communities to make a difference in life. If the key word in India was ‘freedom’, in Hispanic countries it was about ‘respect’. At the same time that such new communities emerged they also retained an emphasis on strong leadership and the limited political engagement common to wider culture. The latter was unsurprising for a people who had never had political power. As in Africa, there was also a particular indigenous engagement with the religious culture (indeed, in Brazil, a confluence of indigeneities) that had been hidden beneath the surface of much existing church life. As one author puts it, to be Hispanic is to be ‘homo religiosus’ and so have every area of life transformed by a religious outlook.⁷⁵ Hispanic spirituality is characterized by passion, personalism, community, pilgrimage, musical élan, ‘fiesta’ celebration, and family. These are areas into which pentecostalism spoke by bringing into being new ways of personal and passionate family and community life, organized around and legitimized by language of the Spirit. Such communities emerged in ways that adapted the pre-existing religious outlook and yet also sought to stand out against ‘the world’. There is an inbuilt paradox here as the Spirit is seen both to engage the whole of a religious outlook and yet also develop approaches to holiness that differentiated Christians from others. In this there seems to be joining of the two ways that Harvey Cox suggests are

⁷³ David Martin, Tongues of Fire (London, 1996), p. 274. ⁷⁴ Stephen Hunt, ‘Glocalization and Protestant and Catholic Contestations in the Brazilian Religious Economy’, in Martin Lindhardt, ed., New Ways of Being Pentecostal in Latin America (Lanham, 2016), p. 19. ⁷⁵ Eldin Villafañe, The Liberating Spirit: Toward an Hispanic American Pentecostal Social Ethic (Grand Rapids, 1993), p. 41.

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options for the future for those seeking spiritual meaning: ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘experientialism’.⁷⁶ There is a stress on the fundamentals that differentiate Christian communities from others, yet an experientialism that includes and transforms certain elements of preexisting religiosity. Cox identifies a number of paradoxes in Latin American pentecostalism that we can see as linked to understandings of the Spirit as working in ways that are both emergent and adaptive.⁷⁷ In considering the social and political impact of such paradoxical religious movements we need to take care as to where we focus our study. The temptation is to examine the larger (and more rigorously studied) megachurches, particularly those with more notable links to North American Churches.⁷⁸ Yet most Pentecostal Churches in Latin America are small and not led by notable leaders, and personal experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit (rather than church identity) is key to their empowerment. This is a ‘redemption from below’ in which Pentecostals become not just changed individually but are swept up into a social programme. The engagement with a spirituality in which family and community are central naturally leads to the kind of social transformation that provides a vision of a better life and enables ‘social uplift’ as people’s moral lives are transformed. New Christians are ‘protestantized’, leading to less waste of time, money, and selves and greater commitment to the good of their families and communities.⁷⁹ Linked with the realization that all are made in the image of God and are granted gifts by the Spirit, this inevitably brings about social change. There is thus an unconscious commitment to social and political change among Pentecostals, a natural side effect of their encounter with the Spirit.⁸⁰ This development has been increasingly given form as independent institutions (such as training colleges, ministerial connexions, media ministries, etc.) have emerged, leading Pentecostals to become more consciously involved in social and political causes. The alternative social realities that they have constructed have come to function as instruments of human justice and networks have been formed to change the wider realities.⁸¹ There have developed, on the one ⁷⁶ Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the 21st Century (London, 1996), p. 300. ⁷⁷ Cox, Fire from Heaven, pp. 218–19. ⁷⁸ Everett A. Wilson, ‘Redemption from Below: The Emergence of Latin American Popular Pentecostals’, in Calvin L. Smith, ed., Pentecostal Power: Expressions, Impact, and Faith of Latin American Pentecostalism (Leiden and Boston, 2011), pp. 9–36. ⁷⁹ Wonsuk Ma, ‘ “When the Poor are Fired Up”: The Role of Pneumatology in Pentecostal/ Charismatic Mission’, in Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen. ed., The Spirit in the World: Emerging Pentecostal Theologies in Global Contexts (Grand Rapids, 2009), p. 41. ⁸⁰ As noted in an important survey by Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley and London, 2007), p. 32. ⁸¹ Douglas Petersen, Not by Might Nor by Power: A Pentecostal Theology of Social Concern in Latin America (Oxford, 1996), pp. 227–31.

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hand, ‘progressive Pentecostals’ who see God as giving them a mandate of responsibility for social problems within their community and, on the other, conservative movements which maintain the social status quo whilst focusing on personal moral transformation.⁸² This political engagement is more widespread than just among Pentecostals and (as previously noted) there has been a parallel development of liberation theology in Latin America. This picks up the broader Protestant desire to set people free in faith and service, but is also rooted in a contextual engagement with particular communities of people and with a commitment to action on behalf of the oppressed. It draws particularly on the Exodus narrative of liberation of God’s people from slavery in Egypt and places this alongside the struggles many face today. The gospel thus brings both a personal and also a political liberation, the latter of which is a pressing need in those countries where oppression is common. This has implications for the structures of church life, and has encouraged the development of small communities who worship, share, and study the Bible together. There are many overlaps between movements of liberation and pentecostalism in their dissent from existing religious assumptions, each stressing in their own way contextual engagement, community development, and faith in action. It can be argued that both have had a significant political effect in setting marginalized people free although until recently, for pentecostals, this has been seen as more of a ‘byproduct’ in ways that have sparked criticism from intellectual elites. Pentecostals have been slowly learning that the liberation from evil needs to take account of structural and not just personal evil. These are bottom-up movements that see individuals empowered by the Holy Spirit to bring change that inevitably connects people together and raises wider questions. Pentecostal and liberation movements are also intertwined within the Roman Catholic Church. Many liberation activists were Catholic and more recent charismatic movements have helped stimulate Catholic renewal movements. It is still the case that over two thirds of Latin Americans see themselves as Catholic yet the desire for a closer connection with God has led many to seek more pentecostal and charismatic forms of faith.⁸³ It is estimated that there are more than seventy million Catholics in Latin America involved in charismatic renewal movements, something that (as the appointment of the first Latin American Pope, Francis, has shown) is slowly changing the nature of Catholicism—in ways not always received with approbation.⁸⁴ These tend to be more ecumenical and relate to wider pentecostal movements. Here too we

⁸² Miller and Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism, p. 34. ⁸³ Pew Research Center, 2014, http://www.pewforum.org/2014/11/13/religion-in-latinamerica/#, accessed 1/12/2014. ⁸⁴ Annalisa Butticci, African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe (Cambridge, 2016), p. 10.

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see Spirit movements breaking up dominant Christian ideological positions in favour of more contextual, personal, spiritual, and politically active forms of communal faith.

P R O S P E R I T Y IN IN D O N E S I A Seeking liberation from very difficult economic and social conditions is common across many of the nations noted in this chapter. It underlies a spiritual seeking after the power of God to change economic and material situations for the better, rooted for many in the promise of the Holy Spirit given to transform the world. There is thus an inevitable link between the spiritual and the material within the immanent address of Spirit movements, and a belief that the material is transformed for the better. Positive dissent from the economic arrangements which produce inequality spark challenges to existing institutions (one might think, for example, of the broadly based coalitions underpinning the Jubilee 2000, or anti-human trafficking campaigns, many of which emerged from charismatic communities).⁸⁵ Yet questions are also raised as to what kinds of transformation are possible in an imperfect world and the extent to which material provisions might result. This has become focused through the so-called prosperity theology of the ‘health and wealth’ gospel proclaimed by many pentecostal leaders. Here God’s blessings are evidenced in increased (or even perfect) finances and personal health and a belief that genuine faith in Jesus inevitably leads to more money and overcoming illnesses. There has been a great deal of scholarly attention on this controversial area (almost to the exclusion of other trends in related Spirit movements), and it is not possible to summarize it all in this chapter. Jason Carter (Chapter 6 in this volume) provides an excellent introduction to the interaction between indigenization and ‘blessing theology’ which has emerged in the influential Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, founded by the Reverend David Yonggi Cho.⁸⁶ This chapter extends that analysis to developments further south, in Indonesia.

⁸⁵ Paola Grenier, ‘Jubilee 2000: Laying the Foundations for a Social Movement’, in John D. Clark, ed., Globalizing Civic Engagement: Civil Society and Transnational Action (London, 2003), p. 90. ⁸⁶ See Lee Young-Hoon, ‘Christian Spirituality and the Diakonic Mission of the Yoido Full Gospel Church’, in Kirsteen Kim and Andrew Anderson, eds., Edinburgh 2010: Mission Today and Tomorrow (Oxford, 2011), pp. 85–97; Katherine Attanasi and Amos Yong, eds., Pentecostalism and Prosperity: The Socio-Economics of the Global Charismatic Movement (New York, 2012), p. 18; Wonsuk Ma, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, and J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, eds., Pentecostal Mission and Global Christianity (Oxford, 2014), p. 103.

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Despite being a Muslim-dominant country, there are millions of Pentecostals and charismatics among the perhaps twenty-four million Christians in the country. Estimated numbers vary: in 2008, Aritonang and Steenbrink suggested there were perhaps six million,⁸⁷ while in 2002 Robinson suggested there were perhaps twelve million.⁸⁸ The World Christian Database proposes a more credible figure of 8.9 million,⁸⁹ while Christine Gudorf outlined the problems of estimating numbers in a society where proselytization is illegal and violence against ethnic Chinese and Christian communities is not uncommon, and decided not to provide an estimate at all.⁹⁰ (The culture of ‘non-reporting’ due to the felt need to protect members from the state security apparatus adds a layer of complexity: poor records lead to significant double counting between classical Pentecostalism and the more contemporary neocharismatic Churches). Nevertheless, as Gudorf notes, Pentecostalism in Indonesia ‘wears a very late modern face’, with ‘high-tech’ worship, large sanctuaries, mass multi-ethnic crowds, extensive use of English (even by non-English speaking members), and car parks full of the symbols of prosperity.⁹¹ Despite official obstructionism, neo-Pentecostal communities have captured in their building of large, well-equipped worship spaces a national orientation by large subsections of urbanized populations which desire to leave the country’s medieval, conservative religio-political past, overcome racial bias, and orient themselves towards globalized markets and flows. Indeed, the distinction between the relatively static classical and growing neo-Pentecostal movements has much to do with the adaptation of the latter to the lived reality in Indonesia, a country which has experienced significant population growth (from under 100 million in 1960 to over 250 million in 2016), and drift to the cities (from a population which was 66 per cent rural in 1960, to 45 per cent rural in 2016).⁹² It represents, in that sense, a form of (d)issent from a semi-religious state ideology, an ‘alternative alternative globalization’ wrapped in a DNA-like helix relationship with that other alternative globalization dominant in Indonesian and Malaysian politics, the reorientation ⁸⁷ J. Aritonang and K. Steenbrink, A History of Christianity in Indonesia (Leiden and Boston, 2008), p. 882. ⁸⁸ Chang-Yau Hoon, ‘Between Evangelism and Multiculturalism: The Dynamics of Protestant Christianity in Indonesia’, Social Compass 60.4 (2013), p. 462. ⁸⁹ Todd M. Johnson and Gina A. Zurlo, eds., World Christian Database (Leiden and Boston), http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/, accessed 10/2017. ⁹⁰ Christine E. Gudorf, ‘Introduction: Pentecostalism Amid the Late Modern Shifts in Indonesian Society’, in Christine E. Gudorf, Zainal Abidin Bagir, and Marthen Tahun, eds., Aspirations for Modernity and Prosperity: Symbols and Sources Behind Pentacostal/Charismatic Growth in Indonesia (Adelaide, 2014), p. 5. ⁹¹ Gudorf, ‘Introduction: Pentecostalism Amid the Late Modern Shifts in Indonesian Society’, p. 3. ⁹² World Bank, ‘Rural population (% of total population)’ [World Bank Staff estimates based on United Nations, World Urbanization Prospect], https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP. RUR.TOTL.ZS, accessed 15/11/2017.

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to the global Muslim Umma. This came to the fore, Rodemeier notes, ‘when President Suharto publicly demonstrated being a “modern” Muslim when he went on pilgrimage to Mecca in 1991’.⁹³ As an alternative, late modern approach to solving the problems also addressed by the national ideology of Indonesia, Pancasila, they adopt a re-culturalized, flexible market perspective rather than legislative approaches which are often heavy-handed, manipulated by political religionists, and inevitably out of date even by the time they come into force. As Chao notes, when specifically religious language is repressed (as Christian public celebrations of Christmas, and other important concepts such as nonMuslim perceptions of the unity of God are in Indonesia), material objects come to have much more powerful import in carrying the core intent of a community’s thought. He describes gift giving in a hospital in Salatiga, Java, as a mechanism for opening conversations, often leading to impassioned prayer encounters. While his use of ‘fetish’ language (in which ‘the object is endowed with personality, quality and agency that actively interacts with people and symbolically indicates status’)⁹⁴ may be more descriptive rather than prescriptive, studies of the spread of neo-Pentecostalism in the semi-command states of South East Asia agree that, in varying ways, approaches to nation formation have (mostly accidentally) conspired to preference charismatic rather than established forms of religious expression.⁹⁵ John Roxborogh describes, for instance, ‘the largest known movement of Muslims to Christianity’⁹⁶ in the mass ‘conversions’ (of up to 2.5 million people) known as the ‘Great Harvests’ sparked by the Suharto administration’s anti-Communist purges in the 1960s, and the particular pressure to ‘choose a religious identity’ placed on Chinese Indonesians in order to distinguish themselves from the meddling of the Communist Party in China. Heavily concentrated in mercantile and other mobile forms of activity, Chinese Indonesians were also linked to the flows of (d)issenting Christianity in other elements of the diaspora, particularly in Malaysia and Singapore. Not only did the Suharto regime accidentally create a receptivity to religious change in a large part of a repressed population, but it did so in ways which connected that population to globalized post-imperial, ⁹³ Susanne Rodemeier, ‘Emergence and Establishment of a Charismatic Church within the Framework of Javanese Self-Perception in Surakarta, Indonesia’, Indonesia and the Malay World 45.131 (2017), p. 67. ⁹⁴ En-Chieh Chao, ‘Blessed Fetishism: Language Ideology and Embodied Worship among Pentecostals in Java’, Culture and Religion 12.4 (2011), pp. 373, 375. ⁹⁵ Robbie Goh, ‘Hillsong and “Megachurch” Practice: Semiotics, Spatial Logic and the Embodiment of Contemporary Evangelical Protestantism’, Material Religion 4.3 (November 2008); Gudorf, ‘Introduction: Pentecostalism Amid the Late Modern Shifts in Indonesian Society’. ⁹⁶ W. John Roxborogh, ‘Situating Southeast Asian Christian Movements in the History of World Christianity’, in Michael Nai-Chiu Poon, ed., Christian Movements in Southeast Asia: A Theological Exploration (Singapore, 2010), p. 21.

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charismatized Christianity. In her study of Surakarta (which at 20 per cent has officially twice as many Christians per head of population as the Central Javanese average, and may have twice as many again) Rodemeir concludes that ‘it is clear that radical Islam serves as breeding ground for a charismatic mega-church’.⁹⁷ In short, pressure downwards on the establishment elements of universalizing Christianity preferences its dissenting and charismatic potentials, particularly where there is an underlying spirituality with which it can be fused. In Africa and South Korea, as we have seen, those underlying spiritualities were various species of animism or shamanism. As the Singaporean theologian, Simon Chan, notes (pace Harold Taylor), Pentecostalism and primal spiritualities share a keen sense ‘that men can enter into relationship with this benevolent spirit world and share in its powers and blessings and receive protection from evil forces by these more-than-human helpers . . . that he share their life and power not only in his world but also beyond death . . . that men live in a sacramental universe where there is no sharp dichotomy between the physical and the spiritual’.⁹⁸ Seeing neo-Pentecostalism as the ‘end point’ of the Christian presence in Indonesia is thus probably a mistake—as such movements grow, they too are in motion, just as they represent change in and from classical Pentecostalism. Interestingly enough, two of the largest ‘apostolic’ schisms from the classical Pentecostal Gereja Bethel Indonesia (centred in Jakarta) both took place in at the other end of the island of Java, in Surabaya: in 2001, for instance, by the Mawar Sharon (Rose of Sharon) Church in Surabaya, and in 2003 by the neo-Pentecostal Gereja Bethany under A. A. Tanuseputra. Local culture, openness to events elsewhere in Asia and Australasia, and tensions over central control clearly played a role. Likewise, the material nature of neo-Pentecostal churches is not just a response to internal spiritualities (‘push’ factors)—it grows in part because of the external ‘pull’ factors (in the Indonesian polis, in local cultures and languages, in inter-ethnic histories, among others). If Muslims, for instance, see Muslim conversion to Christianity as an extension of tempting ‘weak’ or nominal Muslims with material advantages, that is in part because of (as Chao notes) the nature of how materiality is constructed and given value in Indonesian settings, and the value-stripping that is largely led by Muslim politics in the public sphere. Bird counts ten megachurches in Indonesia, two of which are Reformed, one of which is Mennonite, and seven of which are Pentecostal or charismatic.⁹⁹ In part, this is because (as Robbie Goh notes), mass worship ⁹⁷ Rodemeier, ‘Emergence and Establishment of a Charismatic Church’, p. 71. ⁹⁸ Simon Chan, ‘Folk Christianity and Primal Spirituality: Prospects for Theological Development’, in Poon, ed., Christian Movements in Southeast Asia, pp. 1–2. ⁹⁹ This is probably an underestimate, however, as Mawar Sharon, Indonesia Bethel Church– Praise Revival for Jesus (GBI–PRJ), and several others are not included in the list, or are aggregated with others. ‘Global Megachurches—World’s Largest Churches’, compiled by Warren Bird, PhD,

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cultures depend on size (‘the mega’). On the other hand, as Gudorf notes, megachurches can do things other organizations in a disincentivizing broader culture can do, and (in the wake of a variety of attacks and bombings by Islamic militants) are simply safer.¹⁰⁰ Instead, then, neo-Pentecostal growth needs to be seen as a variety of grass-roots responses to heavy-handed official theo-politics (amongst which one might consider the criticism coming from other Christian traditions, particularly the large Reformed constituency), which works because it connects existing cultural potentials in a very various island archipelago directly to global flows. The emergence of ‘Hillsong Family’ Churches in Indonesia and the success of Australian neo-pentecostal rock groups such as Planetshakers there,¹⁰¹ represent the international face of a vibrant, popular, Bahasa-language worship music culture centring on bands such as True Worshippers and Unlimited Fire (the use of English-language pointers is, as elsewhere in the world, a status ‘badge’ pointing towards global engagement). By 2012, even a relatively new movement such as Gereja Bethany not only reported some 300 churches in Indonesia, but another forty churches overseas. Susanne Rodemeier’s study of the emergence of a large, cell-based neoPentecostal Church, Gereja Keluarga Allah (GKA), in the suburbs of Surakarta (Central Java), demonstrates many of these themes. Among the most important are the effects of urbanization, the presence of large numbers of mobile, multi-faith families, democratization after the demission of Suharto in 1998, a strong core of Chinese Indonesian Christians, the charismatic movement in the traditional Protestant Churches, and the increasing importance of language change and individualism.¹⁰² With the sensitivity of an anthropologist, Rodemeier identifies in her interviews with Javanese members of the Church the repetitive use of two words: a Javanese word rasa (‘intuitive experience and knowledge’), and a Bahasa word teman (‘friend’, a term not common among Javanese, for whom personal friendships have traditionally been subjected to family relationships). The central role of rasa and teman in charismatic spirituality was, Rodemeier states, potentially revolutionary in Javanese traditional society, permitting the construction of relationships not tied to traditional family, creating a form of individuality (‘the church . . . helped me find my true self ’)¹⁰³ which mobilizes individuals on alternative pathways and https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YIKShcapvO6LatV5WG7P4XXczuoaw9EAfKv3IMJwXnQ/ edit?hl=en_US&hl=en_US#gid=0 (via http://leadnet.org/world/), accessed 15/11/2017. ¹⁰⁰ Goh, ‘Hillsong and “Megachurch” Practice’, p. 288. ¹⁰¹ Russell Evans, ‘Pastor Russell Evans (Planetshakers) prayer over Indonesia (April 2017)’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS9h2ZTx8x8, accessed 15/11/2017. ¹⁰² Rodemeier, ‘Emergence and Establishment of a Charismatic Church’, pp. 66–7. ¹⁰³ Johanes L. Lengkong, ‘Here I am to Worship: Professionalisation and Emotional Needs Fulfilment in the Worship of Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches in Indonesia’, in Gudorf, Bagir and Tahun, eds., Aspirations for Modernity and Prosperity, p. 15.

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through alternative relationships. Charismatic spirituality appealed particularly to the abangan—those who practised a local mystical Islamic spirituality fused with traditional rituals dominant in the area from the eighteenth century— who were persecuted and murdered by Muslim nationalists in the 1960s, and who were part of the ‘great harvests’ of the 1960s and the post-Suharto period. It also broke down the class relationships between ‘rich’ Chinese Indonesians and lower-middle-class Javanese, by teaching that wealth was the result of following God’s will, regardless of ethnicity or background.¹⁰⁴ A cell-based structure—which is an ecclesial technology particularly associated with Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea—has enabled the Church to spread, despite a virtual ban on new houses of worship, and to expand to other areas of Indonesia. In 2012, the Church claimed 30,000 members (of which Rodemeier reports seeing perhaps 12,000 in combined worship meetings),¹⁰⁵ and was switching its goals towards baptizing a million people.

MEGACHURCHES IN AUSTRALIA The megachurches which have grown around the world in response to fresh moves of the Spirit have often struggled in their journeys of contextual empowerment. One globalized megachurch recognizable by many is Hillsong Church, which originated in Australia, part of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God (later renamed ‘Australian Christian Churches’).¹⁰⁶ Pentecostalism was established in Australia in the early 1900s and (like Mukti, and indeed in interaction with it) developed as an indigenous church that engaged with global movements. It gained fresh life as a result of the charismatic movement in the 1960s and 1970s, facilitating a growth that engaged modern culture. This contextual engagement was focused on attractive new styles of music and leadership culture, and departed from previous, more legalistic approaches to holiness and eschatology. Australian megachurches can thus be seen as a form of dissent within a broader tradition of Pentecostalism itself (in which style, practices, and beliefs were challenged), and to the broader secularization of

¹⁰⁴ Rodemeier, ‘Emergence and Establishment of a Charismatic Church’, p. 78. ¹⁰⁵ ‘In 2011, Gereja Keluarga Allah held five consecutive services each Sunday attended by 1,000 to 3,000 congregants at each service. In the years since then, their numbers have continued to increase and the church was able to open several branches on Java and other Indonesian islands, including Bali, Kalimantan and West Papua’: Rodemeier, ‘Emergence and Establishment of a Charismatic Church’, p. 69. ¹⁰⁶ Shane J. Clifton, Pentecostal Churches in Transition: Analysing the Development of the Assemblies of God in Australia (Leiden, 2009), pp. 151–2, 161–81.

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Australian society.¹⁰⁷ Numbers of ‘new generation’ Australian Pentecostal churches reached megachurch status from the 1970s: the first, perhaps, being Faith Centre in northern Sydney (a forerunner of Christian City Church, or C3), followed by Christian Outreach Centre (now Citipointe Church) in Brisbane, Paradise AOG (now Influencers Church) in Adelaide, Christian Life Centre Darlinghurst (later part of the Hillsong network), Calvary Temple in Townsville, Gateway Baptist Church and Garden City AOG in Brisbane (now Hillsong, Brisbane), and Crossway Baptist Church in Melbourne. Founded in 1983, Hillsong (originally called ‘Hills Christian Life Centre’) has been the most influential of these, growing from an initial forty-five members to over 23,000 people in its Sydney centres, and many more in the sixty or so centres planted later around Australia. The annual Hillsong conference attracts some 35,000 people, and on any given Sunday draws more than 100,000 people to services in its worship centres around the world. Hillsong is clearly a Pentecostal Church and yet one which has sensed the Spirit moving them away from its own ‘Spirit inspired’ roots. Baptism in the Holy Spirit, evidenced by speaking in tongues, is an experience that has shaped most forms of Pentecostalism. Hillsong has quietly adapted this to an emphasis on being filled with the Holy Spirit in ways that enable spiritual gifts, and even this is less evident in the songs the Church has pioneered.¹⁰⁸ This might be due to the process of a ‘routinisation of charisma’ that is a common social change as a tradition develops, although it also reflects a more individualized focus emphasizing personal experience rather than creedal obligation.¹⁰⁹ Indeed, the re-emphasis on the Holy Spirit in more recent Hillsong events (such as at the 2017 Hillsong Conference) might be read as an explicit rejection of routinization. These more socially driven changes are in one sense contextual changes, although without being drawn into dialogue with the biblical text. What has caused more debate within the Assemblies of God has been the nature of leadership. If Pentecostalism has traditionally seen the empowerment of all in ministry then Hillsong represents a shift towards emphasizing the ‘anointed’ leadership of the senior pastor. Though Brian Houston, the founding senior pastor of Hillsong, rarely if ever uses that term, the style of the Church has been interpreted in the context of the broader ‘apostolic revolution’ championed by characters such as C. Peter Wagner, Rick Joyner, and others.

¹⁰⁷ See Mark P. Hutchinson, ‘ “Up the Windsor Road”: Social Complexity, Geographies of Emotion and the Rise of Hillsong’, in T. Riches and T. Wagner, eds., The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon The Waters (Basingstoke and New York, 2017), pp. 39–62. ¹⁰⁸ See here the study of David Morgan, Priesthood, Prophethood and Spirit-Led Community: A Practical-Prophetic Pentecostal Ecclesiology (Lambert, 2010), pp. 169, 202–3. ¹⁰⁹ Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organizations (New York, 1947), pp. 358–92.

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Again, some have argued that this is giving in to the wider culture and moving away from the democratic spirit of the initial Pentecostal impulse.¹¹⁰ It may be the case that emphasizing the work of the Spirit leads naturally to a stress on experience that quickly moves to pragmatic approaches which lose touch with ‘biblically inspired’ ideology. Yet Hillsong remains rooted in the same Scriptures and maintains key pentecostal themes such as that of encountering God in ways that restore and revive the Church. These focus strongly in the worship and practice of the Church and represent continuity despite its significant dissent from the foundational holiness revivalism of its origins. It can be argued that dissent and the strong debates it engenders stimulate a deeper seeking of what is at the heart of these movements of the Spirit. Hillsong emphasizes a heart for worship seen as a transforming encounter with God, resulting in the growth of the Kingdom of God. This is entrenched in its much-emulated Vision Statement (painted on the walls of each of its worship centres), out of which spring the wider practices and beliefs of the Church. Worship is not seen as a contextual practice but one focused on God from which people are empowered for communal engagement. This acts as a counterbalance to the pragmatism which attends the running of a large organization. Such clarity of emphasis also draws attention to the similarities between this move of the Spirit and those in other Christian traditions. Hillsong worship can be seen in terms of encouraging ‘mystical’ encounters with God in ways that resonate with Roman Catholic traditions. Indeed, the Catholic influence on the growth of the charismatic and Pentecostal movements in Australia has been noted.¹¹¹ The Catholic Church had the structures in place to help enable the initial spread of charismatic renewal. It also provided support for a more experiential approach due to the importance of subcultural Celtic and French mystical influences in Australian Catholicism. Whilst many of the mainline denominations have declined since the 1980s they embodied traditions that encouraged the Charismatic Renewal in its early days. As the mainline denominational ‘social contract’ degraded with the secularization of Western societies, these charismatic forms have come to the fore. This was particularly the case in Australia, the public culture of which became crusadingly secular and anti-religious towards the end of the twentieth century.¹¹² The result is that, at the time of writing, Pentecostalism is the only remaining, growing form of Protestant Christianity in Australia, and the second largest form of Christianity by attendance. If (as noted previously) ‘radical Islam serves as breeding ground for a charismatic mega-church’ in

¹¹⁰ Clifton, Pentecostal Churches, p. 178. ¹¹¹ Mark Hutchinson, ‘ “Going the Other Way Round”: Catholic Contributions to the Emerging Pentecostal Norm in Australia’, PentecoStudies 12.1 (2013), pp. 36–61. ¹¹² Hutchinson, ‘ “Up the Windsor Road” ’, pp. 40–1.

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Indonesia, it is arguable that aggressively secular public cultures play a similar role in the West. As Hillsong has grown in size and influence there has also developed a small undercurrent of dissent that feels inspired by the Spirit to develop in other directions, notably those that engage more fully with local cultures. Although Hillsong still describes itself as a ‘local church’ and promotes the importance of such local churches, the term ‘local’ hardly means what it meant in times past as a small geographic area from which the church is drawn. People travel to Hillsong, like other megachurches, from a variety of surrounding geographical areas. Hence there is always a gap between the gathered church and the cultures people have come from, even in more network-based cultures where geography has less significance. One response to this has been given by Comunidade Nova Aliança, a church affiliated to the Assemblies of God and influenced by Hillsong.¹¹³ Some Brazilians involved in Hillsong enjoyed the worship style but found there was lacking the sense of family that is so important in Brazilian culture. They also wanted a greater emphasis on God as ‘Father’ and not just as ‘friend’, reflecting the stronger emphasis on fatherhood in Brazil. These desires stimulated the establishment of a new, if affiliated, Church that worshipped in Portuguese and embodied more of the local culture to which members were familiar. Another example from Sydney is the much smaller Cabramatta Vineyard Church that started out as a church following the alternative charismatic Vineyard model of worship and ministry pioneered by American charismatic leader John Wimber.¹¹⁴ Despite its location in a poorer, more multicultural part of Sydney its leaders became frustrated because of its lack of attractiveness to these cultures: it was growing largely by drawing people of a single culture from outside of their notional area. This dissatisfaction came at a time when there was a growing literature on the idea of a missional church that engaged cultures.¹¹⁵ The leaders took the brave decision to emphasize small community groups that met in the area and for a time closed down their Sunday worship services. (This was to be an approach taken in an increasing number of urban settings in the West, perhaps most famously by such former megachurch pastors as Francis Chan and Rob Bell.) This enabled the growth of a church of diverse communities and missional outlook—a more contextually

¹¹³ Christina Rocha, ‘Transnational Pentecostal Connections: An Australian Megachurch and a Brazilian Church in Australia’, PentecoStudies 12.1 (2013), pp. 62–82. ¹¹⁴ Peter Downes and Darren Cronshaw, ‘Vineyard Meets Emerging Missional Churches’, Australasian Pentecostal Studies 16 (2014), http://aps-journal.com/aps/index.php/APS/article/ view/139/136, accessed 9/2/2015. ¹¹⁵ Darrell L. Guder, ed., Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids, 1998); Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Grand Rapids, 2006).

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empowered approach similar to that amongst the Brazilians noted previously, and among other smaller ethnic church communities which dot the region.¹¹⁶ This naturally brought the Church into conflict with those who felt they were moving away from the ‘Vineyard’ identity. Here, in short, was a nuanced dissent within a charismatic Church which arose from and led to deeper contextual engagement, unsettling issues of identity even as it empowered.

CO NCLUSION The twentieth century saw a variety of Spirit movements that sent the Church out into all the world to engage in a rich mix of cultures. It also brought a rich mix of cultures back into the drawing areas and even the meeting halls of previous missionary ‘sending’ Churches. These engendered inherently dissenting movements, dissenting both from the assumptions of existing Churches, and from wider cultural norms. The Spirit led people and communities to dissent from the existing forms of Church—their practices, traditions, and theology. This was particularly the case in regard to Western-formed Churches at times of nationalist reaction, but was also more general, and the issues in each context differed. Spirit language was also definitional for people moving away from the wider cultural assumptions of their times, particularly in terms of the political outlooks and the ‘monopolization of knowledge’ by enlightenment rationalism.¹¹⁷ As particular states and Churches became less identifiable as the ‘establishment’ against which to push, so ‘Dissent’ became ‘dissent/(D)issent’, i.e. more diffuse forms (if still mirroring some earlier dissent). Looking back we can see dissent from existing Church and cultural patterns, although at the time this was seen more in terms of the Holy Spirit empowering new forms of spirituality that would reshape Churches and cultures. These spiritualities have been helpfully considered in terms of emergent and adaptive spiritualities. Spirit movements both want to reject certain practices and beliefs and yet also continue to hold (or return) to the roots of Christian faith; they desire to be distinctive from and yet connected to particular contexts. Spiritualities that challenge existing forms and establish new patterns are often referred to as emergent, whereas those that aim more at remodelling existing forms are adaptive. Often both approaches occur

¹¹⁶ See Kathleen Openshaw, ‘If I Do My Part: Extraordinary Sacrifice and Fighting for Change in a UCKG Campaign of Faith’, in C. Rocha, M. Hutchinson, and K. Openshaw. eds., Australasian Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Leiden, forthcoming 2019). ¹¹⁷ Ian H. Hutchinson, Monopolizing Knowledge (Boston, 2011).

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together within Spirit movements, albeit with a contextual emphasis which may switch between the two at various times and places. The spiritual ‘power’ involved in dissent comes to the fore in the Spirit movements we have considered. They are less about simply intellectual dissent and more about dissent from ways of living the Christian life (or in some places living a life of any sort). They recognize the need for ‘power from above’ if the dissent is to make any difference within a globalizing frame. Encountering the Holy Spirit has thus been a vital contributor to healthy Protestant dissent/(D)issent across the twentieth century. As Rodemeier notes with regard to Indonesian churches, ‘ritual language—the language of the Holy Spirit—is of special importance’.¹¹⁸ Yet this should not be separated from the means by which the Spirit is encountered. In particular we have seen the importance of personal relationships and contacts across different contexts that have enabled Spirit movements to ‘flow’ into new places. It is through shared conversation, prayer, and theological and political debate that a seeking after the Spirit develops and the seeds of wider movements grow. The importance of ‘testimony’ and the direct inter-mediation of communications technologies in the rapid ‘spike’ in charismatic growth from the 1960s is thus laid bare. The ability to step ‘into’ personal spaces in ways which circumvent national and regional barriers, and which redefine what an individual might consider to be their ‘true self ’ with regard to the God of the Bible, is greatly facilitated by ease of travel and personal choice in sources of messaging. These movements of Spirit dissent tend to retain some renewing element of dissent and don’t simply settle into institutions, even though they are subject to the normal pathways of institutionalization and cultural co-option. They split, adapt, submerge only to re-emerge in forms of ‘global return’ often to subvert or renew their originating institutions.¹¹⁹ The spirituality encouraged by these Spirit movements often concatenates to cause further dissent. There is an unsettling and creative dissent woven into many Spirit movements that does not allow the Christian movement to settle and stagnate. Though it may be in danger of encouraging schism at the expense of unity, each break and reformulation is an opportunity to indigenize, to adapt, to recontextualize the gospel. Whilst such processes of dissent would benefit from further study, it is the case that the changing, transforming, dissenting Protestant Spirit has gone out into all the world, resulting in the proliferation of emergent and adaptive spiritualities.

¹¹⁸ Rodemeier, ‘Emergence and Establishment of a Charismatic Church’, p. 69. ¹¹⁹ See Mark P. Hutchinson, ‘The Latter Rain Movement and the Phenomenon of Global Return’, in M. Wilkinson and P. Althouse, eds., Winds from the North: Canadian Contributions to the Pentecostal Movement (Leiden, 2010), pp. 265–84.

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S E L E C T B I BL IO G R A P H Y Alexander, Estrelda, Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African American Pentecostalism (Downers Grove, 2011). Anderson, Allan, To the Ends of the Earth: Pentecostalism and the Transformation of World Christianity (Oxford, 2013). Asamoah-Gyadu, J. Kwabena, Contemporary Pentecostal Christianity: Interpretations from an African Context (Oxford, 2013). Hocken, P. D., Streams of Renewal: The Origins and Early Development of the Charismatic Movement in Great Britain, 2nd edn (Exeter, 1997). Hudson, Neil, ‘The Development of British Pentecostalism’, in William K. Kay and Anne E. Dyer, eds., European Pentecostalism (Leiden, 2011), pp. 41–60. Jacobsen, Douglas, Thinking in the Spirit: Theologies of the Early Pentecostal Movement (Bloomington, 2003). Kalu, Ogbu, African Pentecostalism (Oxford, 2008). Kay, William K., Apostolic Networks in Britain: New Ways of Being Church (Milton Keynes, 2007). Kim, Kirsteen, The Holy Spirit in the World (London, 2007). Martin, David. Tongues of Fire. London: SPCK, 1996. Miller, Donald E. and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley, 2007). Poloma, Margaret M. and Ralph W. Hood, Blood and Fire: Godly Love in a Pentecostal Emerging Church (New York, 2008). Robeck, Cecil M., The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement (Nashville, 2006). Sanneh, Lamin, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, 2003). Walker, Andrew, Restoring the Kingdom: The Radical Christianity of the House Church Movement, 2nd edn (London, 1988). Ziefle, Joshua R., David Du Plessis and the Assemblies of God (Leiden, 2013).

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8 Glocalized and Indigenized Theologies in the Twentieth Century Mark P. Hutchinson

Jesus is a public figure. Whether being dissected by the Jesus Seminar, analysed through the atomization of a small piece of the Shroud of Turin,¹ or worshipped in an émigré church in Birmingham (Alabama or England, it makes no difference), he still matters. He doesn’t matter uniformly in the West, of course: when (in 1983) Harvey Cox put on the course ‘Jesus and the Moral Life’ at the university named after that ‘godly gentleman and lover of learning’, the Reverend John Harvard, he discovered that the last time such a thing had been taught was in 1912, and that by George Santayana.² By the 1940s, as George Marsden has demonstrated, theology in most American (and by extension, the universities being built to deal with the massification of Western culture throughout the rest of the world) was ‘either banished to divinity schools, or simply banished’. The core intellectual institutions of the West reinvented themselves around an ideology of ‘Liberal Protestantism without Protestantism’,³ and shortly thereafter found little reason to call themselves ‘uni’-versities. While theology still came from universities in the West, they ceased to ‘do’ theology as a core activity, leaving theologizing to other reading communities, often as a mode of resistance or ‘dissent’. The dominance of urban elites which maintain their power in highly plural societies by stitching together a congeries of minority rights and interests has, in many places, driven religious communities in the West into the arms of popularism. Instead of disappearing, then, faith communities in the West are used by both sides of politics as a bargaining chip for stabilizing (either through leftist moral panics or rightist appeals to tradition) inherently unstable polities. Jennifer Oriel, a ¹ Marcus Borg, ‘Introduction: Jesus at 2000’, in M. Borg, ed., Jesus at 2000 (Boulder, 1997), p. 1. ² Harvey Cox, ‘Jesus and Generation X’, in Borg, ed., Jesus at 2000, p. 90. ³ George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York, 1996), p. 410.

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Murdoch columnist for a major Australian newspaper, strikes the emotional tone of the debate: ‘Christ gave us the soul of Western civilisation and the form of freedom. We owe Him more than our scorn.’⁴ Statements about Jesus’ importance in the West, though still common, now come as expressions of surprise. Some surprise comes with outrage, at the endurance of this ‘indigestible or insoluble detritus’.⁵ Other, more winsome, responses are spoken as into the wind, pressing against public ideologies framed to deal with globalizing capitalist disenchantment and the plausibility pressures of pluralism. Entangled in the Western domination of communications networks and their often self-referential conversations, the narrative of secularization has come to dominate theologizing at all levels, even if it is only as the unspoken ‘other’ against which dissenting Christian thinking is framed. It is here that the thought of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is useful, particularly in conceiving of indigenized global theologies as operating within and across ‘social fields’. Secularist monopolization of public thought, and so the theological and indigenizing responses to it, has pushed its concerns out into places where formal theologizing floats above social ‘fields’ which operate on quite different assumptions.⁶ The secular is not, therefore, an unchallenged master narrative. As King notes, even in the middle of the sharpest critiques of gendered Islamic practices in the West, there were reports of increased (rather than decreased) conversions of women to Islam.⁷ On the Christian side of things, we are only just beginning to grasp what that means for, say, a Syrian or a Sierra Leonean refugee staggering off a boat in southern Italy, and walking down streets where the iconography of Jesus (churches, televisions shows, crosses on schoolroom walls, and much more) is everywhere. Somehow, they manage to see God as more present in the West than the long, wrangling secularization debate has permitted Westerners themselves. It is the conundrum at the core of the issues of indigenization and globalization: the encounter between a secularizing West unsure as to how to rid itself of the rest of its Christian heritage without ceasing to be, and a rapidly growing Christian presence in the ‘rest of the world’ which is ceasing to be present just there.

⁴ Jennifer Oriel, ‘Faithless Australians may lose more than just God’, The Australian 3 July 2017, https://www.theaustralian.com.au/. ⁵ Eduardo Mendieta, ‘Modernity’s Religion: Habermas and the Linguistification of the Sacred’, in L. E. Hahn, ed., Perspectives on Habermas (Chicago, 2000), p. 123. ⁶ Social fields are the conceptually bounded spaces created by the relationship of the actor to, and inter-actor struggle over, Bourdieu’s four types of capital: ‘a field of forces, whose necessity is imposed on agents who are engaged in it, and a field of struggles within which agents confront each other, with differentiated means and ends according to their position in the structure of the field of forces, thus contributing to conserving or transforming its structure’: Deborah ReedDanahay, Locating Bourdieu (Bloomington, 2004), p. 32. ⁷ Ebony King, ‘Pathways to Allah: Female Conversion to Islam in Australia’, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 28.4 (2017), pp. 453–4.

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As noted elsewhere in this volume (see Brown, Chapter 1), this is not so in the global South, a fact which encourages us to think beyond the internalist arguments of missiologists (this became that because of intrinsic potentialities) or mere two-way exchanges up and down a metaphorical theological pipeline (as in ‘reverse mission’ concepts). Our imagined refugee in Sicily does not come empty-handed—even in countries where Christians are a controlled minority (Senegal, for instance) there is not a country in the Majority World where the cultural after-effects of longstanding Western contact (in many cases, over centuries) have not left the image of Jesus burned into the cultural landscape. Muslim, Hindu, animist, or other, the effect of globalization has left all religions to be held ‘reflexively’⁸ with regard to the others, unveiled in the broader cosmos by the globalized eye. In all of them ‘what will I do with Jesus?’ is, if only to dismiss him, a question which conditions how they address the modern world. It is a defining element of the construction of sacriscapes in the global ‘space of flows’, the ‘West and the rest’ sharing this element at least in the construction of their respective cultural con- and counter-definitions.⁹ As Harvey Cox has noted, ‘glossing’ the story of the Jesus present in the Koran, and pointing to affirmations of Jesus as ‘prophet’ but not the ‘son of God’ among Western scholars, has been a mechanism for Muslims to deal with the odd present-absence of Jesus in the West. (That is one response. State and nonstate annihilation of the Christian heritage of the Middle East is another.)¹⁰ Among Hindus and Buddhists,¹¹ Jesus is relatively easily absorbed as a prophet, teacher, or a bodhisattva, and can be demonstrated to have had significant influence on the emergence of modern Hinduism through, for example, key leaders such as the Mahatma Ghandi. During one of Ghandi’s stints in jail, news came of a ‘big mutiny’, as a consequence of which ‘severe punishment was necessary to prevent it’. Speaking to his gaoler (in terms cast to recall—and subvert—a parallel first-century scene in the New Testament):¹² I told him that, be that as it might, I would fast and pray for the day. He asked me why. I said I would pray not only for my brethren who were no doubt in error, but ⁸ Lieve Orye, ‘Globalisation, Society and Religion: From Mono‐Metastructural Theory to Metatheoretical Reflexivity’, Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 5:3 (2004), p. 383. ⁹ For a discussion of the literature on the relationship between the development of epistemological categories such as ‘modern’ and ‘religion’, see B. Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, 2013). ¹⁰ Tom Heneghan, ‘Radical Islam Is A Growing Threat To Sub-Saharan Christians: Report’, Huffington Post 7 April 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/09/christian-persecutionsub-saharan-_n_6428520.html, accessed 11/4/2015. ¹¹ Philip Goldberg, ‘Hindu Jesus: A Different Kind of Christianity’, Huffington Post 19 December 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-goldberg/how-hinduism-gave-us-ane_b_797861.html, accessed 11/4/2015; G. A. Barker and S. E. Gregg, eds., Jesus beyond Christianity: The Classic Texts (Oxford, 2010); James M. Hanson, ‘Was Jesus a Buddhist?’, Buddhist-Christian Studies 25 (2005), pp. 75–89. ¹² Acts 16:22–34 (New International Version).

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for those who despitefully used them. The jailer asked me what was the value of prayer. The talk then turned upon the Bible. I explained to him that Jesus and the Bible were not the sole property of Christians like himself, but the joint estate of humanity at large. He then appeared to melt somewhat.¹³

Using Jesus to ‘melt’ the colonial powers was a process which would be emulated across the world in the early twentieth century. It was, however, no mere matter of political convenience or cultural absorption. The matter of Jesus, and the faith which carried his message (Christianity) transformed what it touched, and was by that touch transformed in itself. In philosophical terms, the ontological questions associated with Christianity were inseparable from the epistemological positions of those who ‘held’ that faith, and the existential ‘fields’ within which reception, appropriation, transformation, and recommunication takes place. The invention of, and transformation of Christianity into, a ‘religion’ through the rise of modernity was, Mendieta notes, essential to the emergence of the privileged nation state and so the international order.¹⁴ Globalization, however, determines that ‘the space for religion somewhere in the interstices of culture, society, state, and personality structures has been reconfigured, necessitating religion’s own reconfiguration’.¹⁵ The appropriation of Christianity into non-Western cultures thus needs to be considered in two divisions across three fields. The divisions are made clear by Pierre Bourdieu, in the distinction he makes between practice-based and reflexive thought.¹⁶ The ‘fields’ relate to the life experience of Christians in the conditions of the culture and time of reception, in their encounters with inter-national space, and in the development of specific responses to the emerging global society. All of these elements are seen in Matthew 27, when the question ‘What shall I do then with Jesus, which is called Christ?’ is asked of the mob. Unreflective, practice-based faith encounters the global superpower, Rome, when the Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate ‘washes his hands’ of Jesus’ case, maintaining the peace by transferring the question of ‘what shall I do with Jesus?’ to the mob. The ambiguity of that question, of Pilate’s own actions and the facelessness of the ‘mob’ have made the phrase almost infinitely flexible in Christian usage, and also in semiotic studies. In the Majority World, the ambiguity of texts (oral, visual, printed) as they encounter existing cosmologies has also made Jesus in particular, and Christianity in general, a much more flexible set of categories than Westerners have sometimes been willing to accept.

¹³ Mohandas K. Ghandi; with Ronald Duncan, ed., Selected Writings of Mahatma Gandhi (Boston, 1951), p. 154. ¹⁴ Mendieta, ‘Modernity’s Religion’, pp. 123–5. ¹⁵ Orye, ‘Globalisation, Society and Religion’, p. 386. ¹⁶ A. Schirato and J. Webb, ‘Bourdieu’s Concept of Reflexivity as Metaliteracy’, Cultural Studies, 17.3–4 (2003), p. 541.

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LOCAL PRACTICE-BA SED THEOLOGIES All world religions have in common the ability to adapt, cross borders, and set down roots in new places. As Andrew Walls has noted, Christianity has been particularly adept at this—either in the ‘missionary mode’ (centre to periphery) or in a cultural, osmotic mode (‘diffusion across lines’),¹⁷ conditioning the plausibility of its own acceptance long before ‘the Word’ itself should ever arrive. The more spectacular versions of this common story are commonly told: the release of Samuel Adjai Crowther ‘beyond the Niger’, leading to the conversion of the Igbo and Yoruba peoples;¹⁸ Francis Mason among the Karen people, recording the prophecies of the ‘Y’wa legend’;¹⁹ and the meeting of Korean nationalism, anti-Japanese agitation, and Protestantism.²⁰ Not coincidentally, all three cases are located on or across some of the most volatile boundaries in twentieth-century history, where Christianity played an essential role in providing a bridging identity into modernity, and in protecting local identities from disappearing into more powerful imperial cultures. Such an encounter of Word and culture in the midst of rapid change produces enhanced opportunities for the emergence of ‘popular religion’, which has become a rich field for theorists (whether metaphysical or materialist) to explore the relationship between the conditions of life, emergent spirituality, and political, cultural, and economic outcomes. For Gramsci, for example, ‘popular religion’ emerges from the cultural codeterminants of the material ‘base’, producing ‘a new set of standards, a new psychology, new ways of feeling, thinking and living’.²¹ It is one means by which a subaltern group maintains its identity over and against the ruling class.²² For Huston Smith it was a means of pushing back against the iron cage of rationalizing capitalism, revealing the empowering, salvific oneness beneath all religions.²³ For Pierre Bourdieu, it is the (lesser) epistemological means to agency, which ‘is always the result of a coming together of the habitus and the specific cultural fields and contexts in which agents “find themselves”, in both senses of the expression’.²⁴ Popular religious self-configurations arise out of the interaction between the cultural trajectory of an individual, through ‘cultural fields’, which ‘have their own conditions of entry predicated on an acceptance of the world view(s) of the ¹⁷ A. F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll, 1996), p. 2. ¹⁸ A. F. Walls, ‘The Legacy of Samuel Ajayi Crowther’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 16.1 (January 1992), pp. 15–17. ¹⁹ Randolph Levi Howard, The Baptists in Burma (Philadelphia, 1931), pp. 58ff. ²⁰ viz. Chung-Shin Park, Protestantism and Politics in Korea (Seattle, 2003). ²¹ Jean-Pierre Reed, ‘Theorist of Subaltern Subjectivity: Antonio Gramsci, Popular Beliefs, Political Passion, and Reciprocal Learning’, Critical Sociology 39.4 (July 2013), p. 563. ²² Reed, ‘Theorist of Subaltern Subjectivity’, pp. 563–4. ²³ H. C. Smith, ‘Jesus and the World’s Religions’, in Borg, ed., Jesus at 2000, p. 113. ²⁴ A. Schirato and J. Webb, ‘Bourdieu’s Concept of Reflexivity as Metaliteracy’, Cultural Studies (October 2010), p. 541.

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field, and of its history, values, logics, activities and capital’.²⁵ A number of case studies will demonstrate the usefulness of such concepts in relation to the emergence of localized theologies among (d)issenting movements.

CHRISTIANITY AS RESISTANCE FOR CHANGE By 1900, much of West Africa had been carved up between colonial powers: indeed, there were only two independent national states remaining, Liberia and Ethiopia. The latter’s grand history became—by appropriation of Psalm 68:3 (‘Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands to God’)—a form of mythical hope for many African leaders, embodied in both pan-Africanist political ideology and the attempt to found ‘Ethiopianist’ churches (first in Sierra Leone, and then in Southern Africa from 1892).²⁶ This was a touchstone for a political and ‘miraculous transformation of the material world’.²⁷ The emergence of independent African churches did what decades of missionary work had failed to do: produce a mass conversion to Christianity: . . . vigorous evangelism by African agents, widespread dissatisfaction with white domination, the upheavals of the new colonial economy, and the attraction of a brand of Christianity that emphasized engagement with the African spiritual world, caused the African Church movement to proliferate rapidly. . . . The process developed new momentum in the opening decades of the twentieth century with the emergence of a new spate of African renewal movements variously labeled Zionist, Apostolic, Aladura, or prophet-healing.²⁸

These churches emerged amidst animist and traditional cultures in which the spirit world was immanent. The Old Testament prophets and New Testament miracle workers were plausibly transferred to the present: According to an account of one such occurrence, a Grebo evangelist named Gnebevi was teaching Sunday school in a village in which a traditional priest was being inducted into office. To test the power of the Christian god, Gnebevi and his congregation prayed that the priest might be embarrassed. When the priest was unable to perform one of the feats required of him, the Christians present were convinced of the superior power of their god.²⁹ ²⁵ Schirato and Webb, ‘Bourdieu’s Concept of Reflexivity as Metaliteracy’, p. 542. ²⁶ Charles Price, ‘The Cultural Production of a Black Messiah: Ethiopianism and the Rastafari’, Journal of Africana Religions 2.3 (2014), pp. 422–3. ²⁷ Price, ‘The Cultural Production of a Black Messiah’, p. 421. ²⁸ Jehu J. Hanciles, ‘ “Africa is our Fatherland”: The Black Atlantic, Globalization, and Modern African Christianity’, Theology Today 71.2 (July 2014), p. 219. ²⁹ J. W. Cason, The Growth of Christianity in the Liberian Environment, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1962, quoted in Sheila S. Walker, The Religious Revolution in the Ivory Coast: The Prophet Harris and the Harrist Church (Chapel Hill, 1983), p. 12.

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In an English setting, this sort of affirming, wisdom account would have commenced with ‘Once upon a time’. Here, it is prescriptive history. The ‘Word’, via the narrative, is present in practice which was co-extensive with the functions of the spirituality which it was replacing. On the one hand, this approach had the advantage of immediacy and ‘power’ (i.e. efficacy) for the hearers or, in Bourdieu’s words, ‘the “enchanted” relation to the game that is illusio . . . (re)produces knowledge as the “vision and division” of the world’. On the other hand, it ‘also produces a (tacit) self-interested ignorance or illiteracy’,³⁰ which would require further steps in order to deal with more than localized circumstances. As Jason Carter has shown in this volume (Chapter 6), nowhere was this more apparent than in the enormous success of William Wadé Harris. The elements he describes are worth reinterpreting in terms of the theological tasks involved. A Methodist convert and lay preacher who worked as a government translator, labourer, and teacher, Harris’ conflict with government expectations and Church rejection of traditional African culture obtained for Harris a reputation as a political malcontent. In 1909, he was arrested for the symbolic action of lowering the Liberian flag and raising the British flag on Paduke Beach near Harper. His year-long prison sentence was spent praying and reading the Bible, a context in which he experienced a vision from that suitably inter-religious protagonist, the Angel Gabriel, telling him that ‘like Elijah who burned all the priests of Baal’ he was to go to the people who had not heard the Gospel: ‘Go and teach all nations, baptizing them. . . . So I go and baptize.’³¹ Dressed in iconic robe and accoutrements, his message was the simple legalism of the Old Testament prophet and John the Baptist: turn away from idol worship, obey the Natural Law and the divine precepts (‘especially the observance of the Sabbath which is so little respected’); temperance in use of alcohol; respect for authority. Polygamy was permitted but (unlike many European missionaries) Harris did not prohibit adultery.³² ‘The thunder will speak, the angels will punish the world if people do not listen to my words, the words of God interpreted for you.’³³ His was not the mandate of building a Church: he would preach, baptize (on some occasions up to 500 at a time), and then direct people to Protestant or Catholic Churches for rebaptism. On the one hand, as Walker and Shank clearly show,³⁴ the new Harrist theology was a unique combination of existing ‘readings’ of Christianity, ³⁰ Schirato and Webb, ‘Bourdieu’s Concept of Reflexivity as Metaliteracy’, p. 542. ³¹ Walker, The Religious Revolution in the Ivory Coast, p. 15. ³² This was a position which took pentecostal evangelists another half century to come to. See George Forbes, A Church on Fire: The Story of the Assemblies of God of Papua New Guinea (Mitcham, 2001). ³³ Walker, The Religious Revolution in the Ivory Coast, p. 15. ³⁴ viz. David A. Shank, ‘A Prophet of Modern Times: The Thought of William Wade Harris, West African Precursor of the Reign of Christ’, PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen, 3 vols., 1980.

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applied to solve the challenges of the West African colonial dilemma. Taught not by Europeans, but by first-generation African and African American Christians, conversionist Methodism gave Harris the language and practice of the Spirit, and a historical precedent for itineracy, nonconformism, and transnationality.³⁵ Evangelical biblicism made the Bible, interpreted spiritually, analogically, a flexible source of revelation independent from European control. The Old Testament transposed his prison ‘desert’ into prophetic preparation—he was to be a new Daniel for a new people, different from but continuous with both the Christianity brought by the Europeans and with the Spirit who had always spoken to the African people before the coming of the Book. The external laws Harris taught pointed to inner disciplines essential for coping with colonial dispossession and creeping modernization; the ‘lost nations’ were to be the citizens of new nations, just as the eschatological hopes invested (and long disappointed) in Liberia pointed to a model for a new type of African nation in the escape from American slavery. Charged with the task of showing the path of spiritual salvation to the lost nations and bringing them back to the worship of the universal creator god, Harris also offered his fellow Africans a message of more secular salvation from the oppressive ravages of the colonial system to which the creator god’s unfortunate African children had fallen prey.³⁶

It was a radically rooted, localized theology which unlocked popular religious energy on a large scale. Most of the Christian population of Côte d’Ivoire in one way or another now trace their identity back to Harris’ mission. After the prophet’s death in 1929, and especially during the period of Ivoirian nationalism (1945–51) leading up to national independence in 1960, there were mass re-conversions out of the Catholic and Protestant Churches into which Harris had sent his baptized ones, and the organization of a formal Harrist Church hierarchy. On the other hand, Harris’ legacy did not break out of West Africa in the way that other African initiated churches would do.³⁷ Nor, while still counting members in the hundreds of thousands, would it grow as large as the Église de Jésus Christ sur la Terre par son envoyé spécial Simon Kimbangu (now with congregations in thirty countries),³⁸ or the Zionist churches of South Africa. ³⁵ Walker, The Religious Revolution in the Ivory Coast, pp. 20–1. ³⁶ Walker, The Religious Revolution in the Ivory Coast, p. 21. ³⁷ E. Pace and A. Butticci, Le religioni pentecostali (Rome, 2010), pp. 4ff; Birgit Meyer, ‘Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches’, Annual Review in Anthropology 33 (2004), pp. 447–74, and Elisha P. Renne, ‘Consecrated Garments and Spaces in the Cherubim and Seraphim Church Diaspora’, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 5.1 (March 2009), pp. 80ff. ³⁸ Thomas A. Oduro, ‘Arise, Walk through the Length and Breadth of the Land’: Missionary Concepts and Strategies of African Independent Churches’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 38.2 (April 2014), p. 86.

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Its great influence would be in inspiring prophetism and charismatic innovation in others, directly influencing numbers of Aladura churches, such as the Twelve Apostles Church in Ghana. Everywhere it is present, Harrisism focuses sharply on the link between personal and national righteousness. At its 2012 Easter celebration, for example, the Twelve Apostles Church in Akim Abenase ‘charged Ghanaians to chart a new course of moral and spiritual development to enrich their private and national lives. . . . Prophet S. K. Owusu, in-charge of the local church, who led the Easter church service also prayed for the President, Ministers of State and the sick’, so that national healing would go hand in hand with a stable government which could ‘address unemployment, water, sanitation and environmental problems’.³⁹ These are the concerns of habitus, the non-reflexive form of literacy which makes such leaders powerhouses in their own settings, where their hold on the tacit ‘rules, traditions, values, moves and possibilities that define the game’ makes them masters.⁴⁰ Fuelling a religious revolution which provided ‘wind assistance’ to the rise of several independent West African nations is one thing;⁴¹ creating translatable symbolic architectures which could transcend the habitus in which the movement was born, however, proved more difficult. It is not the case that such ‘downward mobilisations of the Spirit’⁴² are always a structurally simpler ‘first wave’, to be followed by ‘higher’ or more complex forms. There are examples where such charismatically based cultures of practice (in Bourdieu’s terms socially ‘non-reproductive’ in their nature) have failed to become institutionalized, and to so replicate themselves. Some of these movements, such as the highly liturgical Catholic Apostolic Church (CAC) movement, were self-limiting due to their commitment to prophecy (in their case, through the death of their last prophet).⁴³ Their influence continues, tenuous, visible for those with eyes to see, in pro-Israel eschatology, in its remarkable fusion of charismatic and ritualistic prophecy and healing practices, and some highly influential families and individuals.⁴⁴ Others, such ³⁹ VibeGhana 8 April 2012, http://vibeghana.com/2012/04/08/twelve-apostles-church-holdseaster-church-service/, accessed 14/4/2015. ⁴⁰ Schirato and Webb, ‘Bourdieu’s Concept of Reflexivity as Metaliteracy’, p. 542. ⁴¹ David A. Shank, ‘William Wadé Harris c.1860 to 1929’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 10.4 (October 1986), pp. 170–6, reproduced at https://www.dacb.org/stories/ liberia/legacy-harris/, accessed 14/4/2015. ⁴² David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford and Malden, 2002), p. 30. ⁴³ Tim Grass, ‘John Bate Cardale: Bloomsbury Apostle’, University College London Bloomsbury Project, Conference 2011 Paper; Mark P. Hutchinson, ‘Edward Irving’s Antipodean Shadow’, Australasian Pentecostal Studies no. 10, http://aps-journal.com/aps/index.php/APS/article/view/26/ 23, accessed 15/4/2015. ⁴⁴ Including religious actors, such as Charles Freer Andrews (C. F. Andrews, Mahatma Gandhi’s Ideas, London, 1930); artists such as Norman St Clair Carter (Frances Lindsay, ‘Carter, Norman St Clair (1875–1963)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/ biography/carter-norman-st-clair-5525/text9409, published first in hardcopy 1979, accessed online 15/4/2015); and military men and politicians (such as the Dukes of Northumberland,

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as the Healing Revival in the USA fractured, or were tamed within the mainstream charismatic movement, the ‘charisma’ transferred to individual leaders rather than onto the practices which gave the movement birth in the late 1940s. As David Harrell notes, the movement of this practice-based indigenization of American material religion within Christianity among the rural poor rapidly took on more purely doctrinal, evidential, and ‘promotional’ meanings when it moved out of tents and into ‘Hilton Hotels and ornate churches . . . charismatic conferences and seminars’.⁴⁵ All were adapting to circumstances relating to globalization—the tensions created by the global spread of Anglicanism in the case of the CAC, the disappointed expectations raised in the USA by the collapse of the Gilded Age, the Great Depression and the grinding poverty of the Kansas dust bowl, and eventually the disappointments and misdirections of the Great Society.⁴⁶ The charismatic movement itself would, in many places, manage the transfer successfully by escaping nonreproductive practice into the global sacriscape (discussed in more detail shortly). The Healing Revival which had given it birth, however, was like the Harrist movement—enormously influential, but ultimately enclosed within its practice-based connections to the sawdust trail.

R EF L E X I V E I N D I G E N O U S CH R I ST I A N I T I ES There are also examples, however, where indigenization of practice at the local level makes the leap to reflexive thought. As also noted in passing by Carter (Chapter 6 in this volume), Minjung theology emerged in the context of the near death experience and often authoritarian materialist autoreinvention of South Korea as a nation, ever living under the shadow of its martial, paranoid twin to the north. As Sebastian Kim notes, the rapid growth of Christianity in the country confronted the contending Protestant theologies (broadly, liberal/ social and evangelical/revivalist) with the problem of continuing poverty in a rapidly industrializing country. The resulting theologies—‘Kibock Sinang’ and ‘Minjung Theology’—‘represent the contextualisation of the gospel in response to the problem of poverty’.⁴⁷ An effective faith needed to deal with viz. Markku Ruotsila, ‘The Catholic Apostolic Church in British Politics’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 56.1 (January 2005), p. 75). ⁴⁵ David Edwin Harrell, Jr, All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America (Bloomington, 2008), p. 10. ⁴⁶ See Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford, 2004); Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence, 1996). ⁴⁷ Sebastian C. H. Kim, ‘The Problem of Poverty in Post-War Korean Christianity: Kibock Sinang or Minjung Theology?’ Transformation 24.1 (January 2007), p. 43.

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the lack of daily sustenance, with national reconstruction in the face of colonial, and then global commercial, domination. At the same time, it had to compete with the grass-roots shamanism which, in Korea as in much of the non-Western world, provided the underlay for emergent populist Christianities which appropriated spiritualities latent within the magisterial Reformation traditions.⁴⁸ ‘Kibock Sinang’ is thus a term which encapsulates the general preponderance of holistic ‘blessing’ theology in much of the theologically conservative Korean Church, successfully institutionalized in megachurches such as Yoido Full Gospel Church, educational institutions such as Hansei University, and a small publishing industry largely oriented towards explication of the thought of leaders such as David Yonggi-Cho. Practice-based, the pragmatic lessons of the Churches holding this theology (particularly relating to cell-group structures for megachurches) have spread more extensively than the theology itself. Though it has had an impact on the development of prosperity teaching in many Western megachurches, its major influence has been in the Korean diaspora, where it fuses with cultural and linguistic fields to assume the status of doxa.⁴⁹ The denominational divisions of the early twentieth century (in a sense papered over during the anti-Japanese nationalist struggle) grew irreconcilable with post-war development. Blessing theology built churches and individual wealth, but did not address the relationship between the state and ‘the people’, particularly in issues of corruption, democracy, and poverty. The liberal arm of the Church (particularly among Presbyterians and Methodists) was as embedded in the international network of Protestant institutions as it was the evangelical: instead of looking to Westminster or Fuller seminaries, however, many young Korean ordinands continued their traditional association with Heidelberg, Union, McCormick, Princeton, or San Francisco. They took the ‘protest’ element of ‘protestantism’ seriously. Absorbing the emphasis on praxis emerging in both the Western counter-culture and Latin American liberation theology, minjung (a term simply meaning ‘common people’, as opposed to ‘elites and leaders, or even the educated or cultured’)⁵⁰ was a selfconsciously action-reflection-in-context model. Minjung theologians lived with the poor, organized labour unions, and fought street battles in protests against the military government, as well as using this experience (through the

⁴⁸ Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish, p. 4. ⁴⁹ Robert Holton, ‘Bourdieu and Common Sense’, in Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman, eds., Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture (Lanham, 2000), p. 91. ⁵⁰ Namhee Lee, The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (Ithaca, 2007), p. 5; and see Mark P. Hutchinson, ‘The Anatomy of Misunderstanding: Readings and Consequences for Australian Korean Churches’, in D. Kwon et al., eds., New People, New Land (Seoul, 2005).

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narrative, or ‘social biography of the theologian’) to reflect, write, and teach.⁵¹ As with other self-liberation movements (such as Dalit theologians in India), the story of the Exodus was a central narrative for thinker activists such as An Byong-mu and So Nam-dong. ‘History, not the conceptual world, is the chief medium of divine revelation,’⁵² read not through fundamentalist literalism or Germanic philosophizing, but as the concrete narrative ‘reference’ of ‘historical thinking’. So the incarnation of Christ was associated with the suffering people, and the narrative of the theologian themselves embodied Calvary. Concentrating on the salvific act as the driver of history, after two decades of struggle, this theology was a major contributor to the return of parliamentary democracy to Korea. For many first-generation Minjung theologians, the desire to remain concretely attached to the locus of struggle was so definitional that they concluded that even other contextualized theologies (such as liberation theology, or black theology) were too conceptual to be considered exact parallels. Kwang-sun Suh, for example, gently chides Volker Küster for thinking that, first, there was (in this age of prosperity) anything to ‘revisit’ in Minjung theology, and secondly, that (despite Küster’s ‘extraordinary empathy’) someone ‘emerging from the thick forest of German theology’ could hold up anything more than a ‘European mirror’ to a Korean actuality.⁵³ Conceptualization by well-meaning Western theologians made Minjung other than it was, a startlingly clear analysis of both the limits of local-reflexive theologies and of the cross-cultural flows of ideas. With the poverty and the political crisis, so went the theology. What remained was, to the first generation, a pale abstraction, a form of intellectual game as latter-generation and international theologians sought for a way of attaching themselves to an existential moment which would give their conceptual pursuits meaning. It was a slightly ironic twist of the Kantian (and so equally Germanic) das Ding an sich. The historical context which gave rise to Minjung theology—colonization (conditions which Lee describes as the annihilation of ‘historical subjectivity’),⁵⁴ oppression under a post-Second World War neo-colonialism, rigid social restrictions, grinding poverty, modernization, and revival—was not unique to Korea. That the ‘trajectory’ of the historical subject through the ‘field’ can also be determinative, however, may be seen in the theologization associated with indigenous evangelical mission in southern India. The Nadars of Tamil Nadu have been intensively studied both as mass movement and as a case of

⁵¹ David Kwang-sun Suh, ‘Foreword’, in Volker Küster, A Protestant Theology of Passion: Korean Minjung Theology Revisited (Leiden, 2010), p. x. ⁵² Wonil Kim, ‘Minjung Theology’s Biblical Hermeneutics’, in Robert E. Buswell and Timothy S. Lee, eds., Christianity in Korea (Honolulu, 2007), p. 222. ⁵³ Kwang-sun Suh, ‘Foreword’, in Küster, A Protestant Theology, pp. xi–xii. ⁵⁴ Lee, The Making of Minjung, p. 38.

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‘redemption and lift’.⁵⁵ Seeing the benefits associated with conversion among the Sambavars, a mass movement of middle Nadars (particularly among Nadar ‘climbers’) commenced in the 1920s and 1930s into the Anglican Church in Tinnevelly and into London Missionary Society-related churches in Travancore.⁵⁶ Not all Nadars converted,⁵⁷ but conversion (by mediating the suffocating caste system) was one among a range of social mobility mechanisms (such as community banking, the foundation of schools, and the like) which saw the transformation of the caste and its status not only among Christian churches, but also with relation to Nadar acceptability in Hindu temples. Using a social and ‘spiritual capital’ framework, Timothy and Rebecca Shah have pointed to the interactivity between conversion, local theologies of practice (Azariah’s dictum that the best form of evangelism by Dalits was ‘a clean and well cared for body, home and village’), and social mobility.⁵⁸ The emergence out of the ‘revivals’ of the 1960s of a self-funding and organizing evangelistic impetus among ‘conscientized’ Christian Nadars asked the obvious question of a previously marginalized but increasingly educated and prosperous caste: what was the theology of mission which underpinned outreach? It was not an abstract question: an answer was essential for reinforcing their mission teams against attacks by fundamentalist Hindus and even the state,⁵⁹ and against the effects of their voluntary adoption of apostolic poverty in living among the even more marginalized Bhil and Kukna communities of southern Gujarat. Despite their theological conservatism on other measures, organizations such as the Gujarat Christian Workers (GCW) departed from the anti-social gospel emphases of the ‘old evangelicalism’ to develop theologies of holistic development. It helped that the President of GCW (Dan Prabhakar) had extensive experience with World Vision

⁵⁵ e.g. G. Hugald, ed., History of Christianity in India: Tamilnadu in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, vol. IV (Bangalore, 1990); G. De Neve, ‘ “We are all Sondukarar (Relatives)!”: Kinship and Its Morality in an Urban Industry of Tamilnadu, South India’, Modern Asian Studies 42.1 (January 2008); M. T. Thangaraj, ‘Missiological Hermeneutics of a Convert’, Exchange 32.1 (2003), p. 138. For this in other contexts, see P. B. Christian, M. Gent, and T. H. Wadkins, ‘Protestant Growth and Change in El Salvador: Two Decades of Survey Evidence’, Latin American Research Review 50.1 (2015), p. 146. ⁵⁶ Duncan B. Forrester, Forrester on Christian Ethics and Practical Theology: Collected Writings on Christianity, India, and the Social Order (Farnham and Burlington, 2010), p. 75. ⁵⁷ Though in some areas, such as Kanniyakumari district, it was up to 50 per cent—see Barbara Schüler, Of Death And Birth: Icakkiyamman, a Tamil Goddess, in Ritual and Story (Wiesbaden, 2009), p. 235. ⁵⁸ R. S. Shah and T. S. Shah, ‘How Evangelicalism, Including Pentecostalism, Helps the Poor: The Role of Spiritual Capital’, in P. Berger and G. Redding, eds., The Hidden Form of Capital: Spiritual Influences in Societal Progress (London and New York, 2011), pp. 83–4. ⁵⁹ Uday Mahurkar, ‘Justice Reaches Modi: Ahmedabad court convicts former minister in Modi’s government, establishing for the first time a direct link between the Sangh Parivar and the 2002 Gujarat riots’, India Today 10 September 2012, http://ezproxy.library.usyd.edu.au/login? url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1037624366?accountid=14757, accessed 17/4/2015.

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International, which had already undergone a similar transition through the mid-to-late 1960s, in part due to its engagement with government funding bureaucracies and the Missions Advanced Research Center (MARC) at Fuller Theological Seminary.⁶⁰ While liberation theologians framing ‘Dalit theology’ or ‘Naga theology’ emphasize the recovery of the full divinity of the human in the imago dei or the incarnation,⁶¹ Prabhakar emphasized the emergence of the Kingdom of God.⁶² It was local, communal, and directly related to the person of ‘Jesus’, who stood over and above the colonial detritus of the introduction of ‘Christianity’ into India.⁶³ It was embodied in the ‘apostolic poverty’ (a term of Catholic origin) of its workers, taught in formation programmes, and embedded in community practice. Aaron compares the rural and slum work of GCW general secretary Michael Ebenezer, for example, with the urban charismatic congregations which resulted of the same revivalist impulse: Urban pulpit teaching revolves around cultivating personal character and themes of guilt and responsibility. Rural GCW congregations more commonly speak of the Kingdom of God—emphasizing Christ’s lordship, the unity of believers, corporate holiness, and the radical effects of divine involvement in society, thus enabling communities to develop a sense of collective purpose.⁶⁴

While quietism in some evangelical traditions and among Indian Christian traditions—a contributor to the late development of, for instance, an indigenous Christology⁶⁵—has repressed the impulse to political action, GCW’s theology of social engagement was made ‘reflexive’ (and so ‘productive’ in Bourdieuian terms) by its belief that ‘Christianized people-groups should be able, in time, to exercise political influence through individual and group empowerment’.⁶⁶ Both in the explicit Dalit and indigenized evangelical Indian Christian theologies, therefore, there can be seen an increasing self-conciousness, and a rejection of

⁶⁰ viz. Mark P. Hutchinson, ‘The “Global Turn” in American Evangelicalism’, in Heath W. Carter and Laura Rominger Porter, eds., Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, 2017); and David P. King, ‘Heartbroken for God’s World: The Story of Bob Pierce, Founder of World Vision and Samaritans Purse’, in Thomas J. Davis, ed., Religion in Philanthropic Organizations: Family, Friend, or Foe? (Bloomington, 2013), p. 71. ⁶¹ Johnson Petta, ‘In Search of a Contextual Pastoral Theology for Dalits in India’, PhD dissertation, University of Denver, 2012, p. 90; Nungshitula Jamir, ‘Reimagining the Cross of Childbearing: Towards a Naga Constructive Christology of Natality’, PhD dissertation, Boston University, 2014, pp. 211ff. (both ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, online). ⁶² Sushil J. Aaron, ‘Emulating Azariah: Evangelicals and Social Change in the Dangs’, in D. H. Lumsdaine, Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Asia (Oxford, 2009), p. 103. ⁶³ Andrew Wingate, ‘Indian Christianity’, in James Leslie Houlden, ed., Jesus in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia, Vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, 2003), p. 394. ⁶⁴ Aaron, ‘Emulating Azariah’, p. 103. ⁶⁵ Wingate, ‘Indian Christianity’, p. 393. ⁶⁶ Aaron, ‘Emulating Azariah’, p. 104.

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both Western and ‘brahminic’ Christianities, which Wingate suggests is a part of a more general postcolonial mode of thought among (for example) the tribal peoples of India.⁶⁷ The ‘productive’ nature of these theologies can also be seen in the fact they connected naturally to trans-ethnic, inter-national domains. Not only has Dalit theology been taken up as an example of a grass-roots mode of theology applicable more generally to Majority World problems,⁶⁸ but indigenized theologies have been carried out with the Indian diaspora, particularly among Pentecostal congregations.⁶⁹ Given that the ability to internationalize practice-based thought is one mode of escaping both the ‘cold death’ of selfenclosure and/or the ‘hot death’ of majority culture repression, the ability to internationalize (interests, if not also physical presence) is an important part of the survival of local theologies. (At the time of writing, the Armenian genocide is just such an example of a theo-national particularity drawing on the identity-maintaining function of a key twentieth-century internationalizing idea.) The same concepts also explain much about transnationalizing church networks at the other end of the global social order.⁷⁰ As with Minjung theology, art, literature, and other mobile cultural forms have played a role, as has the appropriation of the core universality of the Christian gospel.⁷¹ Sathianathan Clarke, for example, uses the metaphor of Christ as ‘the drum’: Paraiyars are characterised by this musical instrument, which they are required to play at high caste weddings and funerals. It is a sign of oppression. But it is how they express their relationship with God: ‘It is a drum that invites all human beings to dismantle the respective borders that characterize their kingdomes and celebrate the borderless kingdom of God. Just as sound is available to all

⁶⁷ Wingate, ‘Indian Christianity’, p. 398. ⁶⁸ For example, British Anglican writer Keith Hebden links Dalit theology to Christian Anarchism and the broader struggle of Christianity to being co-opted by the state and the ‘powers of this world’ (Dalit Theology and Christian Anarchism (Aldershot and Burlington, 2011); see also Peniel Rajkumar, Dalit Theology and Dalit Liberation: Problems, Paradigms and Possibilities (Aldershot and Burlington, 2010); and S. Clarke, D. Manchala, and P. V. Peacock, eds., Dalit Theology in the Twenty-First Century: Discordant Voices, Discerning Pathways (New Delhi and Oxford, 2010). ⁶⁹ See, for instance, S. J. Raj and K. A. Jacobsen, eds., The South Asian Christian Diaspora: Invisible Diaspora in Europe and North America (Aldershot and Burlington, 2013), and G. K. George, ‘Pneumatic-Centric Ethics: A Pentecostal Indian American Approach to Moral Decision Making’, in Anand Veeraraj and Rachel Fell McDermott, eds., Pilgrims at the Crossroads: Asian Indian Christians at the North American Frontier (Castro Valley and Bangalore, 2009), pp. 28–9. ⁷⁰ See M. P. Hutchinson, ‘ “Up the Windsor Road”: Social Complexity, Geographies of Emotion and the Rise of Hillsong’, in T. Riches and T. Wagner, eds., The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon The Waters (Basingstoke and New York, 2017). ⁷¹ A. F. Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (Marynoll, 2002).

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irrespective of boundaries, the kingdom call goes out to all people—first to Dalits, and then to the caste communities.’⁷²

Every ultimately successful localizing theology has a means of escaping its originating base of practice, and relating local insights to international or transnational interests. In some instances, as in the case of Pandita Ramabai, this is pursued retrospectively as the nation state’s emergence into the international order sparks a search for connecting narratives.⁷³ Ramabai’s use of divergent cultural fields recalls Certeau’s description of the space for innovation which is available to even practice-based thinking, wherein majority world actors “navigate” among the rules, “play with all the possibilities offered by traditions”, make use of one tradition rather than another, compensate for one by means of another. Taking advantage of the flexible surface which covers up the hard core, they create their own relevance within this network.⁷⁴

Hence the continuing importance of Ramabai long after her notoriety passed with her death in 1922, when the movements which would attempt to extract a theology from her personal practice and contextualized writings were hardly yet formed.⁷⁵ Through her various ‘conversions’ and conversations, Ramabai’s thought and practice were eminently ‘broadcastable’,⁷⁶ ensuring her continued relevance.

CLASHING FRAMES ACROSS THE STRAITS The potential for conflict in ‘playing with the possibilities’ of political theology in emerging national/international orders is exemplified in the case of Japanese Congregationalist leader, Ebina Danjo (1856–1937). Educated under Reformed Church of America missionary L. L. Janes, at the Kumamoto

⁷² Sathianathan Clarke, Dalits and Christianity: Subaltern Religion and Liberation (Delhi, 1999), p. 205, quoted in Wingate, ‘Indian Christianity’, p. 397. ⁷³ See, for instance, Joenita Paulrajan, ‘Contesting Identities: Pandita Ramabai’s (1858–1922) Christian Conversions’, PhD dissertation, Fuller Theological Seminary, School of Intercultural Studies, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2014. ⁷⁴ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1974), p. 54. ⁷⁵ H. Shah, ‘Pandita Ramabai: Scholar, Social-Reformer and Saint – a Study of her Dual Legacy’, University of Birmingham (United Kingdom), ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2009; and Yan Suarsana. ‘Inventing Pentecostalism: Pandita Ramabai and the Mukti Revival from a Postcolonial Perspective’, PentecoStudies 13.2 (2014), pp. 173–96. ⁷⁶ Allan Anderson, ‘Pandita Ramabai, the Mukti Revival and Global Pentecostalism’, Transformation 23.1 (January 2006), pp. 39–40.

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Yogakko School for Western Learning,⁷⁷ Ebina found himself in a gathering point for ‘lost samurai’ seeking a new ‘lordship’ to serve in the interests of preserving the nation. In his period at the school, this mantle seemed to have fallen to the liberal Christianity so entrenched in many Western educational elites. Along with many others, Ebina converted and (in 1876, three years after the lifting of the Meiji ban on proselytism) he joined the Kumamoto Christian Band. It was a period of rapid growth, with numbers of Japanese Christians reportedly climbing from 59 to over 31,000 in the next two decades.⁷⁸ The enthusiasm sparked by this growth seemed so definitively to confirm the necessity of Christianity to modernization,⁷⁹ that Ebina and others were prepared, on the one hand, to freely build on Yokoi Shōnan’s combination of Confucianism and Christianity,⁸⁰ and on the other, to define quite contrarian internationalist positions against the xenophobic nationalism which underpinned the rise of Shintoism and the decline of intellectual engagement with Buddhism.⁸¹ Taking advantage of their relatively uncontrolled (if not actually favoured status), liberal Protestant Churches such as Ebina’s Hongō congregation were important projectors of Christianity as ‘the religion of enlightenment rationality, capable of bringing together dissimilar individuals for socio-political discussion’.⁸² The anarchist leader, Ōsugi Sakae, would remember Ebina’s eloquence, and the centrality of Hongō as a local base of practice for the most progressive ideas of the time: I was completely entranced by the preacher’s eloquence. His wonderful voice enthralled me whenever, pushing back his gray hair and stroking his long beard, he would thrust up his hands and raise the pitch of his voice, invoking God. And when his voice choked with tears, I joined the other believers in weeping.⁸³

From the pulpit, in his extensive writings, and later as president of Doshisha University (1920–8), Ebina dominated Japanese Congregationalism in the first third of the twentieth century.⁸⁴ Affected by poor eyesight from his university days, however, Ebina’s Christology was perhaps not as well developed as his ⁷⁷ R. H. Drummond, ‘Janes Leroy Lansing’, in Gerald H. Anderson, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions (Grand Rapids, 1998), p. 327. ⁷⁸ Shuma Iwai, ‘The Perspective of Ebina Danjo’s Japanized Christianity: A Historical Case Study’, Exchange 38.1 (2009), pp. 23–4. ⁷⁹ Garrett Washington, ‘Pulpits as Lecterns: Discourses of Social Change within Tokyo’s Protestant Churches, 1890–1917’, Japanese Studies 29.3 (December 2009), p. 385. ⁸⁰ Iwai, ‘The Perspective of Ebina Danjo’s Japanized Christianity’, pp. 25–6. ⁸¹ Ebina Danjo, ‘The Evangelization of Japan Viewed in its Intellectual Aspect’, Harvard Theological Review 2.2 (April 1909), p. 186. ⁸² Washington, ‘Pulpits as Lecterns’, 386. ⁸³ Ōsugi Sakae, Autobiography, in W. T. De Bary, ed., Sources of Japanese Tradition: Volume 2, 1600 to 2000 (New York, 2005), p. 912. ⁸⁴ Nathalie Cavasin, ‘Ebina Danjo’, in Karen Christensen and David Levinson, eds., Encyclopedia of Modern Asia, vol. 2 (New York, 2002), p. 318. Gale Virtual Reference Library online, accessed 17/4/2015.

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concept of the sovereignty of God. Through the early twentieth century he was quite comfortable in functionally Unitarian circles (such as that attached to the Harvard Theological Review) and was accused of such in his lengthy debate on the matter with pastor of the leading Presbyterian-Reformed Fujimicho Church, Masahisa Uemura.⁸⁵ Counter to the reformed position, Ebina drove his hearers to baptism early, often before they quite understood this new faith. Regardless of their positions on Christian orthodoxy, however, all these indigenizers engaged in the ‘blessed and encouraging thought that Japan too is God’s nation’,⁸⁶ to the degree that even the orthodox (such as Uemura) ‘regarded Neo-Confucian bushido (the way of the warrior) as a gift of God to Japan and a veritable Old Testament’.⁸⁷ What they disagreed on was the relationship between the Kingdom and the Empire, specifically in constructing an indigenized Christian theological ethics capable of encapsulating the Japanese Empire’s increasingly fraught foreign relations. This clash came to a focus in the Nihon Kumiai Kirisuto Kyokai and the personal bitterness beween Ebina and second-generation convert, Kashiwagi Gien. The rise of a ‘craze of patriotism’ around the Russo-Japanese War, and the willingness of most church leaders (Ebina included) to justify Japanese aggression in Korea and Manchuria, antagonized the pacifist and socialist minority. Protest centred on the heimin sha, or Commoners Society, which though led by a core of people who ‘despised religion’ sported a membership largely made up of young, socially conscious liberal Christians who, in addition to German theology had been reading Tolstoy and comparative religion as a way of unifying Christian particularism to the Japanese existential past and present. The War undid the glamour by which Ebina held together the various intellectual trends which made Hongō the intellectual salon of Japan’s aspirational ‘Paris of the East’. Sakae noted: ‘the attitude that religious individuals took to the war—especially the attitude of Ebina in whom I believed—thoroughly betrayed my faith.’⁸⁸ Instead of ‘a cosmopolitanism that transcended national boundaries and a libertarianism that recognized no temporal authority’⁸⁹ the only spirit on display at Hongō seemed now to be that of Japanese militarism, ‘the national principle of expansion’.⁹⁰ The wave on which Ebina had ridden was dependent on a theology which connected the now ⁸⁵ R. H. Drummond, ‘Uemura, Mashisa’, in G. H. Anderson, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions (New York, 1998), pp. 687–8. ⁸⁶ Uchimura Kanzo, quoted in Yosuke Nirei, ‘Toward a Modern Belief: Modernist Protestantism and Problems of National Religion in Meiji Japan’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 34.1 (January 2007), p. 152. ⁸⁷ Drummond, ‘Uemura, Mashisa’, p. 688. ⁸⁸ Sakae, Autobiography, in De Bary, ed., Sources of Japanese Tradition, p. 913. ⁸⁹ Sakae, Autobiography, in De Bary, ed., Sources of Japanese Tradition, p. 913. ⁹⁰ Yosuke Nirei, ‘Toward a Modern Belief: Modernist Protestantism and Problems of National Religion in Meiji Japan’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 34.1 (January 2007), p. 153.

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relativized field of national tradition and identity to the larger field of international thought and practice which defined the Meiji and Taisho periods. Ebina’s ‘construction of rhetorical borders’ defining ‘the backwards wastelands’ of Hokkaido, Taiwan, Manchuria, and Korea as the proper place for ‘a stronger Japan and redoubled evangelization’ promised only the extension of ‘here’ (with its logic of practice) to ‘there’. His position collapsed the universality of Christianity and decreased its distinctiveness both to Shinto revivalism and to absorption into Showa-period proto-fascism.⁹¹ Here was the epistemological origin of the moral compromises denounced by Kashiwagi Gien in the rapine and murder on the Korean peninsula in 1919, of Korean labourers in Japan after the Kanto earthquake in 1923 and the death of Sakae himself in the confusion which surrounded it. Despite his prominence in Congregationalist circles, Kashiwagi’s protests gained little support within the denomination. Having sold itself to nationalism, Ebina’s indigenized theology was silenced by both the empire’s excesses, and then disempowered when Christian opinion abroad supported the League of Nations’ condemnation of Japan’s actions.⁹² As with the ‘German Christians’ under the rise of Nazism, the ‘logic of practice’ trumped theoretical theology. It is futile to think about what might have been if Japanese Congregationalism had followed Kashiwagi’s ‘small Japan internationalism’ rather than Ebina’s ‘big Japan imperialism’. By the end of the century, Christian adherence in Japan hovered around 2 per cent, of whom evangelicals made up perhaps one quarter; across the Tsushima Strait, South Korean adherence was over 25 per cent, half of whom were evangelicals.⁹³ It is at least likely that Christian impact on Asia as a whole may have adopted a different complexion. For our purposes here, however, the important thing is to recognize the degree to which the national struggles of the two fields of practice (Korea and Japan) impinged upon one another—not only in terms of broader movements in nationalism and Christian thought about it, but in the direct interaction between Congregationalist imperialist indigenization in Japan (represented directly by its Kumiai Kyōkai mission in Korea) and (Presbyterian and ⁹¹ Parallels might well be drawn with Pentecostal responses to Alexander Boddy’s support for the First World War: Donald Gee characterized him as having been swept up in British nationalism, with the result that ‘The glory had somehow departed, and he was only a shadow of the former master of assemblies.’ Lenz notes that this was based on a polemical misinterpretation of Boddy’s position: Darin D. Lenz, ‘ “Visions on the Battlefields”: Alexander A. Boddy, Early British Pentecostalism, and the First World War, 1914–1918’, Journal of Religious History 32.3 (September 2008), p. 281. ⁹² A. Hamish Ion, The Cross in the Dark Valley: The Canadian Protestant Missionary Movement in the Japanese Empire, 1931–35 (Waterloo, 1999), p. 20. ⁹³ M. Hutchinson and J. Wolffe, A Short History of Global Evangelicalism (New York and Cambridge, 2012), ch. 9; Donald Baker, ‘Sibling Rivalry in Twentieth-Century Korea: Growth Rates of Catholic and Protestant Communities’, in R. E. Buswell and T. S. Lee, eds., Christianity in Korea (Honolulu, 2006), pp. 289–96.

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Methodist) Korean anti-colonialist indigenization in Korea. Pierre Bourdieu illustrates the point—he recounts the story of returning to a group of photos which he had taken in another colonial setting, Algeria, of stone seed-corn storage jars marked with a serpent: . . . their high quality, although I had no flash-gun, was due to the fact that the roof of the house into which they were built had been destroyed when the occupants were expelled by the French army. There was no need to have exceptional epistemological lucidity or outstanding ethical or political vigilance in order to question the deep-rooted determinants of a so obviously ‘misplaced’ libido sciendi.⁹⁴

The realization was one point on his journey from earlier substantialist understandings to finding the meanings and functions of things in the relationships which they had to one another within the larger ‘system’. In the case of indigenized Christianity in Japan, the ‘relationships in the larger system’ means that its course cannot be understood without reference to events in Korea. Not only was the confident liberal indigenization of Christian theology on the Japanese side of the Tsushima Strait (during the Showa period) driven to near extinction by forces which it had itself encouraged, but it helped create the circumstances by which, on the other side of the Strait, Christianity would become associated with anti-colonialism, and so intrinsic to the means by which Koreans engaged modernity. Following the 1 March 1919 protests, no members of the Kumiai Kyōkai mission in Korea raised their voices in protest at the savage repression by the Japanese;⁹⁵ on the other side, almost half of the signatories to the Korean ‘Declaration of Independence’ were Protestants.⁹⁶ The ‘logic of practice’ drove the internal developments of both Ebina’s proimperialist theology and that of the anti-colonialists on the other side of the Strait. Ultimately it was their relationship to one another which provided them with their meaning. The fact that this dissenting Christian contribution has been ‘overlooked’ in accounts of the twentieth-century development of the ‘Asian tigers’ has been part of the libido sciendi, the purposive blindness to religion in much Western scholarship,⁹⁷ combined with the tendency of post-war Asian societies to rewrite their histories to produce homogeneous national identities. The emerging literature, however, points to the importance of Christianity in nation formation in a number of majority non-Christian nations: Myanmar (with Karen resistance to Buddhist homogenization), Singapore (partially defining ⁹⁴ Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge and Oxford, 1990), p. 3. ⁹⁵ Emily Anderson, ‘Christianity in the Japanese Empire: Nationalism, Conscience, and Faith in Meiji and Taisho Japan’, PhD dissertation, University of California, 2010, pp. 402–3. ⁹⁶ Baker, ‘Sibling Rivalry’, p. 290. ⁹⁷ The ‘racist contempt which, through the self-contempt it induces in its victims, helps to deny them knowledge and recognition of their own tradition’: Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, p. 3.

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diasporic Chinese difference), Vietnam (the Catholic factor in American policy responses), and, as we have seen, Japan and Korea. Among these, Japan and Korea may be seen as a ‘linked pair’, developing through the twentieth century in a form of connected divergence as their national conversations responded to the development of the broader international order and its pressure on ‘the strange history of mottled imperialism in the area’.⁹⁸ In Korea, the role of Protestant internationalism in opposing Japanese expansionism is now well-established, as was its effect on conditioning the Korean response to Communism in the interwar period, and in providing the sort of moral permission/restraint which would make the Korean War very different to, for example, the Pacific War before it, and the Vietnam War which followed.⁹⁹ Before wholesale anti-Communism suborned American foreign policy in the 1950s, as Haga notes, the period 1921–50 (culminating in Truman’s ‘Campaign for Truth’ and in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights) saw intense international activity around the very dissenting Protestant concern for religious freedom. As Truman told a graduating class at Gonzaga University in 1950: It is the moral and religious beliefs of mankind which alone give our strength meaning and purpose. The struggle for peace is a struggle for moral and ethical principles. These principles unite us with religious people in every land, who are striving, as we are striving, for brotherhood among men. In everything we do, at home and abroad, we must demonstrate our clear purpose, and our firm will, to build a world order in which men everywhere can walk upright and unafraid, and do the work of God.¹⁰⁰

It was this sort of fundamentally religio-national self-understanding of the great powers, plus their willingness to promote compliance by persuasion or force (the ‘Truman Doctrine’, for example, or Kennedy’s determination to ‘pay any price, bear any burden . . . in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty’),¹⁰¹ which made religious liberty the conceptual procrustean bed and model for the defence of all other liberties in the international space through most of the twentieth century. Local theologizing took place in new nation ⁹⁸ Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London and New York, 1998), p. 4. ⁹⁹ Kai Yin Allison Haga, ‘An Overlooked Dimension of the Korean War: The Role of Christianity and American Missionaries in the Rise of Korean Nationalism, Anti-Colonialism, and Eventual Civil War, 1884–1953’, PhD dissertation, College of William and Mary, 2007, pp. 518–19; Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 206–7. ¹⁰⁰ H. S. Truman, ‘Address’, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA, 11 May 1950, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman 1950, pp. 375–7, quoted in Haga, ‘An Overlooked Dimension’, p. 246. ¹⁰¹ John F. Kennedy, ‘Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961’, Yale Avalon Project, The Inaugural Addresses of the American Presidents, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/kennedy. asp, accessed 20/4/2015.

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states caught up in the ideological battles of an international order transformed by war, the decline of the old empires, and the rise of the new. By extension, majority world theologies—carried abroad by diasporas, carried back by Western missions agencies, theological institutions, or universities, even projected by national or opposition leaders into international forums—were forced to become reflexive in their mode of self-construction.

INFORMAL AND F ORMAL THEOLOGIES The differences between another ‘linked pair’ of examples of internationalizing indigenization can be seen in the comparison of ‘black theology’ to the Balokole (a term meaning ‘the saved ones’ or, more by attribution, the ‘East African Revival’). There is a great deal of work, led by Keith Ward, Stuart Piggin, and others, on the ‘potential’ international networks connected to the localized outbreak of the Balokole in an Anglican mission setting in Rwanda, and Buganda. This, like many other effective indigenizations, was originally a ‘grass-roots’ revitalization movement, but one which had great impact on millions throughout East Africa. It was united by its practices (preaching for repentance, attacks on many traditional tribal practices, public confession, reparation and restoration, the use of multiracial ‘teams’, and common hymnody such as Tukutendereza Yesu). Its ‘rewards’ were invigoration and renewal of communal/ecclesial life, ‘offering to individuals the challenge of a deeper experience of salvation in Christ and a more radical commitment to Christian discipleship’.¹⁰² As Ward notes, however, even the Gahini hospital mission (where the revival began) was caught in a subtle web of inter-relationality: it was an evangelical subculture defined by its resistance to seemingly dominant Anglo-Catholicism and liberalism elsewhere in the pan-Anglican communion, and connected to the preceding Pilkington Revival of the 1890s and to international networks of Keswick spirituality.¹⁰³ This would later provide a ready mechanism for international influence: at the outset, however, practice-based responses were a necessary transformative response to the fact that biblicist dissenting traditions (all those rooted in the Lutheran ‘sola scriptura’ tradition) generally lacked a strong tradition of natural theology by which to deal intellectually with encounter between the ‘true particularities’ of the Word

¹⁰² Kevin Ward, ‘ “Tukutendereza Yesu”: The Balokole Revival in Uganda’, in Zablon Nthamburi, ed., From Mission to Church: A Handbook of Christianity in East Africa (Nairobi, 1991), p. 113. ¹⁰³ See the ‘reappraisal’ of these links in Jason Bruner, ‘Keswick and the East African Revival: An Historiographical Reappraisal’, Religion Compass 5.9 (September 2011), pp. 477–89.

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and the traditional spiritualities of East Africa.¹⁰⁴ Many of those who were at the origins of the Balokole—such as Simeoni Nsibambi—were locked into status systems if not created, then certainly reinforced by imperialism, and had been influenced by the internationalization of the First World War. If ‘Revival’ in the 1890s had been about spreading Christianity, that in the 1930s was about the forging of a spiritual technology supporting the personal ability to live and succeed within increasingly contested imperial settlements. The multiracialism and emphasis on ‘the Calvary Road’ provided embodied and theological metaphors for trans-local redefinition of communal relationships and, in a period of increased African nationalism, a deliberately universalist reconfiguration of relations between Africans and Europeans. It grew, in short, because (against the background of its ‘field’) it worked. The Kabale Convention of 1935 gave the movement its first organizational presence outside its local origins; adoption by a key bishop and then parish-based preaching ensured its rapid spread throughout the Diocese of Uganda. Equally as quickly, diocesan involvement also sparked opposition from those in theological teaching positions (such as J. S. Herbert and especially John Jones, who had carried a profound anti-experientialism out of his own experience of the Welsh Revival of 1904).¹⁰⁵ Conflict led to the Mukono Incident at Bishop Tucker College, East Africa’s own ‘Princeton schism’, and in turn to opposition to episcopal authority among a significant proportion of the Balokole. The movement now needed to consolidate its theology in opposition to ‘modernism’ and ‘ritualism’. Fears that the movement was a revival of nativist religio-political revolts such as the Nyabingi cult or the Bamalaki movement, also put the movement in conflict with the British colonial authorities.¹⁰⁶ The key elements of the Balokole, noted the Kabale Memorandum of 1941, were ‘the substitutionary death of Christ on the Cross, . . . [and] the ideal of separation from the world to a holy and victorious life’.¹⁰⁷ The Cross acted to restrain the extremes of experientialism (referred to as okufuba, or ‘striving’) which (as in early Methodism and late Pentecostalism) could overflow into antinomianism and/or schism. By strenuous effort the movement remained within the Anglican Church in much of Uganda (the two becoming essentially identified, for instance, with Anglicanism in Western Uganda): the result was ‘a strong puritanism and evangelical theology’ being stamped on the Church in Kigezi, but also ‘a relative openness to the World’.¹⁰⁸ This was not, it is important to note, simply an extension of the ¹⁰⁴ Adrian Hastings, ‘On African Theology’, Scottish Journal of Theology 37.3 (August 1984), p. 359. ¹⁰⁵ Kevin Ward, ‘ “Obedient Rebels”—the Relationship Between the Early “Balokole” and the Church of Uganda: The Mukono Crisis of 1941’, Journal of Religion in Africa 19.3 (1989), pp. 202–3. ¹⁰⁶ Edith Bruder, The Black Jews of Africa: History, Religion, Identity (Oxford, 2008), p. 162. ¹⁰⁷ Ward, ‘ “Tukutendereza Yesu” ’, p. 117. ¹⁰⁸ Ward, ‘ “Tukutendereza Yesu” ’, p. 117.

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Evangelical Party of the Church of England, but a fully indigenized form of evangelicalism preferring Keswick forms which, while present in the Anglican Church elsewhere, were a waning force compared, for example, to the reformed (or ‘Puritan’) revival of the 1950s.¹⁰⁹ While the Balokole commenced in Anglican Churches, internal opposition, regional variations in authority structures and tribal cultures, the influence of charismatic individuals, and the inter-denominationalism intrinsic to evangelicalism meant that the revival movement soon overlapped denominational boundaries. In doing so, it generated movements of critique and influenced numbers of dissenting movements (both old and new).¹¹⁰ It became a movement of (D)issent. In addition to alienation from traditional community practices (though not, as recent anthropological studies have pointed out, alienation from the functions filled both by traditional practice and the new spirituality),¹¹¹ personal critique and reformation was extended to critique of all received Protestantism, and even the new nation states then struggling to emerge. Peterson’s words recall Bourdieu’s emphasis on the relationship between ‘subjective hopes’ and ‘objective chances’:¹¹² ‘Converts offered a contentious reading of their contemporary world: they sorted through cultures and traditions, identified their sins, disavowed their pagan contemporaries and fashioned new lives for themselves.’¹¹³ Not only did revival theology produce renovation, then, but also innovation. From its origination point around Gahini, it became rapidly international, embracing most of the nations of East Africa, with millions of members in all mainstream Protestant Churches.¹¹⁴ Connected to missionary networks, and promulgated by the multiple printings of books such as Roy Hession’s Calvary Road,¹¹⁵ its emphasis on the ‘crucicentrism’ identified by David Bebbington as part of the ‘evangelical quadrilateral’ provided an ‘orthodox’ imprimatum for its revivalist influence to trickle back into the West through the itinerations of the missionary workforce.

¹⁰⁹ C. R. Truemann, ‘J. I. Packer: An English Nonconformist Perspective’, in Timothy George, ed., J. I. Packer and the Evangelical Future: The Impact of His Life and Thought (Grand Rapids, 2009), pp. 117ff. ¹¹⁰ John Rempel, ‘Spirituality in Recent Mennonite Writing’, Mennonite Quarterly Review 71.4 (October 1997), pp. 594–5. ¹¹¹ See B. J. D. Udy, ‘Ecstatic Spirituality in Kigezi, Ruanda and Western Tanganyika c.1933–1940: Censorship, Control and the Ruanda Mission’, MA thesis, University of Durham (United Kingdom), ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2013. ¹¹² Richard Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu (London, 1992), p. 27. ¹¹³ Derek R. Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935 to 1972 (Ann Arbor, 2013), p. 5. ¹¹⁴ John Karanja, ‘Evangelical Attitudes toward Democracy in Kenya’, in Terence O. Ranger, ed., Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa (New York, 2008), p. 67. ¹¹⁵ Brian Stanley, The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott (Downers Grove, 2013), p. 83.

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Whether in ‘Greater God-centredness’ among American Mennonites,¹¹⁶ a form of Protestant Ignatianism for George Verwer’s global youth activists in Operation Mobilization,¹¹⁷ and pre-cursor movements contributing to the later rise of the mainstream charismatic movement in Australia,¹¹⁸ the ‘genetic’ link of the East Africa Revival to earlier Keswick and missionary globalizations made the Revival not merely an international force, but a transnational one. This could trouble the waters of East African state formation: while some Revival churches responded to the siren call of Christian political syncretisms such as Arap Moi’s Nyayo-ism, for example, the reflexive transnational crucicentrism of the movement resisted the replacement of the Cross with the state.¹¹⁹ Not only could the ab’oluganda (‘brothers and sisters’) consolidate resistance inside the sound of the preaching and public confession, but counter to the geographic identities created by the ‘political entrepreneurs’ of the new nation states, the mobility of the revivalists subverted the plausibility of merely geographical identities.¹²⁰ It was a tendency only reinforced by the exile of revivalists under the brutal rule of Idi Amin.¹²¹ Its influence in chain-sparking (particularly Anglican-based) revivals elsewhere in the world (through Geoff Bingham in Pakistan, for example; or Festo Kivengere’s contributions to the indigenization of Aboriginal Christianity in the Northern Territory of Australia and to Billy Graham’s international evangelism), and its absorption into ‘third sector’ agencies such as African Enterprise, ensured that East Africa would remain in the political discourse of the West at least until the 1980s. In a particular example of what Kwame Bediako called the renewal of Christianity as a ‘non-Western Religion’,¹²² for instance, for American Mennonites the Balokole reflexively reattached a conventionalizing first-world constituency to its sixteenth-century dissenting origins. In Donald Jacobs’ words to theologian Howard Yoder: ‘I have met the Anabaptists and they are African!’¹²³

¹¹⁶ Rempel, ‘Spirituality in Recent Mennonite Writing’, p. 595. ¹¹⁷ Stanley, The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism, p. 83. ¹¹⁸ J. K. Kim, ‘Bingham, Geoffrey Cyril (1919–2009)’, Australasian Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, http://webjournals.ac.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ADPCM/article/view/ 195, accessed 23/4/2015, and S. Piggin, Evangelical Christianity in Australia (Melbourne, 1996). ¹¹⁹ See Mbaabu’s account of Church opposition to the ‘queuing’ electoral controversy, for instance: E. J. Mbaabu, ‘Shalom Our Country: A Vision for the Presbyterian Church of East Africa’, PhD dissertation, School of Theology at Claremont, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 1991, p. 198. ¹²⁰ Derek Peterson, ‘Revivalism and Dissent in Colonial East Africa’, in Kevin Ward and Emma Wild-Wood, eds., The East African Revival: History and Legacies (Farnham and Burlington, 2012), p. 116. ¹²¹ Alfred Olwa, ‘Festo Kivengere, a Ugandan Preacher in Australia’, St Mark’s Review 230 (November 2014), pp. 106–7. ¹²² See his Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (Maryknoll, 1997). ¹²³ Stanley, The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism, p. 84.

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The indigenous theology of the Balokole developed around the rhetorical forms of preaching, confession, and hymnody. Its indigenized thought was ‘theological phronesis’: communal ‘wisdom’ thinking for ‘production’ of pastoral and spiritual outcomes. As a result, the appropriation for reflective theology of its experience-based practice has largely been through biblical hermeneutics or historiographical reflection,¹²⁴ rather than through critical or speculative theologizing. In seeking to resist the reduction of revival experience to saccharin pietistic cultural artefacts, agencies such as African Enterprise propagate ‘practical theology’ in books, magazines, DVDs, and the like. There is also a considerable flow of African scholars to and from the major theological agencies in the West, both for the churches and increasingly to supply the growing number of secular and Christian tertiary institutions emerging to service modernizing economies and the rapid expansion of post-Balokole revivalist movements (such as indigenous pentecostalism).¹²⁵ While contentedly globalized, such ‘practical’ theologizing has increasingly resisted co-option into the larger narrative of globalization and its identification by Western scholars as a mere extension of Western capitalism and conservatism.¹²⁶ It is a delicate balancing act—appropriating pre-mission roots and yet avoiding accusations of syncretism—which has driven a variety of methodological approaches to dealing with the key sources of data. For most theologians these sources are found in ancestral/tribal history, diasporic and colonial experience, and ‘new found faith in Christianity’.¹²⁷ From a sociological point of view on the origins of ideas, Bourdieu would add several other considerations: the shifting habitus linked to the conditions of existence, for example, has a critical part to play in supporting reflexive thought (the African ‘brain drain’ to the West is as related to African economics and the needs of the West as it is to theological factors).¹²⁸ Moreover, the impact of the Balokole cannot be understood without reference to the total relational ‘system’ into and out of which these ideas are emerging. ¹²⁴ e.g. Robert Kipkemoi Lang’at, ‘The Holiness Movement in Africa: A Historiographical Study of the Quest for Sanctification as a Theological Framework for Understanding the Emergence of Christianity in Africa’, PhD dissertation, Drew University, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2003; K. J. Gichaara, ‘Ritualization of Time, History and Hope in Kenya’s Social Memory as a Paradigm for an Emerging African Theology’, PhD dissertation, Emory University, 1996. ¹²⁵ J. S. Hittenberger, ‘Globalization, “Marketization,” and the Mission of Pentecostal Higher Education in Africa’, Pneuma 26.2 (2004), p. 184. ¹²⁶ Mark Shaw, ‘Local Revival and Global Expansion: The case of African Christianity’, in A. Adogame and S. Shankar, eds., Religion on the Move!: New Dynamics of Religious Expansion in a Globalizing World (Leiden and Boston, 2012), p. 286. ¹²⁷ F. A. Oborji, ‘The Theological Language in Africa: A Missiological Reflection’, http:// sedosmission.org/old/eng/oborji_5.htm, accessed 23/4/2015. ¹²⁸ Jori Lewis, ‘Brain Drain’, The Crisis 118.4 (Fall 2011), pp. 26–9; Frédéric Docquier and Hillel Rapoport, ‘Globalization, Brain Drain, and Development’, Journal of Economic Literature 50.3 (September 2012), pp. 681–730.

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The problems that the Balokole solved on the way to becoming a transcultural, transnational ‘grass-roots’ African indigenization of Protestant evangelicalism were likewise faced by the emerging ecclesial hierarchies and education structures which followed the first wave of African nation formation through the 1950s and 1960s. It was one thing to practice and preach Christianity authentically in Africa, but how did one teach it, form indigenous clergy within it, express it within the formal professional and certification networks dominated by rationalizing Western scholarship, or use it to mobilize support for or against specific political formations? It is significant that grass-roots indigenization processes (such as the transnational charismatic renewal in universities and schools which transformed Nigerian pentecostalism from the 1960s)¹²⁹ often reached take-off point through an institutional rupture. In formal theological settings, however, the national and transnational status relationships (institutionalized in academic or ecclesial preferment systems, academic journals, grants, and the subtle and not-so-subtle politics of conference invitation) were not nearly so tacit as they were in grass-roots movements. Neither the ‘continuous contemporaneity’ nor the ‘critical self-consciousness’, prescribed by Adrian Hastings as definitive elements of theology,¹³⁰ existed outside the process of institution development. The pressures were, and are, complex. There was a form of triple interdependence in play: just as the popular indigenizations (Harrism, the Balokele, the growth of ‘Bethesda’ pentecostalism among South African Indians, and in many African Initiated Churches) were negatively framed by the emergence of entrepreneurial ethnic nationalism, it might be said that formal African theologizing was positively framed by the same process, and also dependent on the impact of previous indigenizations. Formal theologizing, too, had an economy. A great deal of the early ‘African’ theology, not surprisingly, came from the institutionally and financially more capable South Africa, and from the ‘white tribe of Africa’, particularly the Dutch Reformed community, with its close ties to international communities in Britain, Holland, and Germany. ‘Black Theology’ (a counterdefining movement contingent on encounters with whites) also long preceded ‘African’ theology, and was present in a more articulated manner in South Africa, due to that country’s exposure both to apartheid and to global movements in the black diaspora.¹³¹ There was an implicit black theology among the African American founders of Sierra Leone, for example, and among the Ethiopianist Methodists in Nigeria. When, in 1925, Reuben Spartas read (in the Negro

¹²⁹ As described in Matthews A. Ojo, The End-Time Army: Charismatic Movements in Nigeria (Trenton and Asmara, 2006). ¹³⁰ Hastings, ‘On African Theology’, p. 359. ¹³¹ Mario I. Aguilar, ‘Postcolonial African Theology in Kabasele Lumbala’, Theological Studies 63.2 (June 2002), p. 303.

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World) about the formation of Marcus Garvey’s African Orthodox Church—‘a church established for all right thinking Africans, men who wish to be free in their own house, and not always being thought of as boys’—he felt impelled to import the Church from North America to Uganda.¹³² Released into global socialist and nationalist movements through the latter part of the nineteenth century, these incipient, and later most specific black liberation/Liberation theologies, were increasingly formalized after 1945. They were given impetus by globalizing connective structures such as the Communist International, by post-Bandung international politics, by mobility and the conscientization of the African diaspora (especially in the Caribbean, USA, and South America)¹³³ and by public media/rhetoric surrounding the American civil rights movement. Just as liberation theology emerged from ‘the history of greed and violence, suffering and oppression, and death and destruction that have characterised Latin America for five centuries since the arrival of Christianity’,¹³⁴ so African theology developed both as an extension of maturing scholarly anti-colonialism and the search for what it was to be specifically ‘African’. Here again the triple tension: how to recognize the authenticity of local theological indigenizations, while managing the (sometimes threatening) demands of the entrepreneurial nationalists, and also distinguishing between ‘Africa’ as an ‘othering’ category contingent on colonialism and ‘Africa’ as a bloc of common interests intertwined with the emerging global polity. Over-reliance on global abstractions caused detachment from the energy of grass-roots movements, while absorption into the interests of transnational or national causes threatened a short lifespan for the related theologies.¹³⁵ This was tragically and literally the case with thinkers such as Gudina Tumsa (1929–79), murdered by the Marxist dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam.¹³⁶ In this setting, for much of the latter part of the twentieth century, transnational mediating institutions such as the World Council of Churches and the World Communion of Reformed Churches were important mechanisms for training, voice, and career. It was out of this network that ‘professional’ theologians (such as Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Methodist, born 1934) emerged, and began to develop the necessary scholarly subdisciplines (e.g. Introducing African Women’s Theology, 2001). The crises of the European economy, the decline in resources available to state-funded churches such as the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD) and in the memberships of the

¹³² Marcus Garvey, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. X, ed. Robert A. Hill (Berkeley, 2006), p. xcviii. ¹³³ See, for instance, Robert A. Hill and Gregory A. Pirio, ‘ “Africa for the Africans”: The Garvey Movement in South Africa, 1920–1940’, in S. Marks and S. Trapido, eds., The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa (London, 1987). ¹³⁴ David Tombs, Latin American Liberation Theology (Leiden and Boston, 2002), p. 3. ¹³⁵ Hastings, ‘On African Theology’, p. 362. ¹³⁶ Tasgara Hirpo, ‘The Cost of Discipleship: The story of Gudina Tumsa’, Word and World 25.2 (Spring 2005), p. 159.

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traditional Churches of the West, linked to a broader crisis in (non-evangelical) missionary sending, meant that these mechanisms declined after the 1970s.¹³⁷ After that, the rise of NGOs, the increasing interest in globalization among relatively well-resourced Western universities and theological institutions (including Princeton Theological seminary, and the Centre for Christianity in the non-Western World at Edinburgh) tended to play a replacement role. The economy of theologizing in the Majority World involved a set of activities which relied on resources, a place to be, communication channels through which to connect to an audience. Most early African theologians leveraged their connections to churches and the schooling institutions which were also responsible for producing many of Africa’s first- and secondgeneration nation-founders. Almost all of them first trained as school teachers, and had family connections which made scholarly development possible. Manas Buthelezi (Lutheran, b. 1935), for instance, was the son of a Lutheran evangelist (Abosalom Buthelezi) in the Swedish Mission; Kwame Bediako (Presbyterian, 1945–2008) was the son of a police inspector and the grandson of a Presbyterian catechist and evangelist; Byang Henry Kato (SIM, 1936–75), converted to Christ at the age of twelve in a primary school of the Sudan Interior Mission. Ebenezer Adeolu Adegbola (Methodist, 1918–2004) was a lay preacher in Igan Okoto and was among those who established the Wesleyan School in the town in 1911. Even John Samuel Mbiti (Anglican and Reformed, b. 1931) who, though spending most of his career teaching outside Africa, is called ‘the father of contemporary African theology’, taught in his home school before heading overseas to convert his Makarere University education into an engagement with international trends in theology, first at Gordon-Barrington College and then Cambridge University. Robinson Azenne Oteh (Baptist, 1929–92) was unusual in going straight to theological training (bible college then Seminary), but then he was born in a chiefly family, and brought up by a Christian mother. For those who stayed in Africa (as the great Presbyterian Africanist, Ogbu Uke Kalu, did between 1974 and 1996, before eventually leaving for good in 2001 to become Luce Professor of World Christianity and Mission at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago), lack of resources also impacted on their ability to publish, and to find a voice.¹³⁸ Among all these contesting forces, then, as Hastings asked in the year of Kalu’s premature death in 2009, ‘Is there in fact a recognisable “African Theology” in existence?’¹³⁹ The ‘evangelically and theologically necessary . . . tactics’ of creating a ‘disordering’ counter ‘black’ and ‘African’ theology to oppose and undermine ¹³⁷ Mark Laing, ‘The Church Is the Mission: Integrating the IMC with the WCC’, International Review of Mission 100.2 (November 2011), pp. 217, 228. ¹³⁸ M. L. Bastian, ‘Obituary: Professor Ogbu Uke Kalu (June 2, 1942—January 7, 2009)’, Journal of Religion in Africa 39.3 (2009), pp. 360–1. ¹³⁹ Hastings, ‘On African Theology’, p. 359.

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the colonialist legacy was energetically plausible in the postcolonial period. After all, theologizing was mainly (D)issent from the ‘powers of the world’, and was being articulated in other languages, in terms predefined by ideologies formed elsewhere. By the end of the twentieth century, after half a century and more of nation formation and African leadership, this has shifted in focus—to address the local (so becoming ‘African theologies’ in the plural); the national; and the global/universal. In this search, Pilate’s question (‘What shall I do then with Jesus . . . ?’) has come back to the fore. Just as Leonardo Boff and his generation sought to resolve issues of inculturation, hybridity, and transculturality for Latin America by starting with Christology,¹⁴⁰ so many African theologians in traditional dissenting churches have sought to reframe the universal/embodied Christ in African guise (for instance, as the primordial Ancestor, who baptizes and reframes the Spirit’s presence among African peoples between creation and the present).¹⁴¹ Absorption of such approaches varies with traditions: after all, it is somewhat easier for Catholics to baptize their ancestors into the existing heavenly court around God’s throne, than it is for Word-centred Protestants. In speaking to their own communities, moreover, African theologians have had to take into account the realities of poverty, aspiration, pluralism, mobility, and world view. They also have to take into account the fact that how Africans hold religion not only varies from place to place, but has little to do with theological abstractions. For people at the grass roots, spirituality is a techne for dealing with the difficulties of daily life.¹⁴² In the words of Ellis and ter Haar: ‘Many Africans today who continue to hold beliefs derived from the traditional cosmologies apply these to everyday life even when they live in cities and work in the civil service or business sector. Religious worldviews do not necessarily diminish with formal education.’¹⁴³ Continuous with Martin’s analysis, Kalu notes that this is a major contributor to the popular mobilization which is African pentecostalism: ‘it is the “setting to work” of the gospel in Africa, at once showing how Africans appropriated the gospel message, how they responded to the presence of the Kingdom in their midst, and how its power transformed their worldviews.’¹⁴⁴ Notably, while planted early in the twentieth century, African pentecostalism has grown massively mainly ¹⁴⁰ Aguilar, ‘Postcolonial African Theology in Kabasele Lumbala’, p. 323. ¹⁴¹ M. L. Cook, ‘The African Experience of Jesus’, Theological Studies 70.3 (September 2009), p. 679. ¹⁴² P. Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge and Malden, 2009), p. 5, and see my application of this to Pentecostalism in, M. P. Hutchinson, ‘ “Without the Holy Spirit, You’re Stuffed”: Pentecostalism as Globalizing Techne’, Address to ‘Pentecostalism and Transnationalism’ Symposium, University of Western Sydney, 1 August 2013, https://www. academia.edu/4232129/Without_the_Holy_Spirit_Youre_Stuffed_Pentecostalism_as_Globalizing_ Techne, accessed 30/4/2015. ¹⁴³ Quoted in O. U. Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford, 2008), p. 169. ¹⁴⁴ Kalu, African Pentecostalism, p. 170.

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in the period of post-war globalization. Even more than the Balokole (and to some degree preconditioned by it), it was a religion ‘made to travel’,¹⁴⁵ as its presence among many African refugee communities in Europe attests.¹⁴⁶ The friction between this seemingly neonate (and yet, as Kalu notes, deeply rooted) movement and indigenizing formal theologies is significant—and not just because of the tensions in the international peer community over megachurches and prosperity preaching. Pentecostal praxis, and their growing number of institutions, challenges what African theologians in many traditional churches see as the hard-won inculturation work of the previous fifty years.¹⁴⁷ Too readily transnational, the new popular theologies seem to ‘embed the missionary rhetoric about Satan’ or the metaphor of the Kingdom, and so sell out to masters past and present by failing to engage the structural evils of poverty and self-colonization: ‘Pentecostals do not ignore but engage the primal contexts and renew the social system by critiquing and redefining possession.’¹⁴⁸ As Amos Kasibante notes of his personal experience of both the East Africa Revival and of neo-pentecostalism, ‘Their numerical success has been so great that there is talk in the Church of Uganda of a mass exodus of mainly young people . . . to the new churches.’ The charismatization of mainline churches also challenges their ecclesial form, threatening to unravel or erase their common heritage and identity leading to conflicts on the global stage,¹⁴⁹ all of which (from within the frame of geographically or creedally defined dissenting traditions which support formal theologizing) are considered ‘bad’ (or worse, ‘gauche’). It might be suggested, however, that the roots of such tensions relate to the knowledge economies and intellectual ‘strategies’ within which theologizing is done. Formal (reflexive) and grass-roots (practice-based) theological projects hold inverse relationships to the ‘late globalization’. As traditional dissenting theologies sought more ways in which to become embedded (successfully so, as the old imperial links weakened), their international presence frayed and was weakened by the decline of their European core, and the secularization of educational networks and funding agencies. Meanwhile, African appropriations of Pentecostalism ‘abstracted’ the terms by which traditional African religion was held and rode the transmutable language of experience into the

¹⁴⁵ See M. Dempster et al., eds., The Globalization of Pentecostalism: A Religion Made to Travel (Irvine, 1999). ¹⁴⁶ Claudia Währisch-Oblau, ‘Material Salvation: Healing, Deliverance, and “Breakthrough” in African Migrant Churches in Germany’, in Candy Gunther Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing (Oxford, 2011), pp. 61ff. ¹⁴⁷ Amos Kasibante, ‘Revival and Pentecostalism in My Life’, in Ward and Wild-Wood, The East African Revival, p. 55. ¹⁴⁸ Kalu, African Pentecostalism, p. 170. ¹⁴⁹ Jesse Zink, ‘ “Anglocostalism” in Nigeria: Neo-Pentecostalism and Obstacles to Anglican Unity’, Journal of Anglican Studies 10.2 (November 2012), pp. 231ff.

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diaspora and the emerging global society. When they got where they were going, their class relationships remained inverse, but their social functions were equally marginalized. A polite scholarly paper in the hallowed halls of the university or theological college on the hill (in Kasibante’s case, in halls at Yale, Birmingham, London, and Cardiff) was physically and ideologically separated from the ‘missionary bridgehead’ of the African healing centre in an American, German, Dutch, or British industrial suburb.¹⁵⁰ Neither, however, were gaining much traction in a Western public sphere defined by mediated neoliberal economics and political rhetoric (except, perhaps, when used against one another to enforce social norms and the secular reality through, for example, moral panics).¹⁵¹ The separation relativizes the frameworks (and utility) of critique: after all, what makes inculturation to traditional African, Latin American, or Asian cultures more ‘authentic’ than the inculturation to new global realities being undertaken in pentecostal or charismatic theologies? The critique of church-planting strategies in Britain as producing a ‘suburban sect’ misses the point (and furthers the elitist conception that suburbs are nonplaces).¹⁵² Indigenization strategies are as active in the changing West as they are in rural Ghana. The Bourdieuian critique of structuralist anthropology could also be applied here: do such attitudes to indigenizing/globalizing theologies not simply represent the ‘haunting’ of theology by precommitments to essentialism and/or nineteenth-century forms of scholasticism and ecclesial organization? The particular critiques of indigenized theologies need to be seen on a broader stage. By the end of the twentieth century ‘worship wars’ were the ecclesial equivalent of the broader ‘culture wars’ in framing national cultures of the global North. Not that there was nothing to complain about: the frictions and identity issues in, say, the Southern Baptist Convention, or the Presbyterian Church (USA), were real and often bitter. These debates, it is important to note, were about practice (architecture, iconography, dress, media, and technology, but most particularly about musical instrumental style and the content of lyrics),¹⁵³ the theological weight of which was measurable by the amount of energy expended debating the issues in every medium available.¹⁵⁴ In part, it was testimony to an evangelical pragmatism released from the need to defend itself against liberal theology within its own ranks,

¹⁵⁰ Währisch-Oblau, ‘Material Salvation’, pp. 62–3; Afe Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora (London, 2013). ¹⁵¹ Meyer, ‘Christianity in Africa’, p. 462. ¹⁵² Harriet Sherwood, ‘Top cleric says Church of England risks becoming a “suburban sect” ’, The Guardian 14 August 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/13/justin-welbychurch-of-england-suburban-sect. ¹⁵³ A. E. Nekola, ‘Between This World and the Next: The Musical “Worship Wars” and Evangelical Ideology in the United States, 1960–2005’, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2009, p. 2. ¹⁵⁴ M. A. Noll, American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction (Malden, 2001), p. 24.

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and the anti-Catholic baggage of the nineteenth century, but increasingly troubled externally by the osmotic effects of consumerism and the homogenization of theological identities in the service of modern plural societies. It was also a reordering of the understanding within each confessional setting of the understanding of ‘public worship’. What was theology in an age when the content of theologizing was increasingly mediated through popular song, YouTube videos, or distance education options streamed to people listening to lectures in their home studies somewhere else in the world? There is an argument to be made that just as Africans, Asians, and other citizens of the Majority World were bringing their theologies to live permanently in the First World, the key challenges facing Christian theology in the West also required a series of re-indigenizations. (After the great circulation of Majority World people in the armies of the World Wars, Docquier and Rapoport suggest that this was in the 1960s, after which the foreign-born proportion of the population of high-income countries tripled.)¹⁵⁵ In the century of the ‘homeless mind’, theology was a way of building a house for cosmological concepts.¹⁵⁶ The Youth Revivals of the 1960s (described so brilliantly by Larry Eskridge in his God’s Forever Family¹⁵⁷) were thus as much a form of theological indigenization to rapidly moving late modern society as the emergence of liberation theology in South America or black theology in South Africa. By extension, the teaching of theological nostrums by means of commercialized youth worship cultures (particularly Hillsong United, Jesus Culture, and the like), whether meditated upon via Spotify or bodily embraced in the heaving mass experience of the ‘No Other Name’ Hillsong conference (2014) in Madison Square Gardens, are a form of globalized and indigenized theologizing for dissenting digital natives. Central to each of these is the search for an answer to ‘What shall I do with Jesus?’, a question answered in a myriad of ways which both opened up and closed down possibilities for Majority World theologies encountering the West. The lack of definitional edges in the old liberal theologies, for instance, meant that it was now relatively easy for grounded theologies of practice to find a place alongside the reflexive thought of the traditional dissent. These churches (in the USA, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, northern Baptist; in Australia and Canada, the ‘united/ Uniting’ church constituencies) were used to defining themselves against the public ‘we the people’. Now, the redefinition of the plural public sphere in which they energetically participated (restructuring religion as a purely civil, largely individual, pursuit) created pressure on the theological academicians to move away from offensive claims about Jesus’ uniqueness. In some cases theologians moved towards a ‘Global Christ’; in ¹⁵⁵ Docquier and Rapoport, ‘Globalization, Brain Drain, and Development’, pp. 681–2. ¹⁵⁶ The term comes from P. L. Berger, B. Berger, and H. Kellner, The Homeless Mind; Modernization and Consciousness (New York, 1973). ¹⁵⁷ (New York and Oxford, 2013).

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others they followed the logic of globalization and strove towards an embracing universalism.¹⁵⁸ Thinkers in the Catholic tradition (such as Teilhard de Chardin) could retain an ecclesial vision, due to their assumption of a Church universal, and Rome’s liturgical and bureaucratic mechanisms for managing theological breadth. The logic of evolutionary theory for dissenting movements, however, brought some, such as Charles Birch and Lloyd Geering, to abandon the defined ekklesia for ecological metaphors. The search for a cosmological ‘theory of everything’ among physicists was being pursued theologically within the Church, in theologo-scientific discourse, and externally to the Church in the convergence of science upon the traditional claims of religion.¹⁵⁹ Alongside these, it was no longer incongruous to see a Cuban refugee Catholic nun finishing her PhD at Union Theological Seminary (founded by Presbyterians but officially non-denominational) and teaching at Drew University (Methodist). What Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s ‘mujerista’ theology offered was a connection to practice: protests against the nonordination of women in the Catholic Church, social action among the vast and increasingly definitional tide of Hispanic migration to the USA, a connection (amidst secularization) to one of the most energetic Christian constituencies in the world (Latin America): ‘What mujerista theology insists on saying is that theological work is done by community of struggle, not by individuals who are not intrinsic members of the community.’¹⁶⁰ As with Minjung theology, reflection was embedded in action by ‘theological technicians’ who were part of the community. In plural, individualist America, every theology was now hybridized and attached to the authenticating person, even to the body, of the speaker: Chicana feminist postmoderns worked alongside Japanese American, Indian ‘thali’, and black liberationist practitioners of ‘interstitial integrity’,¹⁶¹ defined by their plurality and the commonality of the hyphen, rather than projected group essences. The Old and New d/Dissent made room for them all. As Paul Freston has noted with regard to Protestant growth in Latin America, however, while the ‘preferential option for the poor’ defined the theology coming out of the traditional churches, the ‘preferential option of the poor’ was to begin with the ‘logic of practice’ underpinning ascetic, selftransformative charismatic spirituality.¹⁶² For large numbers of people, this meant a turn to the controlled ‘jazz improvisation’ spirituality of pentecostal ¹⁵⁸ Paul Dafydd Jones, ‘A Hopeful Universalism’, The Christian Century 129.13 (June 2012), p. 22. ¹⁵⁹ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, ‘The Phenomenon of Man’, in J. P. Demoulin, ed., Let Me Explain (London, 1970), pp. 45–6. ¹⁶⁰ Ada Maria Asisi-Diaz, ‘Mujeristas: A Name of Our Own!!’ Christian Century 24–31 May 1989, p. 560. ¹⁶¹ Abhi Janamanchi, ‘A Hyphen’s Progress: A Journey of Faith, Identity, & Belonging’, http:// www.unityunitarian.org/uploads/6/1/0/3/6103699/25oct2009.pdf, accessed 1/5/2015. ¹⁶² Paul Freston, ‘Evangelicalism & Globalization: General Observations & some Latin American Dimensions’, in M. Hutchinson and O. Kalu, eds., A Global Faith: Essays on Evangelicalism and Globalisation (Sydney, 1998).

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or charismatic Churches, matched with a political preference for the ‘performance of the Christian life’.¹⁶³ While, on the one hand, it has seen a good deal of conservative theology emerge from ministry training schools in Latin and North America and Africa, there are signs that pentecostal theology (aided by the emergence of dedicated institutions in both the First and Majority Worlds) is coming of age. In part this has been through breaking with the defensive paradigms contingent upon the fundamentalist/modernist debate, and recovering internal resources by which to take alternative pathways towards framing a global theology. Ebina Danjo would have considered it strange, for example, that a German theologian would have based his/her call to theology on ‘hearing God’s voice in a sugar cane field in Okinawa’.¹⁶⁴ Such is, however, the self-description of Wolfgang Vondey, a theologian writing out of the charismatic Regent University in Virginia Beach, USA. He would also have found it odd that the theology of an American-educated Chinese Malaysian would have commenced in the imagination rather than in reason, and found a place in an old fortress of fundamentalism (Fuller Theological Seminary). But so, too, it is with Amos Yong, Professor of Theology and Mission, whose book The Spirit Poured out on All Flesh has been hailed as the first systematic theology to step beyond the creedal emphases on the Father and the Son, and point towards a post-Christendom global theology based on the pneumatological imagination.¹⁶⁵ This is theology for the world citizen, re-authorizing (post-Hume and Descartes) the importance of spiritual experience as data, community practice (post-Marx, post-denominational) as conceptualization, and pneumatology (post-fundamentalism and post-foundationalism) as the lens through which to construct pragmatic soteriology in ‘the age of the Spirit’.¹⁶⁶ While challenged and (deliberatively) incomplete, it was a ‘straw in the wind’ for developments in nonconformist theology.

CONCLUSIO N The discussion, sparked to its fullest heat by Andrew Walls in his book The Missionary Movement in Christian History (1996), of the intrinsically boundary-crossing, indigenizing nature of Christianity has moved on. Confronted by the multicentricity of global Christianity, Walls and his Edinburgh ¹⁶³ David Smilde, ‘Contradiction without Paradox: Evangelical Political Culture in the 1998 Venezuelan Elections’, Latin American Politics and Society 46.1 (April 2004), p. 75. ¹⁶⁴ W. Vondey, ‘Author Archive’, http://renewaldynamics.com/author/wvondey/, accessed 1/5/2015. ¹⁶⁵ Amos Yong, The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global Theology (Grand Rapids, 2005), p. 10. ¹⁶⁶ Wolfgang Vondey, ‘Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global Theology: Implications of the Theology of Amos Yong’, Pneuma 28.2 (2006), p. 293.

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School performed an enormous service by relocating presentist theologies and missiologies into a far more nuanced, historical frame. The next question, then, is how one engages the truly global frame, when it becomes apparent that (as with Ebina Danjo and Kashiwagi Gien gazing across the Tsushima Straits towards Korea) the key pressures on indigenizing twentieth-century dissenting theologies come not so much from the connections between individuals, nor from national fields alone, but from the interaction between fields. Ghandi melting the colonial powers by appropriating Jesus in India; the Ghanaian Twelve Apostles Church taking Harrist theology beyond its enclosed origins; the institutional challenges of formal African theologies; the emergence of globalizing indigenizations in Western charismatic and pentecostal flows—all of these point to more complex realities in twentieth-century dissenting theologies than are answerable in the standard accounts now assuming the position of orthodoxy in global scholarship. As K. K. Yeo notes in Chapter 4 of this volume, people answered the question ‘What shall I do then with Jesus?’ in a myriad ways, as the Personality at the heart of European D/dissenting movements moved out into the world. For some, Jesus was a wise man, dressed in the robes of the Sanxing, or the Magi, or other cultural stereotypes which described wonder workers, sages, magicians, and the like. For others he was the suffering servant, born in a stable, attending them in their struggles against the rich and powerful, or leaving an empty Cross and grave before which all could bring their social, economic, and personal sins and have them forgiven. For yet others, he was an enlightened gent, opening the door to modernity with a tradition-stripping, reductionist rhetoric which questioned all and cut to the heart of things. As Bourdieu notes, what people then did with Jesus depended on whether the problems he solved were connected to local, international, or global fields, and whether their appropriation of the Son of God was typified by the production of practice-based or reflexive knowledge. Those movements which remained enclosed and so were time- or space-limited in their expansiveness (Harrist churches, for example, Banjalang pentecostalism, or Dalit conversionism) failed to develop transferrable/translatable symbolic vocabularies, and tended to be fixed to particular techniques, practices, or rituals. In the West the rise and fall of the theology underpinning Church Growth theory is an example, as is the rise and decline of many mass evangelistic methods. Each of these is an indigenization of Christian theology, but not all indigenizations are ‘productive’ in connecting to larger issues and transferring across multiple fields. Among the more reflexive, and so successful indigenized theologies (minjung, for example, or the emerging ‘urban theologies’ around the world), the key seems to be the method used to interrogate the relevant cultural situation, and the flexibility of the range of methods applied. To (D)issent has meant to be entrapped in the counter-definitions of a moment, a particular economy of ideas. The dissenting reflex, however, has meant that, after two millennia, Jesus remains a public figure.

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Adogame, A. and S. Shankar, eds., Religion on the Move!: New Dynamics of Religious Expansion in a Globalizing World (Leiden and Boston, 2012). Anderson, Allan, ‘Pandita Ramabai, the Mukti Revival and Global Pentecostalism’, Transformation 23.1 (January 2006), pp. 37–48. Anderson, Benedict, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London and New York, 1998). Brown, Nicholas and Imre Szeman, eds., Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture (Lanham, 2000). Bruner, Jason, ‘Keswick and the East African Revival: An Historiographical Reappraisal’, Religion Compass 5.9 (September 2011), pp. 477–89. Clarke, S., D. Manchala, and P. V. Peacock, eds., Dalit Theology in the Twenty-First Century: Discordant Voices, Discerning Pathways (New Delhi and Oxford, 2010). George, Timothy, ed., J. I. Packer and the Evangelical Future: The Impact of His Life and Thought (Grand Rapids, 2009). Ion, A. Hamish, The Cross in the Dark Valley: The Canadian Protestant Missionary Movement in the Japanese Empire, 1931–35 (Waterloo, 1999). Kalu, O. U., African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford, 2008). Lumsdaine, D. H., Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Asia (Oxford, 2009). Marks, S. and S. Trapido, eds., The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa (London, 1987). Martin, David, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford and Malden, 2002). Nekola, A. E., ‘Between This World and the Next: The Musical “Worship Wars” and Evangelical Ideology in the United States, 1960–2005’, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2009. Nirei, Yosuke, ‘Toward a Modern Belief: Modernist Protestantism and Problems of National Religion in Meiji Japan’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 34.1 (January 2007), pp. 151–75. Noll, M. A., American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction (Malden, 2001). Nthamburi, Zablon, ed., From Mission to Church: A Handbook of Christianity in East Africa (Nairobi, 1991). Oduro, Thomas A., ‘ “Arise, Walk through the Length and Breadth of the Land”: Missionary Concepts and Strategies of African Independent Churches’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 38.2 (April 2014), pp. 86–9. Ojo, Matthews A., The End-Time Army: Charismatic Movements in Nigeria (Trenton and Asmara, 2006). Park, Chung-Shin, Protestantism and Politics in Korea (Seattle, 2003). Peterson, Derek R., Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c.1935 to 1972 (Ann Arbor, 2013). Raj, S. J. and K. A. Jacobsen, eds., The South Asian Christian Diaspora: Invisible Diaspora in Europe and North America (Aldershot and Burlington, 2013). Ranger, Terence O., ed., Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa (New York, 2008). Smilde, David, ‘Contradiction without Paradox: Evangelical Political Culture in the 1998 Venezuelan Elections’, Latin American Politics and Society 46.1 (April 2004), pp. 75–102.

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Stanley, Brian, The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott (Downers Grove, 2013). Suarsana, Yan, ‘Inventing Pentecostalism: Pandita Ramabai and the Mukti Revival from a Postcolonial Perspective’, PentecoStudies 13.2 (2014), pp. 173–96. Tombs, David, Latin American Liberation Theology (Leiden and Boston, 2002). Ward, Kevin and Emma Wild-Wood, eds., The East African Revival: History and Legacies (Farnham and Burlington, 2012). Zink, Jesse, ‘ “Anglocostalism” in Nigeria: Neo-Pentecostalism and Obstacles to Anglican Unity’, Journal of Anglican Studies 10.2 (November 2012), pp. 231–50.

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9 Organizing for Ministry in the Anglophone World Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation Barry Ensign-George

INTRODUCTION: CREATIVITY AND CONTINUITY Throughout their history the Dissenting Protestant traditions have been characterized by protean organizational creativity and adaptability.¹ They have gathered congregations in spaces of all types and descriptions. They have organized for ministry in alliances, associations, councils, and above all in denominations. They have joined together in ministries directed both beyond themselves—in disaster relief, education, medical mission, and more— and within the life of their congregations through a dazzling array of organizations and institutions: publishing efforts, ministries formed to address congregational needs, organizations for social service and advocacy, schools and colleges, and more. This protean creativity and adaptability continued to be vividly real among the Dissenting traditions across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. This adaptability has also left these traditions open to malformation, as their members and institutions have been shaped by social, political, ethnic, and other contextual forces at odds with what they have considered to be ‘gospel ends’. At the same time, the Dissenting Protestant traditions continue to sustain a recognizable continuity across time by channelling this creative energy through their persistent use of a small set of basic organizational building blocks. These have been adapted and combined in familiar or surprising ways. Three such building blocks have been of decisive importance: congregation, ¹ John H. Y. Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity, 1662–2000’, in Robert Pope, ed., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (London, 2013), p. 3.

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certain trans-congregational forms of organization, and the ‘church’ (understood in a way that undergirds both congregational and trans-congregational forms of organizing for ministry). Primary and definitive among these building blocks is the congregation. Christians in the Dissenting traditions have organized themselves for worship and life together in congregations in a variety of patterns, ranging from informal and highly dependent on gifted individuals, to formal forms of organization and institutional structure that provide a collective authorization of worship and worship leadership whose locus is at least partially outside the congregation itself. These congregations and their members have further combined in trans-congregational forms of great variety. These trans-congregational organizations have required varying degrees of commitment, from temporary and passing commitment in order to address an immediate concern (e.g. response to a specific natural disaster or crisis), to more enduring commitments to organizations addressing needs and problems that require sustained effort (e.g. organizations such as World Vision, with its focus on improving the situation of children and their families worldwide). Such organizations have regularly been formed in response to particular contextual challenges, and opportunities for mission. The denomination is one of the most distinctive forms of D/dissenting trans-congregational organization. In denominations, Christians belonging to multiple congregations gather together to support one another in living out the Christian faith in a particular way. The development of trans-congregational organizations has in part been driven by a distinctive understanding of the catholicity and unity of the church,² and of the authority (and thus exercise of power) that most faithfully enables fuller embodiment of catholicity and unity so understood. This understanding of catholicity and unity generates an abiding acknowledgement (amongst many of the Dissenting traditions) that the church is larger than their particular congregation, or group of congregations. This acknowledgement locates congregations as embodiments of God’s universal purpose, and makes it possible for them to carry out ministry in cooperation with Christians in other congregations. This chapter will consider these three basic organizational building blocks and the creative ways in which they have been deployed. It will then explore

² It is not by accident that there is debate amongst those in the Dissenting Protestant traditions over whether and when to capitalize ‘church/Church’. ‘Church’ is used with an array of referents (a congregation, a building, a denomination, all Christians together, etc.). It is easy to slide between referents in unacknowledged ways. In this chapter I will use ‘church’ standing alone to refer to the encompassing reality of all Christians together. When I intend a different referent I will include an indication to that effect—e.g. house church, megachurch, or particular church. This understanding of ‘church’ obviously depends on the ecclesiological tradition in which one stands, but this is a normative understanding in the Reformed/Presbyterian traditions which make up a large part of Dissenting churches.

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denominations in particular, as the distinctively D/dissenting way of organizing for ministry in the anglophone world.

BASIC BUILDING BLOCKS

The Congregation The congregation is a primary and defining building block in the Dissenting Protestant traditions,³ a fundamental contributor to the rise of D/dissent in the anglophone world. The Dissenting Protestant traditions were birthed in disagreement and struggle over a variety of issues regarding congregations and how they are to be ordered toward faithful living. These issues brought points of conscience into conflict, together with disagreement over the proper interpretation of Scripture as it addresses (or does not) the matters in dispute. As has been explored in Volume 1 in this series, questions leading to separation from the magisterial traditions included, among others, who determines in what congregation a Christian is to worship and on what basis; how worship will be patterned; what vestments and other liturgical objects are to be used; what doctrine is to be taught; what relationships are (or are not) to be maintained with other congregations; how Christians are to be guided in living out the Christian faith, and by whom; and how judgements about faithfulness of teaching and living are to be made. Historically in the Dissenting Protestant traditions, trans-congregational forms of organization have arisen out of congregations joining together, with larger structures emerging from the combination of congregations.⁴ These interacted with the rise of the modern nation state: with the formation of the Canadian and Australian federal structures (the latter at the very beginning of the twentieth century), for instance, many churches chose to attempt to heal previous divisions so as to form ‘national’ denominations. Where—as was the case with some particular Baptist and Presbyterian congregations—the matters of conscience were not resolved, these independent congregations (such as the Presbyterian Church of Eastern Australia, or the continuing Congregational church movement in Canada and Australia) chose to continue a separate existence.

³ Significant research on congregations, focused on the United States, can be found in Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners (Berkeley, 2005); Mark Chaves, Congregations in America (Cambridge, 2004); James P. Wind and James W. Lewis, eds., American Congregations, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1994). ⁴ Such developments are reported in the history of Pentecostals in Australia in Shane Clifton, Pentecostal Churches in Transition: Analysing the Developing Ecclesiology of the Assemblies of God in Australia (Leiden, 2009), pp. 27–79.

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‘Dissent’ may be more or less intellectualized, after all, but its organizational forms usually have a close affinity with the grass roots of congregations. By way of contrast, established churches have been able to lean on the state structures alongside which they stand, and in which they have particular functions to carry out, in order to determine where congregations should be brought into being, and why. In these cases, the authority of the established church is interwoven with the authority of the state. That interweaving may mean that the state has authority to settle matters that would otherwise be regarded as belonging to the church alone, such as powers with regard to church leadership, among others.⁵ At the heart of the struggles that brought the D/dissenting traditions into existence and which continued to shape their organization through the twentieth century, therefore, was the question of authority, and the forms and exercises of power thus authorized. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the tensions released in the period 1893–1910 by local Holy Spirit revivals (Cherokee County, Mukti, Pyongyang, Melbourne, Azusa Street, among them),⁶ often emerging from implicit networks through spiritual outbreaks in local congregations. This re-emphasis on the Spirit was in part a response to issues of coercion, the use of institutional power, and the nature of real authority in existing denominational structures, structures that failed to adapt to the movement of the Holy Spirit fuelling these revivals.⁷ With the breakdown in relationships with plural Western states, previously established churches have had to learn lessons from their dissenting neighbours. It is remarkable that, for example, with the advent of the ‘Fresh Expressions’ movement in the Established Church of England, this Church has itself begun to gather congregations that are not based on parish boundaries, congregations whose relation to the parish system is a matter to be worked out. Congregations are the place in which the faith of individual Christians is most directly expressed and supported, where they are most immediately nurtured and sustained in living the faith. Regular worship is central to that nurturing and sustaining. Other elements of the Christian life both flow out from and flow back into regular gathered worship. Worship in D/dissenting traditions nurtures and sustains the work of education in the faith, generating

⁵ See Kenneth A. Locke, The Church in Anglican Theology: A Historical, Theological and Ecumenical Exploration (Burlington, 2009) pp. 101–27. For a sampling of the discussion within the Church of England on this situation, see Archbishop’s Council on Mission and Public Affairs, Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions in a Changing Context, 2nd edn (New York, 2010); David Goodhew, Andrew Roberts, and Michael Volland, Fresh!: An Introduction to Fresh Expressions of Church and Pioneer Ministry (London, 2012); and Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank, For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions (London, 2010). ⁶ David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford, 2002), pp. 26–32. ⁷ Nicholas M. Healy probes these issues in, ‘ “By the Working of the Holy Spirit”: The Crisis of Authority in the Christian Churches’, Anglican Theological Review 88.1 (Winter 2006), pp. 5–24.

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questions about whom and how Christians are to worship, feeding a desire better to know the one who is worshipped. As Lee, Poloma, and Post have pointed out, there is a direct connection between the expression of ‘love’ and the contextual impact of churches.⁸ Worship nurtures and sustains service in and to the wider world in forms of care, aid, evangelism, and advocacy: it fans the love of God and neighbour that seeks wholeness in the world, and it strengthens and encourages Christians as they respond to the challenges they face in the world. Worship is the place where concerns and longings for one’s family, one’s community, one’s nation, and the wider world can find collective expression in a community that bears and honours (and sometimes challenges) those concerns. Further, the congregation is the place where Christians engage most immediately with the church, the wider communion with whom one is joined in following Jesus Christ. It is in the life of congregations that the reality of other believers most immediately impinges, the place where Christians shape a life together which is faithful to Jesus Christ, where they mutually resolve those matters enabling them to live together, and to make a life in the broader community. As Leege and Kellstedt demonstrate, this is an observable fact regardless of religious tradition: while more intensive involvement in church has no impact on the political identity of a person, for example, it does strongly influence traits such as social traditionalism, moralism, and prolife positions ‘for Protestants and Roman Catholics alike’.⁹ Congregations are the place where issues of authority and the power it authorizes (primary concerns of every organization) come most clearly into the open. It is there that authority and power most immediately impinge on the lives of Christians. What form(s) of worship will best provide the nurture and sustenance that Christians need—and who will decide among the forms that are possible? Who will provide leadership in worship, and under what circumstances? What theological affirmations will undergird the expressions of praise and lament, of joy in and longing for the presence of God that arise in living the Christian faith—and who will make those decisions? What ordering of Christian life together best directs and sustains Christians as they go forth from worship to embody God’s love for the world, and then encourages and empowers them as they re-gather for worship—and who decides among the orders that are possible? Where authority is exercised, there will be those who accede, or submit to that authority. The Dissenting traditions have shared a rejection of use of the power and authority of the state in making or enforcing decisions about the

⁸ Matthew T. Lee, Margaret M. Poloma, and Stephen G. Post, The Heart of Religion: Spiritual Empowerment, Benevolence, and the Experience of God’s Love (New York, 2013), p. 13. ⁹ Quoted in Lucas Swaine, The Liberal Conscience: Politics and Principle in a World of Religious Pluralism (New York, 2006), p. 141.

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shape of Christian life together.¹⁰ The power of the state is not to be applied in working out the mutual submission of Christians one to another—whether state power is applied directly in openly coercive ways, or indirectly through official state preference that grants advantages to one group of Christians while not offering those preferences to other Christian groups.¹¹ Rather, such decisions are to be made by individuals mutually committed to a particular realization of life together. This insistence on freedom from state coercion or preference does not preclude the robust and often troubling embrace of particular political ideologies. Such embrace, and its troubling nature, has been apparent in the United States in the prominence of the ‘Religious Right’, as well as in its often overshadowed progressive analogue, the ‘Religious Left’. Congregations and denominations in the D/dissenting traditions have often aligned themselves to one or another end of this discursive spectrum.¹² Personal choice, then, has been decisive in shaping how the Dissenting Protestant traditions organize the exercise of authority and submission. In the Dissenting traditions authority and the exercise of power are both based on and bound by the consent of the members of congregations and transcongregational forms, by their freedom to submit or not submit to that authority and what exercise of power over them is so authorized. As John Bradbury notes with regard to the formation of the United Reformed Church in Britain (1972), the secularization of the idea of conscience (previously a cause for schism and the disruption of churches from the Reformation forward) over the previous century was key to the development of ecumenism. Members in these Dissenting movements (as the constitutive Presbyterian and Congregational congregations were in England and Wales) are free to leave,

¹⁰ The rejection of use of the coercive power of the state in settling and enforcing decisions about the shape of Christian life together has not, historically, been uniform. At the Westminster Assembly in the 1640s the Presbyterian party was glad to apply the coercive power of the state— but only if that power were applied in order to bring conformity to an established church ordered in the Presbyterian way. They were opposed in this by the ‘Independents’, who were Congregationalist. When it became clear (both in Great Britain and in North America) that Presbyterianism would not be established, Presbyterians joined in rejecting use of the coercive power of the state. ¹¹ The relationship of the state and its powers to the church does not, of course, affect only Christian groups. The Dissenting traditions have often recognized that their rejection of the application of state power to religious belonging can and should extend to non-Christian religious groups as well. ¹² Amy Plantinga Pauw offers incisive reflections on positive and negative aspects of the adaptation of denominations to the modern nation state and its politics. Plantinga Pauw, ‘Presbyterianism and Denomination’, in Paul M. Collins and Barry Ensign-George, eds., Denomination: Assessing an Ecclesiological Category, Ecclesiological Investigations, vol. 11 (London, 2011), pp. 133–46, esp. pp. 139–42. David Maxwell has explored shifting relations between churches (including churches in the Dissenting traditions) and the state in Africa in ‘Post-Colonial Christianity in Africa’, in Hugh McLeod, ed., The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 9, World Christianities c.1914–c.2000 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 401–21.

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but in leaving their congregation did not (necessarily) have to leave the church altogether.¹³ Congregations and trans-congregational structures in the Dissenting traditions are dependent on working with the willing consent of their members. Congregations of all Christian traditions have thus had to deal with the challenge of members’ willingness or unwillingness to submit to that tradition’s way of ordering authority and the exercise of power. What makes these challenges distinctive in the D/dissenting traditions is the heightened role of voluntary association. For the Dissenting traditions, the emergence of voluntary association in religious matters, publicly acknowledged and written into law, plays a vital role. This has required congregations in the Dissenting traditions to cultivate attentiveness to the outlook and views of their members and what the congregation(s) collectively will bear. The shift in Methodist approaches—from its early nineteenth-century highly disciplined assertion that the Connexion was the voice of God—is indicative of the growing importance of individual conscience. Facing significant gaps in the ranks of volunteer circuit preachers and worship leaders, for instance, the British Methodist Conference in 2016 voted on the motion: To this end, the Conference strongly encourages the Methodist people to hear the voice of God, specifically to listen for a call to preach or lead worship in the Methodist Church and to respond in faith.¹⁴

How ‘individual conscience’ (which assumes formation in a congregational culture) interacts with connexional polity is thus essential to understanding the organizational forms of D/dissenting churches. Three major solutions have been: Congregational polities (which are built around decision-making by the faithful at the congregational level), the Presbyterian form (which is conciliar, through sessions, Presbyteries, and Synods/Assemblies) and, as previously mentioned, Methodism (which is conciliar through mandatory Connexional discipline). As will be discussed shortly, managing the tensions arising between congregational spirituality and the form of polity adopted for ‘the denomination’ would become a key issue in national ecumenical unions.¹⁵ In ‘Modernity’, as described by Charles Taylor, the role of choice, or voluntary association, is easily and often misunderstood.¹⁶ It can (for cultural—or,

¹³ John P. Bradbury, ‘Non-Conformist Conscience? Individual Conscience and the Authority of the Church from John Calvin to the Present’, Ecclesiology 10 (2014), pp. 51–2. ¹⁴ The Methodist Conference, 2016, Notice of Motion 2016/209: Listening for the Voice of God, http://www.methodist.org.uk/media/2290029/noms_yellow_2016_209.pdf, accessed 9/9/ 2016. ¹⁵ viz. Christopher C. Walker, Seeking Relevant Churches for the 21st Century (Melbourne, 1997). ¹⁶ James L. Heft, ed., A Catholic Modernity? Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture (New York, 1999), p. 69.

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as Colin Bird notes, political—reasons)¹⁷ move toward an exaggerated individualism—leading to the accusation that the embrace of voluntary association in free church ecclesiologies inevitably leads to atomization, in which every Christian is their own ‘church’. The Dissenting traditions, by way of contrast, have claimed that being a follower of Jesus Christ makes one part of the church. There is no choice in this. There is choice to be exercised, however, in finding the particular form that one’s participation in the church will take. The importance of voluntary association in the (D)issenting traditions has not, however, resulted in large numbers of Christians living the faith in isolation from one another. Congregating is basic to the Dissenting traditions and the forms of Christian life they have generated. These distinctive characteristics of congregations in the Dissenting traditions have created an environment that enables the creativity and continuity distinctive to the organizational life of the Dissenting Protestant traditions. Congregations form where groups of Christians commit together to live the Christian faith in a particular way, inviting others to join them on that way.

Varied Forms of Congregation Voluntary association and the need to address it through persuasion has fuelled creativity and adaptability among the Dissenting traditions—creativity in polity, in places used for worship, in organizing principles for congregations, in forms of organization providing support to the internally and externally directed ministries of congregations. Polity is basic to the organization of congregations, ordering the authorization of worship and worship leadership within the life of the congregation. Ecclesial polity in the (d)issenting traditions runs along multiple spectrums. Authority for leadership can range from the gifted individual exercising C/charismatic¹⁸ leadership, to authority granted by organizational structures within (as in a leadership council or governing board) or beyond the congregation (as in denominations that have structures beyond the congregation itself making decisions about suitability for ordination). Responsibility for authorizing leadership can be held by individuals (e.g. bishops), at one extreme of the continuum, to small groups (such as sessions or consistories), to the congregation as a whole making decisions by assembling for votes, to councils (presbyteries or conferences) at the other extreme. The ecclesial polity may appear to be a list of mere organizational regulations, but polity is theologically laden, being shaped by basic theological commitments, even when these are not made explicit. Thus vesting authority in a gifted individual, ¹⁷ Colin Bird, The Myth of Liberal Individualism (Cambridge, 1999). ¹⁸ ‘Charismatic’ being used here in a broader sense than ‘Pentecostal’.

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relying on that person to discern God’s leading of the congregation, embodies different theological commitments than an ecclesial polity that places congregational leaders under the authority of a group. A wide range of polities have arisen among the Dissenting traditions, ordering authority in a variety of ways: some are congregational, vesting authority in decisions made by congregations themselves (e.g. Congregationalist and Baptist), including those who refuse to have designated clergy (Quakers and Plymouth Brethren). Some vest authority in councils gathered in congregations and regionally (Reformed and Presbyterian); others in an episcopal structure (Methodist, African American Methodist, and some Pentecostal).¹⁹ None of these are a ‘pure’ form. At various places and times, Presbyterians have solved the problem of authority (and so efficiency), for example, by electing weak Moderators but also organizing tacitly around exceptionally influential individuals. The role of key educators has been core at some times in Presbyterian polity (one thinks here of Thomas Chalmers in the nineteenth century, and Samuel Angus in the twentieth), and key administrators (such as R. G. ‘King Ronald’ McIntyre in the Presbyterian Church of New South Wales between 1918 and 1945) at others.²⁰ Often, such mixed arrangements are made in order to solve problems otherwise not soluble under the standard arrangements. Congregations gather in a dazzling range of places and circumstances. Common throughout the use of these varied places is the gathering of a group of people for shared worship. This makes it possible for congregations to gather with a wide range of numbers of people, from ‘two or three gathered’ in the name of Jesus to (as with Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas) tens of thousands gathered in buildings designed as venues for sporting events.²¹ Congregations in the dissenting traditions have been and remain committed to the use of dedicated church buildings, from spaces dedicated specifically to worship (a sanctuary or chapel), to multi-use spaces. Congregations will sometimes share their worship (and other) space with another congregation, or congregations, with the latter ‘nesting’ in space provided by a host congregation. Congregations can meet in multiple places, with African congregations including multiple ‘prayer stations’ existing in connection with a centralized place of worship, or American congregations experimenting with ‘multi-site’

¹⁹ Polities in the church, including those found in the Dissenting traditions, are explored in Edward LeRoy Long, Jr, Patterns of Polity: Varieties of Church Governance (Cleveland, 2001). ²⁰ See Susan Emilsen, A Whiff of Heresy: Samuel Angus and the Presbyterian Church in New South Wales (Kensington, 1991). ²¹ Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, led by Pastor Joel Osteen, gathers for worship in what was formerly the Compaq Center, the home of the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association. See Ed Stetzer, ‘Trends in Church Architecture, Part 2: Larger churches building smaller buildings with community areas are a growing trend’, CT Exchange 19 July 2016, http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2016/july/trends-in-church-architecture-part-2. html, accessed 10/9/2016.

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worship, in which a sermon from a central location might be live-streamed to other worship sites.²² At the same time the Dissenting traditions are marked by great flexibility and adaptability in their use of spaces for congregational worship. Congregations gather in storefronts, in buildings repurposed from other uses, in spaces designed and still used for other purposes (such as coffee houses and pubs). Many congregations begin by meeting in homes, and some continue the practice of meeting as house churches.²³ In England, this may be a missional device to distinguish the congregation from the dominant (Established) form or tradition, while in China it is the de facto form of a grass-roots movement spreading beneath the controls of an oppressive super-state. The challenges of the time find congregations forming in other unusual settings: such as a congregation in North Carolina that meets in the context of a farm, practising a particular kind of relationship to land and to food,²⁴ or the ‘transformance art’ which shapes the meetings of ikon churches in Belfast and New York.²⁵ Congregations in the Dissenting traditions gather on a variety of organizing principles. Historically, many have gathered on the basis of geography: when transportation is difficult and people are limited in how far they can travel, a de facto analogue to the parish system tends to be operative. But other organizing principles have supplemented geographical proximity, a trend hyper-stimulated by the rise of new technologies (such as the ‘Convention’ form central to the Keswick movement at the beginning of the twentieth century and Hillsong Conference at its end). Different understandings of how faithfully to live the Christian faith have been interwoven with doctrinal disagreements, yielding differing ways of organizing congregations and differing patterns of authorizing worship and worship leadership. Thus a Methodist and a Pentecostal congregation can have adjacent buildings and draw their members from the same locale, and yet remain committed to different ways of living out the faith.²⁶

²² For multi-site congregations, see Ed Stetzer, ‘Finding the Right Church Planting Model Part 6: The Multi-Site/Satellite Model’, http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2015/august/ finding-right-church-planting-model-part-6-multi-site-satel.html, accessed 24/1/2017. ²³ A compact account of house churches and the organizational challenges created by growth among such congregations in Britain can be found in Doreen Rosman, The Evolution of the English Churches 1500–2000 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 343–8. ²⁴ ‘Farm Church’, a ‘new worshipping community’ in the Presbyterian Church (USA). ²⁵ See https://ikonbelfast.wordpress.com, accessed 24/1/2017. ²⁶ Some will label such situations schismatic, a violation of the unity of the church. But it is not apparent why the mere fact of their existence alongside one another should be labelled ‘schism’. It is perfectly possible for communities of different Roman Catholic religious orders to exist in adjacent buildings. Anglican ‘fresh expressions’ congregations exist alongside and independently of parish congregations. The charge of schism rests not on their existing on opposite corners of the same intersection, but on other theological claims about the specific nature of the unity to which Christ calls Christians, and about the specific structures necessitated

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The rise of the automobile and other forms of mass transportation across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century has expanded the geographical range across which Christians can gather. Congregations increasingly organized themselves through the twentieth century on adaptive multicultural and multi-ethnic lines, or, inversely, used their newfound freedom to travel as a way of re-emphasizing the ‘homogenous unit principle’. This latter organizes for people of a specific culture, usually also for a specific language other than English. The growing ease of movement has enabled emigration across national boundaries, and thus congregations gather for immigrants from specific foreign countries, whose members share common cultures and languages of origin.²⁷ Some congregations organize themselves within a specific subculture, or for the purpose of outreach to a particular group of people²⁸—and so, churches exist for surfers, or workers in the restaurant industry.²⁹ In the late twentieth century, megachurches (a new and distinctive form of congregation) became a prominent feature of congregation in the Dissenting traditions. Following in the wake of megachurches, multi-site congregations have become an additional significant form of congregation for the D/dissenting traditions. In part, this is due to the ‘pre-preparation’ of congregations which draw their members from an entertainment and technologically mediated society, in part as a solution to high ‘performance’ expectations in a relatively shallow skill pool. Both forms have quasi-denominational elements, and thus will be considered shortly, before the discussion turns to trans-congregational forms of organization as a second building block of organization for ministry in the Dissenting traditions. Congregations in the Dissenting traditions organize ministry focused internally to the life of the congregation, and externally in outreach beyond

by that particular form of unity. These matters are explored further in subsequent sections of this chapter in considering trans-congregational organizing, especially denomination. ²⁷ Immigration has also been deeply affected by law and politics. In the case of the United States immigration took decisively new forms following the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965. ²⁸ The idea of organizing to connect with those in a specific subgroup was articulated in an influential way by Donald McGavran of Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California. McGavran identified the ‘Homogeneous Unit Principle’. This principle holds that outreach to those not active in the church should do so by gathering groups on the basis of ‘racial, linguistic, or class’ similarities. Donald McGavran, Understanding Church Growth, 3rd edn (Grand Rapids, 1990), esp. pp. 163–78. The quoted phrase is on p. 163. This principle has generated discussion about its faithfulness. See e.g. the assessment by the Lausanne movement (https://www.lausanne.org/ content/lop/lop-1), and the comments by Graham Cray of the Fresh Expressions initiative in the Church of England (https://freshexpressions.org.uk/story-archive/we-are-all-for-the-parishby-graham-cray/ at (4) “A ‘flight to segregation’ ”). ²⁹ Examples of congregations shaped by outreach to surfers include Tubestation at Polzeath in England (a Fresh Expressions of the Methodist Church) and Surfers Church in Wahiawa, Hawaii. Outreach to workers in restaurants has shaped the Big Table initiative in Spokane, Washington.

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the membership of the congregation (outreach that has sometimes become the site of contestation by those who have sought to suppress Christian social influence). Internally focused ministries have sought to strengthen members’ knowledge of the faith, and to deepen and sustain members’ practice of the faith. Internally focused ministries include service to congregational members in need (often exercised through an ecclesial office of deacon or equivalent, but shared by the congregation more broadly). Sunday school and youth ministry are internally focused ministries, providing education and support in both knowledge and the practices necessary to sustain the Christian life.³⁰ Both, however, attach to external realities, the value of which shifts across time as ‘childhood’ and/or ‘youth’ is restructured by social and cultural forces. As they have developed, therefore, both Sunday school and youth ministry have extended out beyond the life of the congregation. The collapse of the former (in the early 1960s) and the expansion of the latter have been seen by scholars such as Callum Brown as key indicators of the health of a denomination.³¹ Major efforts have been invested at the trans-congregational level in organizing the provision of resources and training to church leaders and members who plan, carry out, and support ministries in Sunday school and youth ministry. Secondly, both Sunday schools and youth ministries have been means of outreach beyond the congregation.³² Small group ministries have become a significant force within the Dissenting traditions, because they also strengthen members’ knowledge and practice of the faith, and inculcate them into a congregation’s culture.³³ Congregations and denominations have organized ministries to young adults generally, and to university and college students specifically, as extensions of work done in Sunday school and youth ministry. The former was particularly common in the 1950s and 1960s among the post-war wave of American missionaries, who saw Sunday schools as a

³⁰ The pre-twentieth-century history shaping the nature of Sunday schools is explored in Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790–1880 (New Haven, 1988). More recent history, specifically for Britain, can be found in Stephen Orchard and John H. Y. Briggs, eds., The Sunday School Movement: Studies in the Growth and Decline of Sunday Schools (Milton Keynes, 2007), and for other regions in Richard R. Osmer and Friedrich Schweitzer, Religious Education between Modernization and Globalization: New Perspectives on the United States and Germany (Grand Rapids, 2003). For youth ministry, see, for example, the British publication Premier Youthwork (https://www.premieryouthandchildrens.work/). ³¹ Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London and New York, 2001), pp. 6–7. ³² Doreen Rosman has noted the important civic function held by Sunday schools in the early parts of the twentieth century, a function now lost in what Rosman calls ‘the demise of the Sunday School’: Doreen Rosman, ‘Sunday Schools and Social Change in the Twentieth Century’, in Orchard and Briggs, eds., The Sunday School Movement, pp. 149–60. ³³ For example, Seventh Day Adventists in England encourage small group ministry among the members (https://personalministries-adventistchurch-org-uk.adventist.eu/small-groups). See Robert Wuthnow, Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America’s New Quest for Community (New York, 1994).

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major church planting mechanism. (The Assemblies of God, in particular, built a presence in European countries such as Italy by the mass circulation of Sunday school resources in the hands of missionaries such as Josephine Furnari.)³⁴ The mass youth movement form has been a constant, from at least the formation of the Student Volunteer Movement through to the current events hosted by Passion and Hillsong United. Congregations also organize for ministry focused externally in a variety of forms, often doing so trans-congregationally. This is particularly the case where government services are relatively unfocused or absent. Congregations engage in ministries in their local communities, providing services and care. They establish food pantries and provide clothing for those in need. They establish or host day care centres for children. Congregations support other groups providing care through use of church buildings and facilities, and combine in local associations and councils in order to amalgamate resources and increase impact. Brentwood, a multi-centre Baptist Church in Tennessee, for example, connects the fact that it is ‘blessed through prayer, sacrificial giving and diligent effort to occupy . . . facilities’ to its ability to ‘continually focus on our mission. . . . Connecting people to Jesus Christ through relationships, discipleship and worship’.³⁵ Likewise, when the Indonesian government refused clemency in the Bali Nine drug smuggling case and executed two young Australians, the memorial services were held in the only spaces large enough to cope with the public outpouring of grief, Hillsong and Dayspring Churches in Sydney’s north-west.³⁶ Congregations are a ministry of presence to often under-equipped local areas. Aid to those in need takes other forms as well: congregations contribute to the work of trans-congregational or parachurch groups that do aid work beyond the local context. In addition, as Mark Hutchinson notes in Chapter 14 in this volume, some congregations combine internal education with direct provision of aid through short-term visits (‘mission trips’) to distant places where aid is needed. A particularly dominant expression of this type of organization has, since the end of the eighteenth century, been for foreign mission. Congregations support both individual mission personnel (missionaries) and the organizations that provide infrastructure and support to that personnel. Sometimes the support work is done through denominational structures, sometimes through parachurch ministries established for that purpose.³⁷ Here again, the increased ³⁴ Josephine Furnari (1916–1988), Deceased Ministers File 71/3/2, Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, Springfield, USA. ³⁵ BBC, ‘Facilities Use’, http://brentwoodbaptist.com/about/facilities-use/#, accessed 11/9/2016. ³⁶ ‘Andrew Chan funeral: Last letters read at Hillsong ceremony’, News.com.au, 8 May 2015, http://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/andrew-chan-funeral-last-letters-read-at-hillsongceremony/news-story/865265f443c3c864caacc6942b25c59d, accessed 11/9/2016. ³⁷ Robert Wuthnow, Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches (Berkeley, 2010).

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freedom of travel and movement, combined particularly with the growth in means of communication, has increased the ability of congregations to send individual members, or small groups, to participate in foreign mission work directly. In the ten years from 1992, Margaret Lyman estimated that the ‘shortterm mission phenomenon’ grew ‘from approximately 250,000 to one million per year’.³⁸ The rise of such short-term mission has been a challenge to older organizational structures that had developed to support professional foreign mission personnel: congregations involved in such short-term visits need different forms of support than those needed for longer-term mission placement. In addition, short-term mission visits compete locally for funding with long-cycle foreign mission efforts through relatively impersonal and distant agencies. Mission organizations have adapted by learning to ‘crowdsource’ missions, making use of new social media. Organizations such as Operational Mobilization, indeed, arose on the energies released by the restructuring of ‘youth’ in the post-Second World War period, with global effects. As its founder, George Verwer, noted: ‘Befriend people from other cultures. Go on a short-term mission trip. And finally, be ready for the next step—anywhere, anytime—as the Holy Spirit leads.’³⁹

Malformation and Mixed Kinds of Congregation Before turning to the next organizational building block, it is important to note that congregations in the Dissenting Protestant traditions have also organized in ways more aligned to ruling social norms than to the Christian faith. Among the most deeply engrained and damaging of these has been a propensity to organize in ways that embody and institutionalize racism. In the United States of America, in particular, the long history of racism has led to white churches either marginalizing black fellow Christians, or excluding them altogether.⁴⁰ In some cases black Christians have used the ability to form congregations (and denominations) to create spaces in which they can live faithful Christian lives in resistance to racist structures. The rise of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the nineteenth century and the Church of God in Christ in the twentieth are examples of this. Congregations have been formed in ways that embody other societal divisions as well—for ³⁸ J. M. Lyman, ‘Examining Short-Term Mission from a Globalization Perspective: Factors in the Emergence of Today’s Mission Boom and Validity, Issues for a Global Church’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Fuller Theological Seminary, 2004, p. 9. ³⁹ John S. Oldfield, Gut-Level Godliness: Authentic Shepherding in a Superficial Age (Woodinville, 2012), pp. 177–8. ⁴⁰ Eric Tranby and Douglas Hartmann, ‘Critical Whiteness Theories and the Evangelical “Race Problem”: Extending Emerson and Smith’s “Divided by Faith” ’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47.3 (September 2008), pp. 341–59.

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example economic class, or common political conviction (of the left or the right). The freedom to form congregations has also provided opportunity for new congregations to be formed because of disagreement about matters that on closer examination seem minor (e.g. decoration of church facilities, personality conflicts within a congregation, like or dislike of the pastor, and much else). The division of Presbyterian churches over the use of organs or other instruments in worship, or over ministerial robes, is only one example of this. On the other hand, the large historic divisions over theology and relationships to the state have shaped (and in some parts of the world continues to shape) nations. As noted more extensively elsewhere in this volume, megachurches represent a significant development in Christianity—they arose particularly in the Dissenting Protestant traditions as they continued to develop their basic commitments to congregation and community. The scale of resources available in megachurches means that they are able to operate in quasidenominational ways. The Willow Creek Association, for example, has since 1992 been the mechanism for the global spread of resourcing, training, and leadership formation from Bill Hybels’ network of churches centred in the northern suburbs of Chicago. As with the other 1,600 megachurches in North America, Willow Creek supports an extensive staff of people whose work is focused in specialized ways—on ministry among particular groups within the congregation and beyond, on ministry in social service and evangelistic efforts, on worship and worship leadership (be the subject preaching or music). This quasi-denominational status means that megachurches have the ability to be ‘non-denominational’ (to have no ecclesial commitment to a particular denomination): they are large enough that they are able to provide for themselves services and forms of ministry that smaller congregations must band together to provide.⁴¹ There are also megachurches that are members of a denomination. The quasi-denominational status of megachurches generates sometimes strained relationships with their denominations and other congregations within that denomination. The long-term viability of megachurches, particularly in the United States, remains an open question: megachurch scale may be something less valued by rising generations (though frequent predictions of the imminent collapse of this form of congregation have been belied by the ongoing presence of megachurches, and the rise of new congregations to megachurch size).⁴² There are ⁴¹ For an exploration of these tensions, see Scott Thumma and Adair Lummis, ‘Growing Up and Leaving Home: Megachurches That Depart Denominations’ (available on the website of the Hartford Institute of Religion Research, http://www.hartfordinstitute.org/rra.html). ⁴² For this last, see the Hartford Institute’s 2015 report on megachurches: ‘Recent Shifts in America’s Largest Protestant Churches: Megachurch 2015 Report’, at http://www.hartfordinstitute. org/megachurch/2015_Megachurches_Report.pdf.

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two obvious reasons for their durability: their adaptability, and the ‘push’ factors driving their rise. Many megachurches work on cell-group or local gathering forms, in order to provide options in the scale of meetings according to the attendees’ preference. Moreover, often ignored is the fact that social and economic conditions often drive the emergence of megachurches, as either replacement communities (in alienating or underserviced exurbs) or as alternative economic forms (with the absence of state support or in poverty-stricken areas). When large enough, they can even create their own cultures, and so resist those broader trends which provoke scholars to predict their imminent demise. Finally, a relatively recent phenomenon is the rise of ‘multi-site’ congregations, more evidence of the organizational creativity and adaptability of the Dissenting traditions. Some congregations establish multiple locations in which they offer worship services the same as or very similar to those offered in the original or ‘home’ location of the congregation. In many cases the sermon that is given in person in the home location will be broadcast ‘live’ in the other locations. Multi-site locations can provide a more intimate setting for worship than would be the case if worship were concentrated in a relatively few services in a single location. Such settings can facilitate personal connection in ways that are difficult to achieve when worshipping in an arena. Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City has noted that Redeemer has established multiple sites precisely to enable personal connection among people in a particular local community: ‘ . . . we sent our services out into different locations so that people could worship closer to where they lived. People can become more deeply involved in the community and can more easily bring friends if they attend services in their neighborhood.’ Indeed, Keller says that the move to multiple sites is ‘ . . . an “anti-mega-church” move, since huge churches create a large body of commuters who travel long distances to attend church. We wanted to resist this tendency and root people more in their locales.’⁴³ As with megachurches, there are questions about what will develop as multi-site congregations continue to expand. It is noteworthy that the multi-site form moves these large congregations even further towards quasi-denominational status, and will continue to do so particularly if the various sites of a multisite congregation begin to take on unique congregational identities. As may be seen with regard, for example, to the Hillsong Network, essentially such churches can grow to the extent that they either leave, swallow, or replace their parent denominations.

⁴³ Tim Keller, ‘The “Multi-Site” Model – Thoughts’, 12 January 2010, https://www. redeemercitytocity.com/blog/2010/1/12/the-multi-site-model-thoughts.

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TRANS-CONGREGATIONAL ORGANIZATION Trans-congregational organizing is a second primary and defining building block in the Dissenting Protestant traditions. Congregations in the Dissenting traditions have been gathering, sustaining, and shaping trans-congregational organizational structures since the earliest days of the traditions. Those who became D/dissenting leaders emerged from a clearly national Church. They knew that ‘church’ included more than English (and Welsh, and Scottish) Christians. Something more than a matter of empirical fact (‘there are Christians and congregations other than the one in which I worship’) was at work in this knowledge. Theological convictions were and are at work as well: God has sent Christians into all the world to call all people, in every place, to union with and life in Jesus Christ (Matt. 28:16–20; Acts 1–2). They affirmed that life in Jesus Christ connects a Christian to all other Christians in a unique and powerful way that cannot be denied with integrity. Faith in Jesus Christ is, by definition for these traditions, a shared condition.⁴⁴

Basic Characteristics Trans-congregational organizations in the Dissenting traditions have particular distinctive characteristics. First, they are secondary to congregations. Trans-congregational organizations generally exist in support of the regular gathered worship of congregations, and of the life of faith that flows out from and then returns to the gathered worship of the congregation. Worship is primary, and trans-congregational organizations are not worshipping communities in the primary sense that is true of congregations. Examples include those parachurch ministries (such as InterVarsity or the Student Christian Movement) the operations of which have been defined by the need to avoid transgressing on the ‘rights’ of churches and local congregations.⁴⁵ Secondly, trans-congregational organizations are built on voluntary commitment to the organization, which both requires and inspires creativity and adaptability in order to build organizations that will gain support and be effective in carrying out their purposes. Trans-congregational organizations differ from congregations in that they can function well with lower levels of organizational authorization and power. Indeed, trans-congregational organizations could be plotted on a continuum based on their proximity to the worship of the congregation and to the authority and power exercised there. ⁴⁴ ‘Virtually nothing they [congregations] do is possible without the support of outside organizations’: Ammerman, Pillars of Faith, p. 206. ⁴⁵ Keith Hunt and Gladys Hunt, For Christ and the University: The Story of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of the USA—1940–1990 (Downers Grove, 1991), p. 296.

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At one end of this spectrum are denominations that have varying degrees of authority to exercise the power of oversight in the lives of congregations that belong to the denomination; at the other end of the spectrum are trans-congregational organizations that have no authority or power in the congregations that they serve, such as publishers of resources, or service organizations that a congregation may support as part of its ministry. Viewed from another angle, this spectrum of authority and power is also a spectrum of levels of commitment that are required to be part of the organization. Some denominations in the Dissenting traditions require high levels of commitment; and, again, there are many trans-congregational organizations which require only very low levels of commitment (e.g. purchasing a publisher’s resources, or a financial contribution to a parachurch service organization do not require any further purchase, donation, or involvement). The widely varying levels of commitment give both congregations and trans-congregational organizations room for creativity and adaptability: people can join together for a specific purpose without having to decide whom to authorize for worship leadership, or how to exercise ecclesiastical discipline. Thirdly, trans-congregational organizations are formed for a variety of reasons, in pursuit of widely varied ends.⁴⁶ Denominations form in order to enable a group of Christians together to live the Christian faith in a particular way; local councils or associations of multiple congregations of differing denominations may form to work together to care for those affected by a natural disaster in that place, forming relationships of mutual aid which are intentionally temporary. Fourthly, trans-congregational organizations are not just formed by congregations; they also form (and thus shape the identity of) congregations, with the degree of formation varying according to the level of commitment invested by the congregation. Short-term commitments, with low levels of power exercised over participant congregations, will have low formative power— though they will have some formative power, even if only in the congregation’s self-identity (e.g. ‘we are the kind of congregation that joins (or does not join) with other congregations to work against building a coal-fired power plant in our community’, or ‘we are the kind of congregation that uses educational resources from that particular provider because they teach theological views we affirm’). This formative power of trans-congregational organizations helps account for difficulties congregations sometimes have with their participation in such organizations, particularly where the commitment to that organization is high. If a congregation finds itself at odds with the theological or political commitments of its denomination, that may lead to concern about the (mal-) ⁴⁶ ‘Just as the religious voluntarism of the United States has made it possible for local believers to form their own congregations, it is also possible for any enterprising agent to produce and market the education programs congregations will use’: Ammerman, Pillars of Faith, p. 206.

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formative impact of the denomination’s views on the life of the congregation.⁴⁷ The tendency of D/dissenting movements to suffer splits and schism, widely attested in the literature, has both structural and theological roots. In some settings, as with the Uniting Church in Australia, positions held by denominational bodies over key social issues have driven a wedge between congregations and threatened the continued existence of the denomination as a whole.

Varied Forms The creativity and adaptability that are characteristic of the Dissenting Protestant traditions has produced a remarkable array of organizations that bring together and assist congregations. Speaking of the array and formative impact of such trans-congregational organizations in the United States, Nancy Ammerman comments that ‘The organizational field surrounding congregations is so vast that it is easy to see why the individual choices of local communities of faith might seem utterly idiosyncratic. But looked at from another angle, regularities can be spotted even amid the chaos.’⁴⁸ Trans-congregational organizations in the Dissenting traditions can be organized in four broad forms: denominations, ecumenical councils, parachurch organizations, and localized associations. The first of these, the ‘denomination’, has been the most significant trans-congregational form operative among the D/dissenting traditions. In many ways it defines those traditions. Denominations embody strong ecclesiological claims, as well as strong claims about how Christians should gather (or be gathered) into congregations. Unfortunately, those theological claims remain underdeveloped. Theological discourse about denomination continues to be decisively shaped by a single source—H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Social Sources of Denominationalism, published in 1929.⁴⁹ Denomination is important but suffers from an under-developed state of theological analysis—I will therefore focus on it more closely in later sections. Ecumenical councils and associations have marked the Dissenting tradition since its earliest days. Presbyterian, Congregational, and Baptist ministers in ⁴⁷ One symptom of this struggle is the question of whether and how a congregation publicizes its membership in a denomination. Should the name of the denomination appear on the congregation’s public signage? Should its website communicate its denominational connection, or include links to denominational websites? ⁴⁸ Ammerman, Pillars of Faith, p. 206. I propose a set of organizational regularities that differs from Ammermans’s approach. ⁴⁹ H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York, 1929). This is a misreading both of H. Richard Niebuhr’s mature thought, and of Social Sources. See Barry Ensign-George, ‘Denomination: Intermediary Ecclesial Structure Within the Unity of the Church’, PhD dissertation, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, 2013, pp. 55–100.

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London had joined together by the beginning of the eighteenth century to defend common interests, and organizations such as the London Missionary Society began as non-denominational efforts.⁵⁰ Many in the Dissenting traditions have been able to recognize one another as sharing a common Christian faith, which they are living out in different ways. The differences between Dissenting groups have provided not just a basis for mutual recognition, but also for disagreement, competition, and antagonism. The modern ecumenical movement was born in part out of a recognition that interdenominational competition and antagonism endangered missionary effectiveness and embodied a failure of Christian faithfulness. Mission workers in foreign countries—and their representatives in organizations such as the Student Volunteer Movement—found that the denominational differences they brought with them were relativized in their new context: what had mattered at home no longer seemed as significant. This encounter between denominational limitations and global realities has, through the twentieth century, fuelled the modern ecumenical movement, generating a distinct form of trans-congregational organization. Ecumenical organizations bring different denominations into formal, institutional relationship with one another, seeking to embody and demonstrate the unity of ‘the Church’. Ecumenical councils have been organized internationally (in the World Council of Churches), regionally (such as the Christian Conference of Asia), nationally (such as the National Council of Churches in Australia), and locally (through ministerial fellowships and the like). Ecumenical councils provide an institutional structure through which varied Christian groups (particularly denominations) can coordinate mission in their place, and engage in mutual theological conversation.⁵¹ Parachurch organizations are self-governing organizations that exist to carry out a particular function that is an element of the life of congregations. Parachurch organizations may relate to a specific denomination or group of denominations, but what distinguishes them is that they are not under the organizational or administrative control of a denomination. Parachurch organizations are marked by specialization: they address specific concerns and carry out a limited range of tasks.⁵² Christopher Scheitle, in a study of such organizations in the United States, has grouped these organizations by their ⁵⁰ See Rosman, Evolution, pp. 117–30. Over time, the LMS became the de facto missionary society of the English and Scots Congregationalists, and Presbyterians seeking to work outside synodical structures. ⁵¹ For a brief account of the state of such efforts in Australasia, see Ian Breward, A History of the Churches in Australasia (Oxford, 2001), pp. 365–8. ⁵² ‘The traditional church [congregation] by its nature must be a generalist, whereas the parachurch organization is a specialist’: Wesley K. Willmer, J. David Schmidt, with Martyn Smith, The Prospering Parachurch: Enlarging the Boundaries of God’s Kingdom (San Francisco, 1998), p. 25.

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involvement in nine sectors: charismatic evangelism, relief and development, education and training, publishing and resources, radio and television, missions, fellowship and enrichment, activism and advocacy, and ‘fund-raising, grant-making, and other’.⁵³ They exist alongside congregations and denominations, providing flexible responses to contextual issues. Parachurch organizations have roots in the voluntary associations of the nineteenth century. Voluntary societies were organized both within and across denominations, quite often as a response to organizational resistance or inflexibility (as was the case in the emergence of the Salvation Army from Methodism, and numbers of Pentecostal denominations from the Salvation Army). Gradually denominations established agencies within denominational control, mimicking the specialization and focus on specific tasks of the voluntary societies.⁵⁴ Some, such as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810–1961) organized ‘time, talent and treasure’ for global causes. Others, such as the Lutheran World Federation, are among the UNHCR’s top ten social welfare delivery partners. Finally, congregations organize in local associations for specific local purposes. These associations are a form of parachurch organization, but they are characteristically more informally organized, addressing specific local needs as they arise. Local congregations gather together to support ministries to youth or the elderly in their area. They might join together to support a local food bank, or a ministry of clothing supply to those in need. Congregations also unite to advocate regarding local issues, or respond to empower government or intergovernmental programmes through their local knowledge, assets, and networks. All four forms of trans-congregational organizations are called forth in part by the need to gather a critical mass in order for congregations and their members to live the fullness of the Christian faith. Congregations pool passion and expertise and resources to do, or do better, what they are called to do and be. New forms of organization, such as Axiom Church in New York, combine aspects of network, congregation, and mission.

Malformation As with congregations, trans-congregational organizations have, in some cases, been used for purposes that cannot be other than condemned, both ⁵³ Christopher P. Scheitle, Beyond the Congregation: The World of Christian Nonprofits (Oxford, 2010), pp. 60–1. Scheitle follows with further exploration of each of the nine sectors. ⁵⁴ The story of the relationship between voluntary societies (proto-parachurch) and denominational structure within American Presbyterianism is told by Bradley Longfield, Presbyterians and American Culture: A History (Louisville, 2013), pp. 53–90.

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for the basis on which they are formed, and in the way in which they are lived out. Such organizations can be used against ‘others’, be those others Christian groups that are different (such as the now declining Orange Lodge movement, formed originally in opposition to Roman Catholicism)⁵⁵ or against other groups of people (serving, like some ‘Christian identity’ groups, racist purposes).⁵⁶ As we will shortly, denominations in particular have often been used in these ways. As with all human organizations, choice and persuasion often follow channels dug by bias and the desire for power.

Denomination as a Distinctive Organizing Form Denomination is a distinctive form of ecclesial organization that arose among the Dissenting traditions and has marked them across the anglophone world.⁵⁷ Existing between the congregation and the church, denominations serve to help congregations embody, in concrete ways, their affirmation that the church extends beyond their membership, by bringing the congregation into a relationship with a particular group of Christians, a relationship that impinges on the life of the congregation itself (like other trans-congregational organizations, denominations play a formative role on congregations). Denominations have arisen in the confluence of particular historical events, mixing together with key theological (specifically ecclesiological) presuppositions which, combined, create a conceptual space in which it becomes possible to imagine and enact a different way of shaping a life together for groups of congregations within the church. The first of them arose out of the theological and ecclesial disagreements of the Reformation. Neither the theological tools nor the ecclesial structures available to those engaged in the Reformation disagreements, remarkable as they were (as developed within medieval scholasticism and renaissance humanism) were able to resolve the issues at hand. The result was the application of the violent power of the state. Calvin, ⁵⁵ ‘Order marching toward obscurity: the Loyal Orange Lodge once a prerequisite for politicians on the climb, now faces the greying of its members,’ The Globe and Mail, 9 July 1990, A3. ⁵⁶ Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill, 1997). ⁵⁷ In addition to Niebuhr’s The Social Sources of Denominationalism (see footnote 49), two anthologies and a collection of essays by Richey are central to consideration of denomination: Russell E. Richey, ed., Denominationalism (Nashville, 1977); Robert Bruce Mullin and Russell E. Richey, eds., Reimagining Denominationalism: Interpretive Essays (New York, 1994); Russell E. Richey, Denominationalism Illustrated and Explained (Eugene, 2013). Denomination within and outside the Dissenting traditions is explored in Paul M. Collins and Barry Ensign-George, Denomination: Assessing an Ecclesiological Category, Ecclesiological Investigations, vol. 11 (London, 2011). Some of the ideas in this section of this chapter are developed in my contribution to that volume: ‘Denomination as Ecclesiological Category: Sketching an Assessment’, pp. 1–21.

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famously, turned away from his friend, Felix Manz, who was drowned in Lake Zurich. Luther exiled his former colleague, Karlstadt. Such an application of state power was the natural result of a particular way of understanding the relationship of Church and state, and the role of state power in defending the unity of the church—an understanding often called ‘Constantinian’. The century-long ‘Wars of Religion’ left a bloody mark of state coercion which was emphatically seared into the ongoing identities of D/dissenting movements.⁵⁸ One of the last outbursts of this application of state violence in the anglophone world was the English Civil War and Interregnum. This experience made it clear to those who fashioned the emerging British state’s legal establishment of religious toleration (limited though it might, initially, have been): state violence would not resolve the issue, and would serve only to bring misery. While there is much to criticize in denominations and in the category ‘denomination’ itself, criticism must reckon with the failure of previous ecclesial orders and ecclesiological understandings. It must reckon with the vital importance of ecclesial (and political) orders that allow persons to make their own choices about religion and religious belonging. There are theological and ecclesiological presuppositions to ‘denomination’, among which are the following. First, there is more than one faithful way to live the Christian life together. It is faithful for those pursuing one of these ways to establish a distinct ecclesial organization in which they can support one another in that pursuit. Secondly, these different ways of organizing to live the Christian life together can exist alongside one another in the unity of the church because, for dissenters, they are not coterminous with but rather are partial embodiments of the church. Therefore the unity to which God calls the church, for which Jesus Christ prays, does not require that all Christians live under the authority of a single earthly ordering of Christian life. The unity of the church is realized in another way. Thirdly, the rights of conscience are central. Religious belonging must not be coerced, on the one hand, because coercion improperly inserts a human agent between God and the Christian, and on the other, it undermines the central ‘mission’ of the dissenting believer, which is the witness of the reality of God in the believing soul. The central role of non-coercion and freedom of conscience have been at work in movements practising conscientious objection and civil disobedience, particularly among the left wing of Dissenting traditions. Among these, the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s are important examples, but dissenting churches have continued to be prominent among pro-migration, anti-nuclear, anti-poverty,

⁵⁸ William Cavanaugh has suggested, provocatively, that the so-called ‘Wars of Religion’ were actually an extended struggle by the state (in its varied forms) to gain fuller control over the church (in whatever form). William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (London, 2002).

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and conservationist campaigns.⁵⁹ After climbing out of their reactive fundamentalist phase, globalized forms of (d)issent, such as Pentecostal churches, have continued to develop this tradition of extending personal transformation to social outcomes.⁶⁰

Denomination: Evolving Forms Across their histories, denominations have adopted and adapted organizational and institutional structures that resemble other organizations and institutions in their environment. The history of these changing forms of denominational organization in the United States has been told in two articles, one by Craig Dykstra and James Hudnut-Beumler, which was further developed by Russell Richey.⁶¹ Both essays point to three significant organizational forms adopted widely by denominations over the twentieth century (especially in the United States). First, from the late nineteenth century into the 1970s denominations followed the model of the mid-to-late modern nation states alongside which they were organized by forming themselves as corporate, bureaucratic structures. Denominational functions were centralized. Mission initiatives were brought under denominational control or coordination so that fund raising for mission could be centralized, meaning congregations would work with one body (the denomination) for their mission giving. Tasks beyond worship, such as missions, the publication of resources, engagement with social issues, and development and distribution of Sunday school curriculums, came to be more clearly identified with the denomination. Regional judicatories and congregations were expected to contribute to and work within aims, initiatives, and policies determined at the denominational level. Denominational offices were marked by increasing specialization and an expectation that those working in these offices would have expertise in these areas of specialization. Denominations developed bureaucratic structures to oversee and carry out this work. In part, this rise of denominational agencies involved an effort to bring work ⁵⁹ Jonathan Gorry, Cold War Christians and the Spectre of Nuclear Deterrence, 1945–1959 (London, 2013); Kristineb Miranne and Katherine Amato-Von Hemert, ‘Putting Flesh on the Word: Churches and Welfare Reform’, Journal of Poverty 5.2 (June 2001), pp. 21–43. ⁶⁰ Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley, 2007), p. 15. ⁶¹ Craig Dykstra and James Hudnut-Beumler, ‘The National Organizational Structures of Protestant Denominations: An Invitation to a Conversation’, in Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks, eds., The Organizational Revolution: Presbyterians and American Denominationalism (Louisville, 1992), pp. 307–31. See also Russell E. Richey, ‘Denominations and Denominationalism: An American Morphology’, in Mullin and Richey, eds., Reimagining Denominationalism, pp. 74–98.

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being done by parachurch (or proto-parachurch) groups into the denominations themselves. Secondly, starting in the 1960s, denominations increasingly began to organize themselves as ‘regulatory agencies’. Denominations built on the corporate model found themselves unable financially to sustain the bureaucracies they had developed, unable to provide the full range of services that they had gathered in and centralized. This inability went hand in hand with a growing impulse to allow congregations and regional judicatories more room to identify both their own needs, and ways to meet those needs. Often, they had little choice. Their bureaucratic forms were intrinsically alienating, and undermined their functions as ‘mediating’ institutions.⁶² From the 1960s, grass-roots revivalism—charismatic, reformed, Youth, Marxist—pressed into the spaces so created.⁶³ In face of the inability to sustain the highly centralized model that prevailed earlier, denominations came instead to regulate tasks being carried out and goods being supplied by other agencies. With denominational agencies able to provide fewer resources and services, parachurch organizations often arose to supply the need. The rise of parachurch organizations and their ability to supply the needs of congregations further weakened the once-strong ties between congregations and their denominational offices and agencies. Denominations came increasingly to seek to regulate those who carried out tasks they no longer could. Thirdly, since the turn of the millennium it has become increasingly clear that the regulatory model itself is no longer sustainable, nor is it seen as desirable. As a response to heightened emphasis on issues of ‘spirit’ over creed, the present moment is a time of flux. Indeed, if D. G. Hart is to be believed, the long-term impact of American revivalism has led to a dominance of anti-creedal pietism, and so to ‘the lost soul of American Protestantism’.⁶⁴ Certainly, there is increasing emphasis on developing networks of relationship (generally, though not exclusively within a denomination) that are more personal and less bureaucratic. This emphasis builds on and extends the tendency in the regulatory period to push initiative from central denominational agencies to judicatories and congregations. Initiative in ministry has tended to move to more local levels, particularly to congregations. This push to more local levels does not bring with it full funding for local initiatives: funding for local initiatives is primarily to be sought from local supporters. Many denominations are experiencing shrinking membership, in some cases long-term membership losses that have sharply reduced denominational ⁶² See Nathan Todd and Nicole Allen, ‘Religious Congregations as Mediating Structures for Social Justice: A Multilevel Examination’, American Journal of Community Psychology 48.3–4 (December 2011), pp. 222–37. ⁶³ See Larry Eskridge, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People in America (New York, 2013), pp. 2–3. ⁶⁴ viz. D. G. Hart, The Lost Soul of American Protestantism (Lanham, 2002).

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size. Many find that they are increasingly a denomination of many smaller congregations, which means that in, say, the Uniting/United traditions of Australia, Canada, and the UK, fewer full-time pastors are needed. Denominations are thus experimenting widely with forms of pastoral leadership and preparation for leadership that are less expensive financially and less time-consuming. Denominational belonging is becoming more fluid, and current denominational identities may not align well with what people are seeking.⁶⁵ Nevertheless, denominations continue to provide organizational structure in which large numbers of Christians live out their faith daily and weekly. New denominations continue to form, often, as is the case of the Vineyard Churches (a movement founded in the 1970s by pastor Kenn Gullicksen), or the C3 movement (founded by New Zealander Phil Pringle about the same time) out of revivalist origins.⁶⁶

Denomination: Malformation and Apparent Alternatives Denominations are also vehicles of Christian malformation. Denominations have been, and continue to be, shaped in ways that undercut the Gospel. Denominations have been built on racism, they have persistently been agents of nationalism, and they have reinforced class distinctions in society. Denominations have formed as institutionalized embodiments of one group of Christians’ rejection of another group of Christians, the denial of their union in Jesus Christ with those sisters and brothers in the faith.⁶⁷ Finally, there are two developments that appear to be alternatives to denomination: non-denominational congregations and ‘post-denominationalism’. Non-denominational congregations claim no affiliation with a denomination, and their worship and worship leadership are not authorized by a denomination. Non-denominational congregations are a major presence, particularly in the United States. As Scott Thumma notes, If the nation’s independent and nondenominational churches were combined into a single group they would represent the third largest cluster of religious adherents in the country, following the Roman Catholic Church and the

⁶⁵ Ian Breward identifies these issues at work in the Australian context: Breward, Churches in Australasia, pp. 421–42. ⁶⁶ See http://www.vineyardusa.org/site/about/vineyard-history. ⁶⁷ On this point Niebuhr’s The Social Sources of Denominationalism continues to be helpful in mapping these interlocking malformations. More recent statements of denominational malformation can be found in Plantinga Pauw, ‘Presbyterianism and Denomination’, and (focusing specifically on the United States) in Peter Leithart, The End of Protestantism (Grand Rapids, 2016).

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Southern Baptist Convention; second largest in the number of churches— following the Southern Baptist.⁶⁸

Indeed, Nancy Ammerman suggests that ‘non-denominational’ is becoming a recognizable type, a quasi-denominational status marked by commonalities among these congregations.⁶⁹ What is clear about many ‘non-denominational’ congregations is that they do not exist in complete isolation. They purchase worship resources from parachurch providers—often the same providers. They tend to draw their pastors from specific seminaries, or from other congregations with which they find theological affinity. They support parachurch mission organizations, they gather ideas from particular publishers, and they attend a particular set of conferences. All of this establishes a web of connection that functions like a self-assembled support structure which looks much like a denomination, fulfilling many of the functions offered by denominations. The question is whether these congregations will be able to endure over the long term, particularly through multiple changes in pastoral leadership. Institutional structures exist to carry collective human projects across time, and the loose, self-made webs of connection assembled by nondenominational congregations seem unlikely to survive over lengthy periods. It also remains to be seen whether ‘non-denominational congregations’ as a category itself persists, even if individual congregations in that category do not. Secondly, it is sometimes claimed that we are living in a ‘postdenominational’ time. It is unclear what this means, specifically, and the term is rarely defined with any precision.⁷⁰ If it means that we are moving into a time when all congregations will be non-denominational, then the claim is clearly false. Theologically, there is something about the Christian faith that impels Christians towards one another, into forms of life together, united by commitment to and union with Jesus Christ. The history of the Christian Church is a significant part of the history of this impulse, in all its manifold complexity. Sociologically, congregations (as noted above) can’t do what they want to do alone. On the other hand, if this claim means that we are passing out of the era of the ‘regulatory’ denomination into a new time when a previously dominant set of denominations loses its cultural standing and all denominations need to take on a new form, then that is clearly true. But what it brings is not post-denominationalism, but post-previous-forms-of-denomination-ism. ⁶⁸ Scott Thuma, ‘A Report on the 2010 National Profile of U.S. Nondenominational and Independent Churches’, http://www.hartfordinstitute.org/cong/nondenominational-churchesnational-profile-2010.html. ⁶⁹ Ammerman, Pillars of Faith, p. 217. ⁷⁰ See e.g. Gu Mengfei, ‘The Post-Denominational Era Chinese Churches on the Way towards Unity’, The Ecumenical Review 60.3 (July 2008), p. 271; and G. Dames, ‘New Frontiers for Mission in a Post-Modern Era: Creating Missional Communities’, Missionalia 35.1 (2007), pp. 34–53.

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The emergence of ‘apostolic networks’ (often based on a form of globalizing commodity exchange between connected but localized spiritual economies) and the like, demonstrate the tendency towards denominationalism even in anti-denominationalist reform movements.⁷¹

T H E CH U R C H Finally, it should not be forgotten that the third organizational building block in the Dissenting Protestant traditions is ‘church’—the Body of Christ, into which all Christians, both now living and stretching back across time are incorporated. Apart from national divisions over the fundamentalist/liberalism debates of the 1910s–1930s, the inter-national history of Protestant dissenting movements in the twentieth century was heavily inflected by debates over ecumenism and the consequences this had for ‘organic’ or other forms of unity. As noted above with regard to the Uniting Church in Australia, and as might be noted about the global pan-Anglican Communion at the time of writing, attempts at organizational unity not also founded on coherent theological and ecclesial identities tended to splinter as the post-Second World War social consensuses fell apart in the West.⁷² The Dissenting Protestant traditions have generally held that ‘the church’ refers to the ‘church catholic’, or universal church. These traditions have distinctively held that the Church so understood has room for a variety of ecclesial bodies organized to gather multiple congregations (but not every congregation) into a shared way of being the church by living out the Christian faith together. This claim provides an encompassing vision that maps congregations and transcongregational organizations, coordinating them with one another in ways that have been and continue to be remarkably fruitful. This claim also makes it possible for congregations and denominations to live peaceably with one another, open to forms of relationship that are possible because those in relationship are able to recognize common identity while also acknowledging disagreement within that common identity. Such recognition grows from and reinforces habits of mind that are applicable in relationships and parts of life not explicitly Christian, which means that such habits of mind are of great value. In conclusion, then, the Dissenting Protestant traditions organize for ministry in an astonishing variety of ways, on every level. That variety of forms is ⁷¹ William K. Kay, Apostolic Networks in Britain: New Ways of Being Church (Milton Keynes, 2007). ⁷² John Rawlinson, ‘Can a Renewal Movement Be Renewed? Questions for the Future of Ecumenism’, Anglican and Episcopal History 86.2 (June 2017), pp. 226–8.

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made possible by basic building blocks, modified and refined again and again as ‘dissent’ has spread around the world. Those building blocks provide recognizable continuity across the wide range of variations. Congregation, trans-congregational organization, and a particular understanding of the church enable the organizational creativity and continuity evident in the long history of the (D)issenting Protestant traditions.

SEL E C T B I B L I OG R A P H Y Ammerman, Nancy Tatom, Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners (Berkeley, 2005). Brown, Callum, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London and New York, 2001). Chaves, Mark, Congregations in America (Cambridge, 2004). Clifton, Shane, Pentecostal Churches in Transition: Analysing the Developing Ecclesiology of the Assemblies of God in Australia (Leiden, 2009). Collins, Paul M. and Barry Ensign-George, Denomination: Assessing an Ecclesiological Category, Ecclesiological Investigations, vol. 11 (London, 2011). Davison, Andrew and Alison Milbank, For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions (London, 2010). Dykstra, Craig and James Hudnut-Beumler, ‘The National Organizational Structures of Protestant Denominations: An Invitation to a Conversation’, in Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks, eds., The Organizational Revolution: Presbyterians and American Denominationalism (Louisville, 1992), pp. 307–31. Eskridge, Larry, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People in America (New York, 2013). Gorry, Jonathan, Cold War Christians and the Spectre of Nuclear Deterrence, 1945–1959 (London, 2013). Hart, D. G., The Lost Soul of American Protestantism (Lanham, 2002). Healy, Nicholas M., ‘ “By the Working of the Holy Spirit”: The Crisis of Authority in the Christian Churches’, Anglican Theological Review 88.1 (Winter 2006), pp. 5–24. Hunt, Keith and Gladys Hunt, For Christ and the University: The Story of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of the USA—1940–1990 (Downers Grove, 1991). Kay, William K., Apostolic Networks in Britain: New Ways of Being Church (Milton Keynes, 2007). Lee, Matthew T., Margaret M. Poloma, and Stephen G. Post, The Heart of Religion: Spiritual Empowerment, Benevolence, and the Experience of God’s Love (New York, 2013). Leithart, Peter, The End of Protestantism (Grand Rapids, 2016). Locke, Kenneth A. The Church in Anglican Theology: A Historical, Theological and Ecumenical Exploration (Burlington, 2009). Long, Jr, Edward LeRoy, Patterns of Polity: Varieties of Church Governance (Cleveland, 2001). Longfield, Bradley, Presbyterians and American Culture: A History (Louisville, 2013).

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Lyman, J. M., ‘Examining Short-Term Mission from a Globalization Perspective: Factors in the Emergence of Today’s Mission Boom and Validity, Issues for a Global Church’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Fuller Theological Seminary, 2004, p. 9. Maxwell, David, ‘Post-Colonial Christianity in Africa’, in Hugh McLeod, ed., The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 9, World Christianities c.1914–c.2000 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 401–21. Mengfei, Gu, ‘The Post-Denominational Era Chinese Churches on the Way towards Unity’, The Ecumenical Review 60.3 (July 2008), pp. 271–87. Miller, Donald E. and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley, 2007). Orchard, Stephen and John H. Y. Briggs, eds., The Sunday School Movement: Studies in the Growth and Decline of Sunday Schools (Milton Keynes, 2007). Pope, Robert, ed., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (London, 2013). Rawlinson, John, ‘Can a Renewal Movement Be Renewed? Questions for the Future of Ecumenism’, Anglican and Episcopal History 86.2 (June 2017), pp. 226–8. Scheitle, Christopher P., Beyond the Congregation: The World of Christian Nonprofits (Oxford, 2010). Walker, Christopher C., Seeking Relevant Churches for the 21st Century (Melbourne, 1997). Willmer, Wesley K., J. David Schmidt, with Martyn Smith, The Prospering Parachurch: Enlarging the Boundaries of God’s Kingdom (San Francisco, 1998). Wuthnow, Robert, Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches (Berkeley, 2010).

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10 The Manufacture of Dissent Reflexive Christian Traditions in a Global Setting Graham A. Duncan

INTRODUCTION The twentieth century was, par excellence, the transnational century. While there were significant periods and spaces for ‘commonwealth’ and empire in previous periods, never was the international order so widespread, and ease of travel and communication across borders so quotidian. The political crises (particularly the two world wars) posed the question: What happens when culture carriers do not just cross boundaries, but exist continuously in transnational settings? A result of experiential transculturality has been the rise of religious practice marked by hybridity, and scholarship intended to explain it. Understanding among scholars of the complexity involved has been incremental. The term ‘inculturation’, for example, is used in a variety of ways, some related to particular faith traditions, particularly Roman Catholicism which, with that tradition’s broad natural theology and its long experience in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Internal conversations of this type, however, can lead to a lack of clarity of meaning and expression. This paper unpacks the meanings of terms such as ‘inculturation’ as ‘adaptation’, ‘innovation’, and ‘reflexivity’, and explores the ways in which these emerge in the intercultural settings of Protestant Christian mission in the Majority World. It is argued that these concepts are not separate processes but co-involved, and that their interaction necessitates (or ‘manufactures’) dissent as the precondition of religious change. After all, dissatisfaction with the present (for whatever reason) is a necessary condition for formulating a vision for the future. Adaptation involves innovation and is dependent on reflexivity; each impacts and refers not only to one another, but to the various attempts to create

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orthodoxies in twentieth-century missional settings.¹ Exploring how this has impacted upon the rise of dissenting movements in the twentieth century (which this chapter takes to be the ‘long’ century, commencing in 1880) requires not just definition, but exploration of the social contexts in which the concepts arose. By way of initial clarification, it is worth observing that scholarly discourse can be as enclosed and non-reflective as those which are the subjects of scholarship. The history of interaction between cultures, and the related creation of dissent, often occurs across a longer period of time than is immediately obvious. This is clear from Thomas S. Kühn’s paradigm theory where changes in historical ways of thinking and acting are seen as overlapping progressions rather than as sudden changes: ‘an entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so forth shared by a given community’² which are phased in and out. Such changes are conditioned by numerous factors, some internal (such as a change in leadership), and others external (e.g. invasion or cultural ‘swamping’). An example of the emerging nature of the scholarship can be seen in Pobee’s proposal³ that Christianity was a simply a foreign invention imposed on Africa. It is a common enough assumption. The problem (as the ensuing debate showed) is that his argument does not take into account the osmotic flows not readily visible in the records and which are therefore unknown when narrators such as Pobee construct their ‘point of view’. Medieval Europeans, for instance, were wrong to project the existence of a kingdom of Prester John:⁴ but when Europeans began to re-engage with Africa in the eighteenth century, they did rediscover a Christian kingdom in Ethiopia which became a template for constitutive African national myths combined with history through the latter end of the nineteenth century. E. W. Blyden, the Liberian Presbyterian affirmed that: Africa may yet prove to be the spiritual conservatory of the world. Just as in past times, Egypt proved the stronghold of Christianity after Jerusalem fell, and just as the noblest and greatest of the Fathers of the Christian Church came out of Egypt, so it may be, when the civilised nations, in consequence of their wonderful material development have had their spiritual perceptions darkened and their ¹ Cf. J. N. J. Kritzinger, ‘Faith to Faith: Missiology as Encounterology’, Verbum et Ecclesia 29.3 (2008), pp. 764–90, http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ve.v29i3.31; J. N. J. Kritzinger, ‘Using Archives Missiologically: A Perspective from South Africa’, in H. Lems, ed., Mission History and Mission Archives (Utrecht, 2011), pp. 18–42. ² This theory has been adopted in missiology and church history; see David J Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, 1991), pp. 181–9; Hans Küng, Christianity: The Religious Situation of our Time (London, 1994), p. 60. ³ J. S. Pobee, ‘Good News Turned by Native Hands, Turned by Native Hatchets and Tendered with Native Earth – A History of Theological Education in Africa’, in I. Phiri and D. Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa (Oxford, 2013), pp. 15–16. ⁴ Richard Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization (New York, 2010).

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spiritual susceptibilities blunted through the agency of a capturing and absorbing materialism, it may be, that they may have to resort to Africa to recover some of the simple elements of faith; for the promise of that land [Ethiopia] is that she shall stretch forth her hands unto God.⁵

And, Ethiopians laid the foundations for modern forms of African nationalism whether in the political or ecclesiastical realm and initiated the current debates on inculturation and vernacularisation in African theology. They voice a new form of Christianity in Africa.⁶

By the early twentieth century, the Egyptian hedj began to fall off the eyes of archaeologists enamoured with Tutankamen, and they too began to rediscover ancient Christian Nubia.⁷ So, the role of historic ‘fact’ is itself reflexive, depending on how it is selected, replicated, and ‘received’. The other contestants for Prester John’s title (such as the Nestorian Khereid/Kéraït of Central Asia) were only later resurrected by careful modern scholarship, after being erased by people movements and invasions from the histories then accessible.⁸ Sweeping statements by Pobee and others, therefore, are framed without an awareness that they too are based on assumptions about inculturation, based on the moment of their own engagement. (Specifically the narrative impulse, dominant in his context, to reconstruct contact history around issues of colonialism.) Pobee is probably on better ground in saying that early African theologians (such as Tertullian, Cyprian of Alexandria, Basilides, and Valentinus, and those in the Coptic and monastic communities) developed an enclosed culture which ultimately was not ‘productive’ (see Hutchinson’s use of Bourdieu in Chapter 14 in this volume, a sociology which also has its roots in northern Africa). The result was a church that went into a severe decline as its organizing framework (the Romano-Byzantine world) crumbled before Islamic invasion. As Nwatu points out in his sketch of the debate, however, even this is argumentative.⁹ The same might be said of the early extensions of Christianity to China, Siberia, or Japan, long before the rise of the seventeenthcentury mercantilist expansion. The Islamic conquest of North Africa, after all, was not merely a crisis of Christianity as such, but informed by structural crises of the Roman, Byzantine, and Persian Empires which had previously ⁵ Edward W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (London, 1888), p. 143. ⁶ Ogbu U. Kalu, ed., African Christianity: An African Story (Pretoria, 2005), p. 273. ⁷ Krzystztof Grzymski, ‘Nubia: Rediscovering African Kingdoms’, American Visions 8.5 (1993), pp. 20ff. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 5 May 2015 (online). ⁸ Mark Dickens, ‘The Church of the East: The Rest of the Story’, Fides et Historia 32.2 (Summer 2000), pp. 107–25. ⁹ Felix Nwatu, ‘ “Colonial” Christianity in Post-Colonial Africa?’, The Ecumenical Review 46.3 (July 1994), pp. 352–60.

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provided the plausibility structure for what might be considered ‘appropriate inculturation’.¹⁰ Pobee’s judgement, in other words, is anachronistic, relying upon a flattening, backward-looking judgement which essentially excerpts Christianity from its historical setting. Narrators such as Pobee also need to take more account of the influence of their own literary devices (in this case, the assumption of a definite ‘beginning’ point for postcolonial criticism). New paradigms need to be evaluated in terms of the context no matter what influence the West has had. Certainly, after half a century of nation formation among Majority World cultures, and full engagement in the global economy, the discussion has surely to move beyond essentialism and toward a more dynamic approach to the Christian story in the Majority World. The ‘long twentieth century’ was simultaneously the period of high imperialism and the highpoint of transnational missions (which we may date 1880–1920).¹¹ ‘Colonialism, civilization, commerce, capitalism, conquest and Christianity’ interacted with and laid the basis for the contemporary world, one typified by globalization, militarization, ‘terrorism’, poverty, the ‘new plagues’, and human trafficking.¹² Beginning with the Berlin Conference (1884–5), which partitioned Africa between the European powers, international politics became a field of enforced inculturation applied to most of what would become known as the ‘Majority World’. Berlin had an enormous effect, in particular, on the relationship between white missionaries and Africans, and added to the colonial partitions which (through the establishment of colonies, treaty ports, and gunboat-enforced ‘free trade’) had already brought much of the rest of the world into contact with or under the sway of European control. The simultaneous secularization of the imperial bureaucracies (sparking conflict between missionaries and the various European states at home and abroad) provoked a variety of crises in European Christianity abroad. The pragmatic evangelicalism of Henry Venn (Anglican) and J. L. Nevius (Presbyterian) in Korea projected for missions abroad the aspiration to be ‘self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating’.¹³ The crises in theology, Church and state in the period of high imperialism produced missions as transnational non-state actors wedded to universalizing ‘faith principles’. Apart from such impulses, modernization was having the effects explored in this volume by Candy Brown (Chapter 1). From the close of the nineteenth ¹⁰ Cf. Jonathan Conant, Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439–700 (Cambridge and New York, 2012), p. 363. ¹¹ Andrew F. Walls, ‘British Missions’ in T. Christensen and W. R. Hutchinson, eds., Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era, 1880–1920 (Aarhus, 1982), pp. 191–9. ¹² Glenn Myles and Christa F. Crawford, eds., Stopping the Traffick: A Christian Response to Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking (Oxford, 2014). ¹³ Jae-Buhm Hwang, ‘Korean Theologians’ Ambivalent Responses to Calvinism’, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 53.4 (2011), pp. 480–95.

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century, the Lutheran state church in Norway was subject to a series of revivals among voluntary bodies, leading (from 1899) to ‘faith missionaries’ such as Fredrik Franson committing to a series of Norwegian missions to China.¹⁴ Franson’s work blended together a belief in Jesus’ return, urgency, evangelism, holiness, and Christianity. These were the heady days of the Student Volunteer Movement and charismatic faith mission leaders, days which provided increasing scope for leadership by (D)issenting women and indigenous evangelists.¹⁵ These became essential sources of labour for such low-resource ‘faith’ works such as that led by Franson in China, enabling the mission to expand into education, medicine, and social service work. The ‘ecumenism of the field’ produced in turn the rich cornucopia of the Edinburgh World Missions Conference 1910, a recognition (for all the enthusiasm expressed) that no state church actor alone was sufficient to the global task before them. It had ‘a new sense of its own world character, a new vision of the goal, and a new desire to be born again into the knowledge of God commensurate with the superhuman task’.¹⁶ Dissenting and nonconformist actors sharply criticized the influence of national church traditions in excising large parts of the globe from consideration at the Conference.¹⁷ The increasing openness of the participants to other traditions, predominantly from other (D)issenting bodies, was itself a novel, homespun form of dissent from their own Dissenting traditions.¹⁸ An example of this is Che’eng Ching-yi, assistant pastor of the Mi-Shu Hutung Church (which, though it had links with the majority Congregationalist London Missionary Society, was moving towards independence). Che’eng (later chairman of the 1922 Singapore National Christian Conference) made significant contributions at the World Missionary Conference by supporting the implementation of the three-self principles and by promoting the need to move from the ecumenical federal structure achieved by the Protestant churches in China:¹⁹

¹⁴ Ingrid Eskit, ‘Saving of Souls and the Return of the Lord: Fredrik Franson’s Role in Interesting People for China Mission among Norwegian Free Church Christians at the Turn of the Former Century’, in Tormod Engelsviken, N. R. Thelle, and K. E. Larsen, eds., A Passion for China: Norwegian Mission to China until 1949 (Oxford, 2015), pp. 20–40, 22. ¹⁵ Eskit, ‘Saving of Souls and the Return of the Lord’, in Engelsviken et al., eds., A Passion for China, p. 34. ¹⁶ W. H. T. Gairdner, Edinburgh 1910: An Account and Interpretation of the World Missionary Conference (London and Edinburgh, 1910), pp. 5–6. ¹⁷ Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids, 2010), p. 67. ¹⁸ Kenneth R. Ross, ‘The World Missionary Conference 1910: Its Scottish provenance’, in K. R. Ross, ed., Roots and Fruits: Retrieving Scotland’s Missionary Story (Oxford, 2014), pp. 37–56. ¹⁹ Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, pp. 107–8.

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Speaking plainly [he noted] we hope to see, in the near future a united Christian Church without any denominational distinctions. This may seem somewhat peculiar to you, but, friends, do not forget to view us, not from our standpoint, and if you fail to do that, the Chinese will always remain as a mysterious people to you.²⁰

Naïve and simplistic as this call may have seemed, particularly to the AngloCatholics present, Che’eng was to live to see the formation of the Church of Christ in China, uniting sixteen denominations including Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists. In the meantime, he had studied at the nondenominational Bible Training Institute (BTI) in Glasgow (1906–8), a college which focused on ‘an astonishing range of ministries’.²¹ The period following the First World War (1914–18), including the Great Depression of the 1930s, was a difficult one for missionary agencies. Depression and war destabilized their hegemonic approach to mission, just as an internal challenge arose from expansionary (and primarily American) Protestant fundamentalists in their own churches.²² International missions became a bone of contention fought over as an extension of divisions in the domestic Dissenting traditions in the West. The position of the West, as a leader of ‘Christian civilization’ changed forever as the focus of world Christianity began to move inexorably towards the South. These developments brought the Gospel and missionary cultural values down to the grass roots, where an attempt was made to domesticate them in the local cultural terrain. Africans, Asians, Pasifika peoples and Latin Americans responded by weaving Christian strands of their own,²³ often in interaction with global migration flows blowing in cross-pollinating minority influences.²⁴ This provided an opportunity for innovation on the part of Majority World Christians. What had been notable across the history of Christianity²⁵ became in the globalizing context of the early twentieth century virtually a truism: all major world faiths were challenged and moulded by the impact of their meeting with mission Christianity. Just as Christianity itself had been altered and challenged by its inculturations as it moved out of Palestine, in the present

²⁰ World Missionary Conference, 1910, Report of Commission VIII, On Cooperation and the Promotion of Unity (Edinburgh and London, 1910), p. 196. ²¹ Rose Dowsett, ‘ “The Evangelisation of the World in this Generation”: Vignettes from Scottish Evangelicals’ Response 1890–2009’, in Ross, ed., Roots and Fruits. ²² Dowsett, ‘ “The Evangelisation of the World in this Generation” ’, in Ross, ed., Roots and Fruits, p. 77. ²³ O. U. Kalu, ‘West African Christianity: Padres, Pastors, Prophets, and Pentecostals’, in C. E. Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity (Oxford, 2012), pp. 36–50. ²⁴ See, for instance, Mark P. Hutchinson, ‘ “Rough Blocks”: The Trans-Oceanic Triangle in Planting Pentecostalism among Italian Migrants, 1907–1979’, in M. Noll, G. Rawlyk, and D. Bebbington, eds., Amazing Grace: Essays on the Trans-Atlantic Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, 1994); Jaakko Lounela, Mission and Development: Finnish Pentecostal, Lutheran and Orthodox Mission Agencies in Development Work in Kenya 1948–1989 (Abo, 2007). ²⁵ A. F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll, 1996), p. 2.

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too there needed to be contextualization or adaptation to the local context. It often happened as the result of isolation. For instance, St Thomas Christians in southern India had integrated ceremonies and architecture from Hinduism²⁶ as well as influences from Syrian liturgy and (Nestorian) theology²⁷ over centuries and inculturated their religious life and Hindu culture through virtually identical rituals and social customs, even to the extent of incorporating Islamic influences.²⁸ Perhaps the Moravians were the first to seriously engage in ‘Diaspora missions’²⁹ by forming a transnational network in the eighteenth century running against the grain of standard missionary outreach. As each wave was inculturated, so too the surrounding cultures were innoculated, creating resistance and so, in turn, the need for re-inculturation. These were all experienced as aspects of the mission of the church. It was only a matter of time before the reverse diasporic movement (‘blessed reflex’)³⁰ was set in motion as a particular expression of global mission, a ‘standing wave’ of permanent dissent from the tendency of the churches ‘left behind’ to settle down.

SOME DEFINITION S: MISSION , DISSENT, ADA PTATION, INNOVATION, AND REFLEXIVITY A concern for its transformative mission in the world is definitional of Christianity. ‘Mission’ in dissenting Christian terms refers to God’s work in reconciling the world to himself, by which humans are called to participate, and through which all are transformed, both the subjects and objects of mission outreach on the periphery of life. Kritzinger defines ‘mission’ more succinctly as ‘transformative encounter’.³¹ (This, of course presumes a centre from which mission is directed, an ‘originating self ’ to which there is an ‘other’. As we shall see, this is not an idea which has escaped challenge in intercultural exchanges.) Kritzinger’s ‘praxis matrix’ for mission is built on a number of dimensions—agency, contextual understanding, ecclesial scrutiny, ²⁶ R. Woodberry, ‘Conclusion: World Christianity, Its History, Spread and Influence’, in Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity, p. 265. ²⁷ A. Jones, ‘Christianity in South Asia: Negotiating Religious Pluralism’, in Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity, p. 93. ²⁸ Jones, ‘Christianity in South Asia’, in Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity, p. 97. ²⁹ Anne F. Henningsen, ‘On Difference, Sameness and Double Binds: Ambiguous Discourses, Failed Aspirations’, in Hilde Nielson, Inger M. Okkenhaug, and Karina H Skeie, eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Unto the Ends of the World (Leiden, 2011), pp. 131–56, 133. ³⁰ Harvey C. Kwiyani, Sent Forth: African Missionary Work in the West (Maryknoll, 2014), p. 71. ³¹ J. N. J. Kritzinger, ‘Using Archives Missiologically: A Perspective from South Africa’, in H. Lems, ed., Mission History and Mission Archives (Utrecht, 2011), p. 21.

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interpreting the tradition, discernment for action, reflexivity, and spirituality.³² Inculturative mission thus includes elements of adaptation, innovation, and reflexivity. As Christianity globalized during the twentieth century so did reflections on the faith in the locations of encounter,³³ each characterized by ‘adaptation, . . . inculturation and liberation’.³⁴ In other words, the dynamic of inculturation implies (to invert Noam Chomsky’s phrase) ‘the manufacture of dissent’. Inculturation itself has been variously defined. Arbuckle notes dissatisfaction with the terms ‘contextualization’, ‘accommodation’, and ‘adaptation’.³⁵ Broadly, inculturation can be defined (in the missiological sense) as a process whereby indigenous cultural values are transformed through their exposure to the Christian message, and Christianity itself takes on indigenous forms and emphases through cross-cultural encounters. Bosch has summarized this well: ‘[I]nculturation suggests a double movement: there is at once inculturation of Christianity and Christianisation of culture.’³⁶ This process can only be undertaken where there is already a comprehension (tacit or explicit) of the local culture as it relates to world views, ways of thinking, group solidarity, understanding of history, and of modernity and its impact.³⁷ The resulting dissonance, and simultaneous recognition of consonance, equally implies tensions between orthodoxy and dissent, resistance and change. As the twentieth century advanced, and the locus of mission came to be practised (as Hutchinson notes in Chapter 14 in this volume) ‘from everywhere to everywhere’, so inculturation came to be a far more complex multi-directional process. The phenomenon of Pentecostalism (explored further later in this chapter) has become perhaps the archetypical twentieth-century (d)issenting form, arising as both challenge and complement to traditional Christianity, drawing its doctrine (in its earlier years) from conservative evangelical sources.³⁸ As Andy Lord notes in Chapter 7 of this volume, it has overflowed as a phenomenon within mainstream denominations ‘without feeling the need to separate’.³⁹ It transforms the denomination and sometimes also changes the ³² Kritzinger, ‘Using Archives Missiologically’, in Lems, ed., Mission History, pp. 20ff. ³³ J. Gathogo, ‘Historical Developments of Theological Education in Eastern Africa—The Example of Julius Krapf ’, in Phiri and Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa, p. 28. ³⁴ Gathogo, ‘Historical Developments of Theological Education in Eastern Africa’, p. 35. ³⁵ G. A. Arbuckle, ‘Inculturation and Evangelisation: Realism or Romanticism’, in V. S. Sutlive and D. Whiteman, eds., Missionaries, Anthropologists and Cultural Change (Williamsburg, 1984), pp. 186–97. ³⁶ Bosch, Transforming Mission, p. 454; cf. Alemayehu Mekonnen, Culture Change in Ethiopia: An Evangelical Perspective (Oxford, 2013), p. 29. ³⁷ H. Yung, Mangoes or Bananas: The Quest for an Authentic Asian Theology (Oxford, 2014), pp. 64–76. ³⁸ J. H. Y. Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity, 1662–2000’, in Robert Pope and Denzil Morgan, eds., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (Edinburgh, 2013), p. 15. ³⁹ Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity’, in Pope and Morgan, eds., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity, p. 16.

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nature of the tradition. For instance, Presbyterians can easily become Congregationalists or independents. It has ‘stripped traditions of tradition’, while revealing their potential for mission. They and similar Charismatic churches have ‘created new relationships in and between the churches’ as they have inculturated themselves in new diasporic contexts. Yet as a form of dissent from their own churches they have sometimes emasculated their own traditions, leading to a situation where it is difficult to identify them except as Pentecostal or charismatic and as quasi-ecumenical. To the outside observer, the situation is further confounded by the fact that many diaspora churches (most of which are Pentecostal) often make use of buildings owned by the Old and New Dissent.⁴⁰ They have cast off their denominational identities,⁴¹ causing the barriers between them and dissenting churches have become osmotic.⁴² This tendency can be seen right back at the origins of the global Protestant missions process, with the dissenting London Missionary Society. While nondenominational in character, its commitment to the principle of voluntarism soon resulted in its being co-opted by the Independent Church Movement, in part because established ‘churchmen’ (though evangelical in theology) felt uncomfortable with its position.⁴³ Adaptation is fundamental to the cross-cultural enterprise inasmuch as it determines what is consistent and inconsistent with the gospel expressed by a sending, a receiving, or even a novel expression of church. A two-way process is discerned here between the indigenization of the European and the Europeanization of the indigenes where there is an attempt to incorporate one another’s values. It is therefore simultaneously a missiological issue, a theological issue, and an issue of reflexive practice as Christian traditions seek to extend the incarnation of the Word, God’s self-adaptation to humanity.⁴⁴ When we consider such appropriation as part of the inculturation process, do we consider it to be prior, or integral, to adaptation? The position taken in this chapter is ‘largely the latter’, for appropriation is not simply the process of accepting Western impositions. In some cases adaptation can advance even to the point of assimilation into traditional cultures, as in the practice of nineteenth-century missionary to Kenya, Ludwig Krapf (Basel Mission, and Church Mission Society (CMS)).⁴⁵ Local expressions of Christianity are localized specifically ⁴⁰ Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity’, in Pope and Morgan, eds., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity, p. 16. ⁴¹ Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity’, in Pope and Morgan, eds., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity, p. 17. ⁴² Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity’, in Pope and Morgan, eds., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity, p. 19. ⁴³ Charles Villa-Vicencio and Peter Grassow, Christianity and the Colonisation of South Africa: A Documentary History, vol. 1 (Pretoria, 2009), p. 13. ⁴⁴ Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation (New York, 1996), §54, p. 93. ⁴⁵ Gathogo, ‘Historical Developments of Theological Education in Eastern Africa’, in Phiri and Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa, p. 42.

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because they absorb local religious and philosophical concepts, and the quality of the temporally bound exchange which occurred between missionaries and local agents. Here African evangelists, pastors, and teachers rapidly took on a seminal role. The fifohazana (a late lay-led Shepherd revival movement in Madagascar originating in 1894) demonstrates the legitimization of mainline mission churches through adaptive cooperation: Local Christianities are always appropriations based on already existing concepts and notions, results of complex interactions between actors who are empowered and constrained by social and historical contests. Thus, all local Christians in Africa are genuinely ‘African’, both from a theoretical and empirical point of view.⁴⁶

This privileges local agency—with its personal religious experience, lack of formal education (representing different types of religious wisdom emanating from European and fifohazana contexts), relationship with ancestors, equal treatment, and healing ministry—as a form of dissent from the missionary cause, without obscuring it totally. There was a degree of cooperation between Protestant revivalist groups and between churches and local missions, which was strengthened from 1960 in the post-independence period. Financial assistance from the West has promoted the transition from local to national and trans-national movements as it acted as an important link with the global church.⁴⁷ Establishing ‘creative synergies’ has become a fascination in the literature on mission praxis, in part due to the absorption into the interdisciplinary space of insights and tools from the social sciences. The relationships developed between missionaries and local agents and communities, and their longterm effects on all parties involved, has been unpacked in a variety of longitudinal studies.⁴⁸ The concentration among Filipino scholars on the impact of migrant workers in that country’s vast labour migration, for instance, is an example of seeking for compensatory incarnational strength in fiscal weakness.⁴⁹ Moreover, as Freston points out, the rise of Majority World-originated missions disempowers the easy association between missions and colonialism, embedded as it is in the modernist presumption of the identity of religion and ⁴⁶ K. H. Skeie, ‘Mission Appropriation or Appropriating the Mission? Negotiating Local and Global Christianity in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Madagascar’, in Nielsen et al., eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters, pp. 157–85, 157–8. ⁴⁷ Skeie, ‘Mission Appropriation or Appropriating the Mission?’, in Nielsen et al., eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters, p. 183. ⁴⁸ Detlef Bloecher, ‘Training Builds Missionaries Up – Lessons from ReMAP II’, 22 January 2004, DMG International, https://www.dmgint.de/files/cto_layout/img/red/downloads/PDFs/ englisch/missionary_training_s_22104.pdf, accessed 7/5/2015. ⁴⁹ Ella Abigail Santos, ‘Migration Trends and Statistics’, In Touch 2 (2013), 16ff., and P. Freston, ‘The Changing Face of Christian Proselytization: Actors from the Global South’, in R. I. J. Hackett, ed., Proselytization Revisited: Rights Talk, Free Markets and Culture Wars (London, 1999).

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culture.⁵⁰ The majority of locally innovative movements has originated within the churches of European origin and then, through the manufacture of dissent, has gone well beyond them. Cooperation, coexistence, and conflict were thus both direct and indirect. This is evidenced in Marten’s approach to ‘centres’ (mission stations) and ‘peripheries’ where the latter (outstations) ‘change and develop independently of the centre, and act in ways that necessitate the centre, occasionally needing to re-gain or reassert its position as the centre’.⁵¹ This is a dynamic process in specific ‘contact zones’.⁵² They may be what Foucault describes as ‘heterotopias of deviation’.⁵³ Mission stations were often centres of refuge for social outliers: converts, women, the adventurous, and the insane. They were perceived as centres of civilization in contexts of disorder; they were subversive in that they facilitated the discernment and alteration of power relations. The same is also true on an international scale between sending body (‘home’ or metropolis) and mission country (‘out there’ or periphery). The curtailment of the world mission of the Church of Scotland from the end of the twentieth century has resulted in a denial that the face of mission has changed irrevocably: ‘Younger churches reacted negatively to any form of western hegemony, while older churches recognised the need for fellowship, yet found it difficult to express this and work constructively with its partners to achieve the desired goal.’⁵⁴ The façade of partnership in mission has disintegrated in the face of the rejection of opportunities for ‘multipartnership relations’ by the sending church.⁵⁵ This too may be described as ‘dissent’ from developments in twenty-first-century notions of mission praxis; it is unfortunate when considered against the innovations for which missions have been renowned. Such relationships are dynamic and characterized by fluidity and simultaneity, except that here (counter-logically) it is the peripheries which are always the constant. Yet as there is always a tension between them, ‘the peripheries have stayed as peripheries!’⁵⁶ This idea is replicated in Wallerstein’s ‘world systems theory’ in which core countries that dominated and benefited from the capitalist world economy exploited peripheral countries ⁵⁰ Freston, ‘The Changing Face of Christian Proselytization’, in Hackett, ed., Proselytization Revisited, p. 111. ⁵¹ M. Martens, ‘Re-Imagining “Metropole” and “Periphery” in Mission History’, in Nielsen et al., eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters, p. 297. ⁵² Martens, ‘Re-Imagining “Metropole” and “Periphery” in Mission History’, in Nielsen et al., eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters, p. 305. ⁵³ Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16.1 (1986), pp. 22–7, 25. ⁵⁴ Graham A. Duncan, Partnership in Mission: A Critical Historical Evaluation of the Relationship between ‘Older’ and ‘Younger’ Churches with Special Reference to the Church of Scotland (Saarbrücken, 2008), p. 147. ⁵⁵ Duncan, Partnership in Mission, p. 240. ⁵⁶ Martens, ‘Re-Imagining “Metropole” And “Periphery” in Mission History’, in Nielsen et al., eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters, p. 298.

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(historically subjected to colonial and imperial powers), largely for labour, raw materials, and resources from the colonial period and continue to do so.⁵⁷ Sugden suggests that First World missionaries erred in the belief that (in order to evangelize indigenous peoples) they had to persuade them to reject their traditional heritage and religious culture and adopt new converted identities.⁵⁸ Conversion was a process of incorporation but also of contestation. Indigenous peoples, however, could not simply give up all that had made them what and who they were. Hence, from ‘the creative genius of indigenous peoples there arose a synthesis of development that met their needs in their oppression’.⁵⁹ This dual process has been described as ‘the colonisation of . . . consciousness and . . . consciousness of colonisation’.⁶⁰ Moreover, ‘giving up’ was not always a matter of polarities: most indigenizing movements in the Majority World (as Carter notes of the Harrists in Chapter 6 in this volume, for example) were typified by a negotiated process of surrendering and accepting. New and old practices were merged so as to create both cathartic separation from what had ceased to work in older cosmologies, and sufficient retention of traditional practices and selforientations in order to provide a sense of coherence and continuity. It is clear that this process of self-conversion, as seen in, say, the Karen peoples in Burma,⁶¹ in the East African Revival,⁶² or among the Yolngu people of northern Australia,⁶³ missionary intention and theories of mere ‘syncretism’ are insufficient to account for the depth and nature of the indigenization which has taken place around the world in the twentieth century. This has not shaken the ideological conviction of those who continue to portray the spread of Christianity to the Majority World as merely an extension of colonialism or ‘white man’s religion’. Certainly, the pan-Africanist Edward Blyden suggested that the impact of Christianity in Africa was superficial.⁶⁴ He was, however, speaking at the end of the nineteenth century, and promoting a sacralized political religion of his own. Further, he was possibly ⁵⁷ Lumen Boundless Sociology, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-sociology/ chapter/sociological-theories-and-global-inequality/, accessed 17 April 2018. Modern History Sourcebook: Summary of Wallerstein on World System Theory, https://sourcebooks.fordham. edu/mod/Wallerstein.asp, accessed 17 April 2018. ⁵⁸ C. Sugden, The Natural Mystery of Folk Religion (Bramont, 1992), p. 6. ⁵⁹ C. Bolt, Reluctant or Radical Revolutionaries?: Evangelical Missionaries and Afro-Jamaican Character, 1834–1870 (Oxford, 2013), p. 245. ⁶⁰ Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, Vol. I (Chicago, 1991), p. 4. ⁶¹ Mikael Gravers, Nationalism as Political Paranoia in Burma: An Essay on the Historical Practice of Power (Richmond, 1999), p. 22. ⁶² See Laura Rademaker, Chapter 12 in this volume. ⁶³ Fiona Magowan, ‘Syncretism or Sychronicity?: Remapping the Yolngu Feel of Place’, Australian Journal of Anthropology 12.3 (December 2001), pp. 277–8. ⁶⁴ T. Gatwa, ‘The Cross-Cultural Mission: An Agenda for Theological Education in Africa’, in Phiri and Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa, p. 90.

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unaware of the developments in mission Christianity earlier in the nineteenth century where, for instance, at Lovedale Missionary Institution in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, classical languages, and natural, moral, and mental philosophy had been taught along with political economy.⁶⁵ Lovedale was not an isolated example. Even then, African Christianity was a resilient superficiality: just as European Christianities were indigenizations of the Palestinian original,⁶⁶ from this new transcultural ‘downward mobilization’⁶⁷ emerged theologies focusing on adaptation and contextualization through discussions of ‘ubuntu, solidarity, hospitality, humanness, dialogue and mediation’, and of black theology.⁶⁸ Andrew Walls thus asserts that significant theological reflection occurs where the majority of Christians understand that they share a continuity of consciousness about ‘the final significance of Jesus, continuity of a certain consciousness about history, continuity in the use of Scriptures, of bread and wine, of water’.⁶⁹ The necessary shift in orientation was facilitated by the decolonization of Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans from European Christianity and their growing need for cultural and spiritual freedom to secure their identity both as particular social identities (Nigerian, Brazilian, Korean, Indian, etc.) and as Christians within a context that is ‘occasional and local’,⁷⁰ that is, praxis oriented. Walls, too, emphasizes the role of memory.⁷¹ As Gravers and Delang point out with regard to the Karen people, this can place local, network identities in conflict with larger communal (e.g. national identities):⁷² throughout Asia, Christians still suffer from the perception that their faith is colonialist and offensively exclusivist in nature.⁷³ The periodic crackdowns on unregistered Christian groups in China, for example, coincide with the cyclical conflict of competing ‘universalisms’—Marxism, transnational Christianity, Chinese universalism (tianxia zhuyi) and secularized neo-liberalism—and the political and moral panics which result.⁷⁴ In a sense Pentecostalism (discussed in the following section) is an important expression of a transnational personalization and identification process which transmutes the contextual challenges of

⁶⁵ Lovedale Missionary Institution, Report for 1872 (Lovedale, 1872), pp. 5–6. ⁶⁶ Bolt, Reluctant or Radical Revolutionaries?, p. 246. ⁶⁷ David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford, 2001), p. 4. ⁶⁸ Gatwa, ‘The Cross-Cultural Mission’, p. 91. ⁶⁹ A. Walls, ‘The Gospel as Prisoner and Liberator of Culture’, Missionalia 10.2 (1982), pp. 96–7. ⁷⁰ Walls, ‘The Gospel as Prisoner’, p. 100. ⁷¹ Andrew F. Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Maryknoll, 2012), p. 13. ⁷² Gravers, Nationalism as Political Paranoia, pp. 22–3; Claudio O. Delang, Living at the Edge of Thai Society: The Karen in the Highlands of Northern Thailand (New York, 2003), p. 215. ⁷³ C. Kremmer, ‘Missionary murder: fundamentalist charged’, Sydney Morning Herald 2 February 2000, p. 8. ⁷⁴ Pohl, ‘Communitarianism and Confucianism: In Search of Common Moral Ground’, in Karl-Heinz Pohl, ed., Chinese Thought in a Global Context: A Dialogue between Chinese and Western Philosophical Approaches (Boston, 1999), p. 280.

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personal spirituality into effective spiritual ‘power’. It does so, in part, by flowing across the boundaries within which these oppressions occur.⁷⁵ The problem with the term ‘adaptation’, then, is that change is never unidirectional, and is not restricted to the ‘spiritual’ realm. The democratic and nationalistic ideas encountered by Majority World cultures, for instance, had their source in European and American contexts.⁷⁶ They also had their sources in a holistic world view. This was an area where the dissenting principle of ‘no state interference’ was put to the test and often resulted in pragmatism winning the day. In Korea, the Protestant Church had to collaborate with Korean nationalism by trying to adopt a neutral stance. But the indigenous Chosŏn leadership recognized that the value of adopting some externals of assimilation (e.g. in the fields of science and technology) could be the price of toleration. Protestant missions became involved in the March First Independence Movement in 1919, which was a stimulus to nationalism. In 1935, when Japan imposed a Shinto ceremony on the churches, the Presbyterians chose closure of their schools rather than compliance with what they considered to be idolatry. Presbyterian sympathy with the Korean struggle and the promise of new life for converts are reasons for its growth so both political (aid to reform their people and nation) and apolitical (evangelical) motives were at work.⁷⁷ All the while the Protestants maintained their antipathy towards non-partisan positions. Adaptation had been the modus operandi during the colonial period and so it continued: ‘though the missionaries succeeded in depoliticising the Church qua an institution, they failed to depoliticise it qua Korean men and women’.⁷⁸ They also refused to come to terms with traditional religions. When Korean Protestantism began to expand rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century, it was largely the result of indigenization and evangelicalism’s contribution to Korean political concerns. By this time it was virtually the legitimate indigenized religion in Korea with Korean Christians playing influential roles in civil society, politics, and the economy. It contributed also to the democratic movement in South Korea. In all the cases mentioned above, the source of theological reflection was the datum of experience. And so in Africa: a significant number of blacks resisted what they saw as the imposition of the missionaries’ Christianity and interpreted their religious way of being with its roots in their African religious culture while taking over from Christianity what

⁷⁵ See Hutchinson on this in his ‘ “Up the Windsor Road”: Social Complexity, Geographies of Emotion and the Rise of Hillsong’, in T. Riches and T. Wagner, eds., The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon The Waters (Basingstoke and New York, 2017), pp. 39–62. ⁷⁶ Woodberry, ‘Conclusion’, in Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity, p. 262. ⁷⁷ Timothy S. Lee, ‘Christianity in East Asia: Evangelicalism and the March First Independence Movement in Korea’, in Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity, pp. 122–35, 129. ⁷⁸ Lee, ‘Christianity in East Asia’, in Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity, p. 130.

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they could adapt to their religious preferences. This will be judged as syncretism but it was a legitimate way of deepening their understanding of their religion and of themselves. They had biblical precedence for so acting since in the Bible ways of being were taken over from some nations in the ancient near east and given a Jewish or Christian character in the light of their understanding of God. The blacks incorporated into their Christian understanding those elements of African cultural and religious heritage which existentially met their needs.⁷⁹

As Carter notes (Chapter 6 in this volume) in the case of African Christians who reject ancestor veneration and the oppression of women, this also caused a wave of resistance among those who proposed leaving their faith in favour of Christianity and who had no wish to carry traditional symbolic elements into their newfound faith. ‘Becoming Christian’ was in essence and in varying degrees a matter of adopting a different lifestyle and challenging dominant cosmologies and social relationships, creating a vacuum into which Christianity inserted itself. David Chidester extends the impact of experience by locating the encounter in a ‘contact zone’, which he defines as a ‘space of intercultural engagements shaped by unequal power relations’. He uses dream analysis (a factor in the ‘call’ to ministry) to understand how this transformation occurs: Christian missionaries played an important role in this massive disruption, providing a haven for African refugees or exiles, but also introducing new social divisions between ‘traditional’ and Christian Africans. These divisions were simultaneously spiritual and material. Material signs of Christianity, such as wearing European clothing, living in square houses, or using a plough to till the land, became indicators of spiritual conversion for a new class of Zulu Christian ‘believers’. At the same time, Africans who tried to adhere to traditional or ancestral ways of life also underwent a transformation that was simultaneously spiritual and material.⁸⁰

Adaptation as a working term, then, has been displaced, largely because inculturation lacks the inclusivity and dynamism necessary to explain developments in global Protestant (d)issent. It remains a component of the larger process, but needs to be used with careful definition. ‘Adaptation’ leaves the receptor relatively unchanged in its essence while inculturation suggests integration. Inculturation is a reflexive form of donation through adaptation, acceptance, and rejection, the reflexive/reflective nature of which provides space for the tacit and explicit transformations which occur in transcultural negotiations. Thus Africa was Christianized as the result of adaptation and accommodation rather than a unidirectional onslaught of coerced conversions. In South Asia the Syrian form of Christianity largely accommodated the local cultures, but Protestants filled the niche of providing an alternative to indigenous ⁷⁹ Bolt, Reluctant or Radical Revolutionaries?, p. 248. ⁸⁰ David Chidester, ‘Dreaming in the Contact Zone: Zulu Dreams, Visions, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century South Africa’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76.1 (March 2008), pp. 27–53.

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social and religious traditions. In holistic cultures as in South Asia, there is no distinct separation between sacred and secular, and religious commitment is a matter of identity. Consequently, communal conflict may be perceived as religious strife.⁸¹ As Jones notes with regard to North India, the ‘points of view’ embedded in scholarly discourse can obscure what is happening on the ground. The development of Christianity in Mizoram in north-east India offers an exemplar from the beginning of the twentieth century when Mizo people accepted Protestant Christianity as it began to identify with its culture and identity. Within two decades of contact, new Mizo-inspired hymns were being used that combined indigenous singing with Christian music, instruments, and dance.⁸² By the mid-twentieth century, 80 per cent of the Mizo population was largely Dissenting Christian in affiliation. Concurrently, as the Mizo people appropriated Christianity as their own, they rejected the Hindu faith and Indian nationalism. In this case, Christianity was moulded by the context into which it implanted itself and so north-east Indian Christianity is peculiarly north Indian. In fact, across the Majority World, traditional religion endured, as did ‘traditionalized’ and ‘traditional’ Christianity, syncretized forms and fully indigenized orthodoxy, however much scholars interested in colonialism, transculturality, or globalization might be embarrassed by the vibrant self-determination of local religious cultures,⁸³ particularly in their materialistic expression of salvation.⁸⁴ Iliffe notes this in African indigenizations: In practice, adaptation took place, but it was done by the converts themselves in the process of accepting the new religion and reconciling it with inherited beliefs and practices. As, at best, newly literate people, they did this in an eclectic manner, but eclecticism could point in two directions, as at earlier periods of African Christianity history. Some Christians continued to believe fervently in the reality of their old gods but saw them now as evil forces.⁸⁵

This process of ‘adaptation’ is not and (by definition in an open global system, can never be) complete, as can be seen in the development of Majority World Pentecostalism(s). Here is a congeries of traditions (as Anderson notes, a set of mutual recognitions of the ‘many Jerusalems’ entering the global stage at the same time, and so perhaps better termed a series of glocalizations)⁸⁶ gathered ⁸¹ Jones, ‘Christianity in South Asia’, in Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity, pp. 95–107, 96. ⁸² Jones, ‘Christianity in South Asia’, in Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity, p. 104. ⁸³ A. Jones, ‘Scholarly Transgressions: (Re)writing the History of World Christianity’, Theology Today 71(2) (2014), pp. 223–4. ⁸⁴ J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs of the Spirit: Ghanaian Perspectives on Pentecostalism and Renewal in Africa (Oxford, 2015), p. 15. ⁸⁵ J. Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge, 1995), p. 226. ⁸⁶ Allan Anderson, ‘Writing the Pentecostal History of Africa, Asia and Latin America’, Journal of Beliefs and Values 25.2 (August 2004), p. 142; M. P. Hutchinson, ‘The Latter Rain

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under a single term (‘pentecostalism’) which cannot be simplistically regarded as a means of Christian colonization and of reshaping Majority World cultures. It possesses distinctive identit(ies), authenticity, and integrity which vary from place to place. While there are economic and other influences of American origin in the Zionist churches in South Africa, for example, these too are engaged and negotiated as individualism displaces communalism, and indigenization and globalization stretch and fray the defining edges of received traditions. The same was true of Nigeria following its civil war (1967–70), when political factors came into play with an emphasis on reconstruction, rehabilitation and reconciliation, and a need to foster hope in the post-war crisis. The attraction of the pragmatism of the health and wealth gospel—with its varying relationships with the charismatic movement, with transnational entrepreneurialism, and with the dynamics of diaspora and labour migration—can be understood.⁸⁷ Counter to this, it also has to be noted that there was an African genesis to many revival movements. Kalu distinguishes five dimensions which demonstrate considerable adaptation, innovation. and reflexivity as a response to missionary efforts. These include reconstruction of identity, imagining social space, representation which employs an innovative hermeneutic, a praxis approach to the text, and reclaiming the public space.⁸⁸ Mission, in other words, went from being an organized reflex of transatlantic spiritual movements to an indigenizing spiritual reorientation among Majority World peoples, which in turn threw up analogous missional responses through the latter end of the twentieth century. (As Hutchinson notes in Chapter 14 in this volume, this is what makes the term ‘return mission’, from where to where? inaccurate, or at least ‘blunt’.) Mission is time, vector, and place specific. From a missiological perspective, ‘sowing the seed’ of the gospel in a ‘new’ cultural context is, according to Njoroge, an unending dialogical process that balances culture in the anthropological sense of the term and the divine presence of the Holy Spirit. . . . The inculturation process starts when a community starts functioning as an indigenous or local church. To be local means that the church has taken roots in a given place with all its cultural, natural, social, and any other characteristic that constitutes the life, values and thoughts of the people involved.⁸⁹

Movement and the Phenomenon of Global Return’, in M. Wilkinson and P. Althouse, eds., Winds from the North: Canadian Contributions to the Pentecostal Movement (Leiden, 2010), pp. 270ff. ⁸⁷ A. Anderson, To the Ends of the Earth: Pentecostalism and the Transformation of World Christianity (Oxford and New York, 2013), pp. 235ff. ⁸⁸ O. U. Kalu, Clio in a Sacred Garb: Essays on Christian Presence and African Responses (Trenton, 2008), p. 247. ⁸⁹ K. J. N. Njoroge, ‘Inculturation as a Mode of Orthodox Mission: Intercultural Orthodox Mission—Imposing Culture and Inculturation’, in P. Vasiliadis, ed., Orthodox Perspectives in Mission (Oxford, 2013), pp. 242–3.

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Adaption is grounded in the diversity of creation and takes account of contradiction. Ohm articulates a three-step process of adaptation: accommodation (reception, enculturation), assimilation and transformation which draw people into communication, as it ‘absorbs’ the riches of others’⁹⁰ and hopes for a better future commonwealth.⁹¹ Adaptation in this model is not simple conversion from a Western perspective where new converts were isolated in mission stations to be remade in the image of the missionary.⁹² Transformation comes from within an existing dynamic culture with its own agency, through transformation by all interlocutors rather than by external imposition. So, while scholars may prefer to flatten the lived experience of Majority World actors in order to highlight the effects of the global labour market, for example, or evils of Western neo-liberalism, this is not what Ghanaian Pentecostals in Ireland, or Filipino guest workers in Saudi Arabia, or Wenzhounese merchants in Russia, think of themselves. Rather, they see themselves as ‘on mission’, lodging in the mobile house of the ‘Spirit’,⁹³ agents in transformation which takes place in their personal lives, in their immediate and extended communities, in the moral life and calling of their nations, and in the mission of God in the world.⁹⁴ To make this a matter of reflective practice, the process begins with a thorough understanding of one’s own (sending) culture and what attachments it might make indistinguishable with the message, prior to its being offered within another culture. This is difficult, because even our own understandings are borrowed from other cultures (for example, the omnipresent Graeco-Roman influence on the West transported further afield through the missionary movement). Further, many in these contexts are not there primarily as ‘missionaries’ but because they are searching for a better life. Where the process of thought is coextensive with its subject, there is no consensus on which to build. Greek dualism, for example, has traditionally been a source of conflict in discussions over presumed polarities between syncretism and orthodoxy. By way of contrast, in most African cosmologies, there is no distinction made between the sacred and secular. Theirs’ is an integrated cosmology. Likewise, the Filipina theologian, Melba Maggay illustrates this by pointing to the different understandings

⁹⁰ F. A. Oborji, ‘Catholic Missiology 1910–2010: Origins and Perspectives’, in S. B. Bevans, ed., A Century of Catholic Mission (Oxford 2013), pp. 133–54, 139. ⁹¹ T. Ohm, Machetzu Jungen alle Volker: Theorie der Mission (Freiburg, 1962), p. 700. ⁹² Graham A. Duncan, Lovedale: Coercive Agency: Power and Resistance in Mission Education (Pietermaritzburg: 2003), pp. 18–27. ⁹³ K. E. Openshaw, ‘Home is Where the Spirit Is: How Members of Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pentecostal Parishes on the East Coast of Ireland Make Home’, MA thesis, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 2013, p. 5. ⁹⁴ This is a theme unpacked by V. Turner, ‘Liminality and Communitas’, in Michael Lambek, ed., A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion (Oxford, 2002); cf. Paul Woods, Theologising Migration: Otherness and Liminality in East Asia (Oxford, 2015).

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of the person of Jesus within different cultural contexts.⁹⁵ Cultures are not only dynamic; they are also resilient because they are dynamic: ‘they adapt to alien influences and subvert even powerful influences grafted into them’.⁹⁶ The work of Jean and John Comaroff ⁹⁷ has made it clear that the power of cultures to adapt, and resist, is such that core values may persist despite many outward manifestations of change. An example of this is the Zion Christian Church, which . . . includes Christian principles and African cultural traditions. New members are asked to forsake their beliefs, ancestor ‘worship’ or customary rituals. Instead, all these rituals are embraced by the church. With the introduction of Zionism in the Tswana community, certain concepts were reintroduced, such as go tlhapiswa (ritual washing) as opposed to go kolobetsa (to make wet) which was used by the Orthodox Church. As part of an attempt to contradict the colonial, reactionary movements such as the Zion Christian Church used, the term didiba (wells) to refer to their own churches. This I find interesting as a form of struggle, using words which colonised the Tswana to now set them ‘free’ from mainline European churches.⁹⁸

‘Adaptation’ in this context is the role of the outsider through identification with that culture’s positive aspects. But who is to adapt? In the context of diaspora is it the sender or the receiver, and what is the role of the migrant here? Migrants are rarely sent; they migrate for many reasons, often economic. And as time passes, the definition of ‘outsider’ becomes fluid and less definitive. Is there a mutual process of adaptation at specific points of insertion? This latter is a matter of discomfort to dualists or essentialists. The existence of multiple points of insertion seems to deny the integrity of culture as an entity on both sides as attempts are made to negotiate between sending and receiving cultures. Such a view does not, however, take note of coherence and integration within cultures: ‘Each centre sees itself as a full participant in the evangelising process.’⁹⁹ In this way, faith travels readily through migrants, and while flexing during the process of transition and settlement (or cyclical migration, as it might be), retains its adapted coherence in the new setting: Many Africans who undergo complex forms of immigration processes have largely carried traits of their religious and cultural identities with them. As a matter of fact, their sojourn in new geo-cultural contexts has enlivened these immigrants to identify, organise and reconstruct their religion both for themselves and their host societies.¹⁰⁰ ⁹⁵ M. P. Maggay, ‘People Power Revisited’, in P. Alexander and A. Tizon, eds., Following Jesus: Journeys in Radical Discipleship, Essays in Honor of Ronald J. Sider (Oxford, 2013), p. 127. ⁹⁶ Maggay, ‘People Power Revisited’, in Alexander and Tizon, eds., Following Jesus, p. 128. ⁹⁷ J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2 vols (Chicago, 1997). ⁹⁸ O. Ntsoane, ‘The Resourcefulness of Elders and their Strategic Intelligence in Interpreting the Footsteps of Missionaries’, in P. Opondo, ed., Culture, Memory and Trauma (Pretoria, 2013), p. 56. ⁹⁹ Oborji, ‘Catholic Missiology’, in Bevans, ed., A Century of Catholic Mission, p. 149. ¹⁰⁰ Afe Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora: New Currents and Emerging Trends in World Christianity (London, 2013), p. viii.

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Adoption (reception) depends on the theologies of the local peoples. Cultures, after all, are not unitary silos or static identities, but identities in process and (re)construction. They are impacting on and being impacted upon as they negotiate passage across particular glocalities within a globalizing culture. In practice, pace Sugden, there was less adaptation on the part of missionary Christianity than was necessary or appropriate. Great damage was done by replacing the mores of traditional societies with Dissenting individualism imposed by missionaries. The existence of other, more positive, examples, however, indicates that these impacts too were local and particular rather than universally present in missionary contact history. For example, in East Africa, Bruno Guttmann, a Leipzig missionary, worked among the Chaga people on Mount Kilimanjaro between 1902 and 1938 (with an interval from 1920 to 1925): He saw Chaga not as Individuals to be saved, almost from society, but bound by ‘primal ties’ to an organic community, which contrasted favourably with the merely constructed organisation of a society. European civilisation was the great enemy to the African.¹⁰¹

This represented a radical departure from the expectations of mission supporters in the sending cultures. ‘Many African church people [too] were ready to support missionary decisions in the first place, or invent their own, and then replicate them for many decades.’¹⁰² Likewise, American Baptists in contact with the Naga peoples of north-east India adopted a ‘let the Naga convert the Naga’ approach, despite the fact that poor attempts were made by missionaries to understand the sociocultural and religious ethos of the Naga people that might have led to a more eirenic and meaningful adaptation of the faith. The Naga themselves took up the new faith with energy and self-determination. While there is a ‘tendency to overreact to this cultural imperialism’,¹⁰³ often on the part of scholars whose ‘main game’ is defending the international political system (and so India), or excoriating imperialism, ‘the transmission of the Christian faith was indigenous’ or for the most part carried out by indigenous agents under the supervision of missionaries. The Naga would have to work out later what that meant in their own situation. One tool effective in framing such reflection, and thence in replication, was theological education. The future Majority World teachers of ministers were trained, often followed by a period studying theology in the West, prior to returning to assume responsibility for the ‘Africanizing’, ‘Indianizing’, ‘Koreanizing’, etc., of ¹⁰¹ B. Knighton, ‘Christian Belongings in East Africa: Flocking to the Churches’, in Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity, p. 25. ¹⁰² Knighton, ‘Christian Belongings in East Africa’, in Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity, p. 25. ¹⁰³ Joshua Lorin, ‘Naga Christianity: The Baptists in the Formative Years, 1838–1915’, PhD dissertation, Fuller Theological Seminary, Center for Advanced Theological Study, 2014.

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ministerial formation.¹⁰⁴ Among African thinkers and teachers, this ‘out and back again’ process included those who, like Kwesi Abotsia Dickson (Oxford), Kwame Bediako (Bordeaux and Aberdeen), Mercy Amba Oduyoyo (Cambridge), and Lamin Sanneh (Birmingham, Beirut, London), have been central to the rethinking of issues of indigenization. Among Koreans, who have become a vibrant presence on many (particularly Presbyterian and reformed) theological campuses around the world, leading names in the early period included Hyung Yong Park (Princeton), Chul Won Suh (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Jae-Jun Kim (Princeton), and many others. The Protestant theological tradition in India has been largely dominated by Church of India and the Church of South India. M. M. Thomas was something of an autodidact, Indian Protestants such as Paul Devanandan (Berkeley and Yale) developed the basis for Christian–Hindu dialogue, and A. J. Appasamy (Harvard and Oxford) saw in his classical studies the need for Christians to engage with the bhakti tradition in his own country. It also produced significant practitioners educated in other fields: the evangelist Bakht Singh (Winnipeg), for example, was a significant indigenous church planter and evangelist, who left a strong mark on the ‘New Testament Church’ teaching of Paul Sudhakar.¹⁰⁵ Where Christianity was a minority religion in conflicted pluralistic settings, the opportunity to connect to the global church was essential for theological reflection. This was done admirably by many who studied in the West and integrated its teachings into their own contexts through promoting quality, authenticity, and creativity and by incorporating a praxis methodology in dealing with contemporary issues.¹⁰⁶ However, some of these stuck closer to the ‘last’ on which they were formed. The cry for political independence from the West was louder than the call for a rejection of its theological education programmes: In all the various situations in which the African [and others no doubt] has to choose between the old and the new he [she] is in a dilemma, because he can accept neither with his whole heart and being . . . . In the cities, with better educational facilities and more opportunities for the two worlds to meet and mingle there can at least be a common intellectual level at which there is some chance of mutual comprehension; but despite the sophistication of the townsfolk, the tribal past with its tribal attitude is frequently still too close to be forgotten or ignored, and the new is still to be much more than a flimsy veneer.¹⁰⁷

¹⁰⁴ K. A. Gyadu, ‘Theological Education in West Africa’, in Phiri and Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa, p. 150. ¹⁰⁵ D. E. Singh, ‘Lessons for Missiology from Twentieth-Century India’, in W. Ma and K. R. Ross, eds., Mission Spirituality and Authentic Discipleship (Oxford, 2013), pp. 139–56. ¹⁰⁶ Ofelia Ortega, ‘Foreword’, in D. Werner, D. Esterline, N. Kang, and J. Raja, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in World Christianity (Oxford, 2010), pp. xix–xx, xix. ¹⁰⁷ Colin M. Turnbull, The Lonely African (New York, 1962), p. 203.

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In many places outdated Western models of theological education persist. One of the reasons for this was that only around 25 per cent of theological educators worldwide were indigenous and there was a constant turnover of missionary staff.¹⁰⁸ However, there are contexts where African, black, and feminist theology are still considered sub-cultural or even deviant theologies. The dissenting voices of theologians representative of such theologies are not always heard. A related issue was (and is) the high cost of theological education. The creation of the Theological Education Fund of the International Missionary Council in 1958 was, in effect, one of the most powerful agents of the manufacture of dissent since its financial assistance was available only to ecumenical theological education projects.¹⁰⁹ This, of course, raised questions regarding the motivation for becoming involved in ecumenical ventures, few of which have yielded results proportionate to their cost.¹¹⁰ In a still traditionally based curriculum dominated by the discipline-based theological encyclopaedia, curriculum reform and attention to global issues has been slow in coming. Dissent produces results but often at a heavy cost. And in theological education, it requires critical thinking and reflection in the concrete context. Namsoon Kang, at Brite Divinity School, argues for a postcolonial approach through seeing theological education as a visionary challenger of existing reality of Christianity and society . . . that takes up and challenges the issues of ‘power and knowledge’ on the one hand and to [sic] fundamentally seeks to re-construct theological discourse, curriculum, pedagogy or theological institutional systems from a perspective of a the geopolitical human context of justice, equality, and human plurality on the other. In this sense, postcolonial theological education is a theological education for ‘public’ theologies that concern a public relevance of theological education and turns its face toward the ‘public’ world in order to participate in making a more ‘just’ world.¹¹¹

For Kang, following Derrida, this is an impossible task to achieve, but one which must be made in pursuit of the Christian vision. An example is the work of the Foundation for Theological Education in South East Asia in cooperation with the Association for Theological Education in South East Asia along with the World Council of Churches and other ecumenical partners. The first of their future tasks suggests their approach in the postcolonial period: ‘to deepen and broaden networks of Asian theologians through the sharing of Asian ¹⁰⁸ David Esterline, ‘From Western Church to World Christianity: Developments in Theological Education in the Ecumenical Movement’, in Werner et al., eds., Handbook of Theological Education in World Christianity, pp. 13–22, 17. ¹⁰⁹ Esterline, ‘From Western Church to World Christianity’, pp. 16–17. ¹¹⁰ Philippe Denis and Graham Duncan, The Native School that Caused all the Trouble: A History of the Federal Theological Seminary of Southern Africa (Pietermaritzburg, 2011). ¹¹¹ Namsoon Kang, ‘From Colonial to Postcolonial Theological Education’, in Werner et al., eds., Handbook of Theological Education in World Christianity, pp. 30–41, 31.

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resources for doing theology, exchanges of students and theological educators and inter-regional dialogues’.¹¹² Formal theological education was not a luxury available to indigenous movements such as the African Initiated Churches (AICs), many of which appeared as spiritual protest or revitalization movements in the context of colonialism or oppression. Instead, Oosthuizen has suggested that training was undertaken ‘through the Holy Spirit and the ancestors’ under the supervision of senior and experienced ministers.¹¹³ Yet from the 1920s in the African Independent Pentecostal Church of Africa (AIPCA), while there was no formal theological education, Church leaders . . . needed to be trained how to use traditional stories, proverbs and rituals. . . . Ad hoc meetings-cum-seminars were arranged for any person who demonstrated mastery in communicating with the people and acceptance by the congregation. At this point charisma was preferred at the expense of formal knowledge. . . . Christian theology as such was picked up largely through constant participation in church rituals and worship.¹¹⁴

In Gikuyu custom, apprenticeship initiation preceded ritual training with appropriate modification in the AIPCA. On occasion candidates have been sent to established theological education centres but the results have yet to be seen. Generally, Pentecostal approaches were (until recently) defined by negativity towards dissenting forms of theological education. It was to be ‘avoided at all costs since it would stifle the Spirit-filled life’.¹¹⁵ However, dissent has been normalized in this case for a number of reasons, including a desire for academic recognition: ‘Pentecostal hermeneutics is praxis-oriented, with experience and scripture being maintained in a dialectical relationship maintained by the Holy Spirit.’¹¹⁶ What has emerged is an innovative model expressing and working towards passion for God; fullness of the Holy Spirit; sound biblical doctrine; dynamic, critical, and creative missiological involvement; and the promotion of efficacious service and academics.¹¹⁷

¹¹² Samuel C. Pearson, ed., Supporting Asian Christianity’s Transition from Mission to Church: A History of the Foundation for Theological Education in South East Asia (Grand Rapids, 2010), pp. 317–18. ¹¹³ G. C. Oosthuizen, The Healer Prophets in Afro-Christian Churches (Leiden, 1982), pp. 37–8. ¹¹⁴ John Gichimu, ‘Theological Education in African Instituted Churches’, in Werner et al., eds., Handbook of Theological Education in World Christianity, pp. 368–74. ¹¹⁵ Teresa Chai, ‘Pentecostal Theological Education and Ministerial Formation’, in Wonsuk Ma, Veli-Matti Kärkäinen, and J. Kwabena-Asamoah, eds., Pentecostal Mission and Global Christianity (Oxford, 2014), pp. 343–59, 344. ¹¹⁶ Cheryl Bridges Johns, Pentecostal Formation (Sheffield, 1993), p. 86. ¹¹⁷ Chai, ‘Pentecostal Theological Education and Ministerial Formation’, in Ma et al., eds., Pentecostal Mission, p. 347.

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In this non-traditional theological education the candidate’s ‘call’ is established by investigation of dreams or visions (see Chidester, as discussed pp. 31–4).¹¹⁸ This was quite a shift from the imposed epistemological assumptions of the West which persist in formal theological education based on the assumption of having successfully disempowered indigenous knowledge systems. It was not unlike, however, the early short-term ‘bible institutes’ (such as C. F. Parham’s Bethel College in Topeka, Kansas, or even the current ‘schools of power’, such as the franchised Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry) so essential to the rise of Pentecostalism in North America.¹¹⁹ Despite their antipathy to formal education, for instance, Bible Colleges were essentially to the movement’s definition, human resources, and growth. A North China Truth Bible Institute was established in Beijing as early as 1922,¹²⁰ and it was through short-term bible programmes that renewal movements such as the Latter Rain movement were born.¹²¹ Globally, Pentecostal theological education is harder to categorize; more recently it has been characterized by an empowerment of the laity (more accurately, theological education for all), levels of education (up to PhD), the growth of research, the establishment of regional theological associations¹²² and ecumenism.¹²³ Kärkäinen has opened up the possibilities for Pentecostal theological educators to expand their horizons with a call for theological education as denominational initiation, discovery of catholicity, and enabling for ecumenical learning.¹²⁴ One limitation with regard to formal theological education is the frequent requirement to conform to denominational distinctives¹²⁵ in the face of contrary national educational directives. In Asia, the existence of the Asia Pacific Pentecostal Association as an accrediting body offers credibility to a process marked by versatility and flexibility.¹²⁶ Here, the ‘Spirit’ provided the ¹¹⁸ O. Kealotswe, ‘Theological Education in the African Independent Churches in Botswana’, in Phiri and Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa, p. 436. ¹¹⁹ G. Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, 2001), p. 151. ¹²⁰ Chai, ‘Pentecostal Theological Education and Ministerial Formation’, in Ma et al., eds., Pentecostal Mission, p. 348; W. K. Kay, ‘Pentecostal Education’, Journal of Beliefs and Values 25.2 (2004), pp. 229–39. ¹²¹ Richard Riss, ‘The Latter Rain Movement of 1948’, Pneuma 4.1 (1982), p. 38. ¹²² Wonsuk Ma, ‘Theological Education in Pentecostal Churches in Asia’, in Werner et al., eds., Handbook of Theological Education in World Christianity, pp. 729–35, 733–4. ¹²³ Daniel Chiquette, ‘Pentecostalism, Ecumenism and Theological Education in Latin American Perspective’, in Werner et al., eds., Handbook of Theological Education in World Christianity, pp. 736–41, 739–40; cf. Ma, ‘Theological Education in Pentecostal Churches in Asia’, in Werner et al., eds., Handbook of Theological Education in World Christianity, pp. 734–5. ¹²⁴ Veli-Matti Kärkäinen, ‘ “Epistemology, Ethos and Environment”: In Search of a Theology of Pentecostal Theological Education’, World Alliance for Pentecostal Theological Education Consultation, Stockholm, Sweden, 25 August 2010, p. 14. ¹²⁵ William Kay, ‘New Paradigms in Pentecostal Education: A Very Short Introduction’, 2009 Glopent conference paper, p. 2. ¹²⁶ Chai, ‘Pentecostal Theological Education and Ministerial Formation’, in Ma et al., eds., Pentecostal Mission, p. 349.

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mechanism permitting a selective break with the past and adaptive appropriation of elements of the new, to enable the cosmological and ritual underpinnings of communities of faith to continue. The reconstruction of African epistemologies in formal settings, and popular pneumatic autodidacticism, both essential elements in a reflexive and inculturated Christianity in Majority World settings, thus took place in parallel, but often separated social locations, until the rise of formal theological training among pentecostal churches. Oddie notes the same among Indian indigenous movements. Of the theologians seeking a rapprochement with the Indian tradition, almost all of these writers were of high caste status. Their theology was therefore limited very largely to attempts to relate Christianity to higher caste religion and culture or to what is sometimes called the great tradition. Most Christians in India were of low or outcaste origin and hence could not be expected to easily accept the views of people they sometimes thought of as belonging to an oppressor class.¹²⁷

The philosophical and civic problems associated with such rethinking processes are considerable, and responses ranged from essentialism to Marxist anti-colonialism, with indigenous peoples selectively portraying themselves as ‘at times ancient, at times subversive, at times oppositional, at times secret, at times essentialist, at times shifting’.¹²⁸ One of the most significant means of transformation and adaptation has been the introduction of modern media. In the nineteenth century the printing press, the mechanical accompaniment of language, was used to inculturate European concepts through which ‘Africans had access to the material in their mother tongues’.¹²⁹ Missionaries were in the forefront of committing local languages to written form, often mis-‘reading’ and misconceptualizing important indigenous cosmological concepts, and so imposing a shift in meaning.¹³⁰ Consequently, bible translation into indigenous languages and the contextualisation of Christian theology provided the combustible energy that propelled Christianity around the world, making the faith meaningful in all kinds of contexts. . . . it demonstrated the powerful and unpredictable ways in which the biblical message transformed people and nations.¹³¹

This could also occur with the translation of music, which was conceived both as a form of religious liberty but also a form of literary and expressive captivity.

¹²⁷ G. A. Oddie, ‘Indigenization and Nationalism’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions 43e Année, No. 103 (July–September 1998), p. 149. ¹²⁸ M. Dodson, ‘The Wentworth Lecture: The End in the Beginning: Re(de)finding Aboriginality’, Australian Aboriginal Studies 1, p. 12. ¹²⁹ Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, p. 92. ¹³⁰ J. L. Cox, The Invention of God in Indigenous Societies (London, 2014), pp. 1–2. ¹³¹ Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity, p. 2.

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The Norwegian Lutherans in China discovered this when resistance by local people to the imposition of a hymnbook led them to resort to a more inclusive indigenous production. The requirements were that it had to reflect Lutheran (and not Reformed) theology, be ‘up to date, understandable for unlearned people, similar to what was used in the Chinese Bible. But at the same time it had to be solemn.’ The result was warmly received by Chinese Lutherans.¹³² Indigenous people sometimes turned the tables on the linguistically challenged. As Rademaker records of CMS missionaries in northern Australia: From the earliest days of the missions, missionaries used songs to communicate their message. When first arriving at Groote Eylandt in 1921, one attempted translating ‘Jesus Loves Me’ into Anindilyakwa. Pointing to his chest, he asked, ‘how do you say me?’ and was given the word for ‘chest hair’, and so sang ‘Jesus loves my chest hair’ to an amused congregation.¹³³

The standardization, regimentation (through schooling), and proliferation of previously oral traditions itself carried the seeds of nationalism and social change. Translation of the Hebrew Bible ‘authored and nourished national identity and religious-cultural nationalism’ and created new technologies of the self.¹³⁴ More recently, there has been a revival of indigenizing epistemologies in the work of recent black theologians such as E. B. Farisani, Madipoane Masenya, M. K. Nzimande, and M. S. Tsehla,¹³⁵ not least in the translation and contextualizing of Scripture as imperatives of mission.¹³⁶ Luka-Mbole insists that this involves engaging in ‘a constructive dialogue between an original biblical culture, a church tradition and a contemporary culture’.¹³⁷ Here no epistemological value system is privileged above another, an egalitarianism which is reinforced by the convergence on the same space among First World missiologists seeking solutions for faith in the post-Christendom West.¹³⁸

¹³² Erik Kjebekk, ‘Knut I Samset: A Norwegian Missionary who Compiled a Chinese Hymnbook’, in Engelsviken, Thelle, and Larsen, eds., A Passion for China, pp. 54–68, 63. ¹³³ L. Rademaker, ‘For a Thousand Tongues to Sing: Translation and Song at Arnhem Land Missions’, Lucas: An Evangelical History Review 2.6 (December 2013), p. 42. ¹³⁴ David Aberbach, ‘Nationalism and the Hebrew Bible’, Nations and Nationalism 11.2 (April 2005), pp. 223–4; and see A. Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997). ¹³⁵ M. Masenya, ‘Biblical Studies in South(ern) Africa’, in Phiri and Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa, p. 463. ¹³⁶ A. Majola, ‘Bible Translation and Christian Theological Education in Africa: A Historical and a Pan-African view’, in Phiri and Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa, pp. 496–7. ¹³⁷ J.-C. Luka-Mbole, ‘The Significance of Bible Translations for African Theological education’, in Phiri and Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa, p. 519. ¹³⁸ viz. Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir (Grand Rapids, 2012); S. Hauerwas and W. H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville, 1989); J. A. Mahn, ‘What are Churches For? Toward an Ecclesiology of the Cross after Christendom’, Dialog 51.1 (March 2012), pp. 462–3.

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Although inculturation as a process includes accommodation,¹³⁹ innovation, consultation, and the creation of dissent through conflict, it also produces revitalization and resilience. Examples of this abound, both in the Majority World and in marginal locations in the First World, and have given rise to a growing literature on concepts such as ‘spiritual capital’.¹⁴⁰ McRoberts’ work on Four Corners in Boston demonstrates the interaction between churches and religious and communal revitalization in socially and politically depleted environments.¹⁴¹ Oleson notes the same with regard to Pacific peoples.¹⁴² It cannot occur outside a particular historical period in which ‘a situation in a cultural ecosystem . . . demands important changes in its operation if it is to remain viable’.¹⁴³ Major change has to happen. This can occur through the use of experimental forms of communal worship ‘that share striking similarities with the primitive Christian communities of the preConstantine, missionary church unfettered by power and riches’.¹⁴⁴ Again, revitalization and renewal can be seen in the growth of Pentecostalism. In all, this leads to what Ukpong calls ‘integrative inculturation theology’, which is a dynamic on-going process of conscious, critical and mutual interaction between the Christian faith and the religious and secular aspects of cultures such that the Christian reality becomes appropriated from within the perspective of and within the resources of these cultures to challenge and transform society and bring about a re-interpretation of faith. It seeks to open up new understandings of faith and lead to recreating culture and society.¹⁴⁵

¹³⁹ S. De Gruchy and S. Chirongoma, ‘Earth, Water, Fire and Wind: Elements of African Ecclesiologies’, in G. Mannion and L. S. Mudge, eds., The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church (London, 2010), p. 299; Ma and Ross, eds., Mission Spirituality and Authentic Discipleship, p. 226; M. P. K. Okyerefo, ‘Spirituality and Historic Mission Christianity in Africa: Ghanaization in Roman Catholicism’, in Ma and Ross, eds., Mission Spirituality and Authentic Discipleship, p. 43;M. N. Schmalz, ‘Dalit Catholic Tactics of Marginality at a North Indian Mission’, History of Religions 44.3 (February 2005), p. 218. ¹⁴⁰ For a view from an Islamic perspective, see O. Dsouli, N. Khan, and N. K. Kakabadse, ‘Spiritual Capital’, Journal of Management Development 31.10 (October 2012), pp. 1058–75; and see Hughes’ response: P. Hughes, ‘Spiritual Capital?’, Pointers: Bulletin of the Christian Research Association 18.3 (September 2008): p. 20. ¹⁴¹ O. M. McRoberts, ‘Saving Four Corners: Religion and Revitalization in a Depressed Neighbourhood’, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2000. ¹⁴² A. A. Oleson, ‘All People Want to Sing: Mortlockese Migrants Controlling Knowledge, Historical Disaster, and Protestant Identity on Pohnpei, FSM’, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007. ¹⁴³ P. D. Leedy and J. E. Ormond, Practical Research: Planning and Design (Columbus, 1985), p. 184. ¹⁴⁴ Okyerefo, ‘Spirituality and Historic Mission Christianity in Africa’, in Ma and Ross, eds., Mission Spirituality and Authentic Discipleship, p. 39. ¹⁴⁵ J. Ukpong, ‘Inculturation Theology in Africa: Historical and Hermeneutical Elements’, in Phiri and Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa, p. 531 (emphasis in original).

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In this definition, the inculturating church is not abstracted and spiritual but integral to both culture and society, transformed and transformative of identities at every level. While the focus has traditionally been on the instigators of change from external sources, or the predicates of change, more recent approaches to ‘reception’ focus on the process whereby ‘a [resident] Christian community acknowledges, accepts, and integrates the insights of a church teaching or experience’.¹⁴⁶ This raises further questions: Who are the agents of transformation? What is the process of democratization, where everyone can enjoy full participation and access to the sacred as the result of baptism in the Spirit (speaking in tongues, for example)? How are they ‘inserted’ into the context in relation to others? It is here that distinctions between non-reflective, reflective, and self-reflexive praxis are useful. Non-reflective thought proposes a direct relationship between the conditions of life and the ‘spiritual solutions’ to the problems to which they give rise. Reflexive thought places the self in the frame—self-reflexive thought considers ‘the self looking at the self ’, which is in the frame. Non-reflective thought may analyse context, but reflexive thought asks the methodological (i.e. constructive) questions, ‘How do I analyse this context?’ and ‘How do these factors affect my approach?’ Self-reflexive thought asks ‘How am I inserted into the space I share with the others?’ and ‘How does this relate to the practice of Christians and others in the past and in the present?’ These were not always elective transitions. The twentieth century was marked by increasing instantaneity of entangled experience, whereby globalization advanced rapidly, refounding the commonweal of the world relatively less on shared commodities and increasingly on a shared existential framework. In the 1930s, the average Australian or Canadian, say, may have had a passing knowledge of Africa, as a place from which commodities such as coffee and chocolate came, and where the subject of Phantom comics resided. By the 1990s, it was a place of other commodities (especially blood diamonds), but made more physically present through the appearance of increasing numbers of African refugees. By the 2010s, it was associated (through Ebola) with daily risks in every airport and hospital in the world, and the headlines tracking the deaths of ‘irregular migrants’ in the Mediterranean (over 3,000 in 2017). In short, across the twentieth century, the Majority World transitioned from ‘object to subject’ for the West. Entanglement became quotidian—a daily dealing with the political and social consequences of mass people movements— rather than optional and the matter of occasional ‘adventure’. The consequence was a shift in the nature of mission. At the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘mission’ was in and to the Majority World; by the end of the same century, mission was increasingly to or by majority worlders ¹⁴⁶ J. Kroeger, ‘Papal Mission Wisdom: Five Mission Encyclicals, 1919–1959’, in Bevans, ed., A Century of Catholic Mission, p. 100.

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(either actually or potentially) resident in the West—from everywhere to everywhere. While churches in the Minority World learned only slowly how to receive, adapt, innovate, or reflect in this new circumstance, early signs recognizing this shift came in the use of the concept of ‘partnership’ on terms set by the minority sending nations.¹⁴⁷ Attractive as the concept was in theory, it was a flawed and transitional term. It failed to integrate partnership as praxis; the imbalances in power and resources ensured that agency was retained by the sending organizations from the global North. Transactional arrangements, and their own bureaucratic disconnection from local communities, meant that relationships between the Old Dissent in the global North and the New Dissents in the global South continued to be based on power rather than authentic koinonia, which implies a renunciation of power. ‘Churches of the North’, proposes the American Sinophile Philip Wickeri, need to reject their reliance on power. Placing themselves in faith before God in solidarity with peoples who have been marginalised, so that all people’s hopes and dreams may be transformed in God’s image. The kenosis of mission keeps the church from initiating a new form of colonialism, and mission becomes the power of self-emptying.¹⁴⁸

It is interesting to note that in Pentecostalism, it is by democratization and the laity taking power and creating koinonia that authentic faith expressions occur. Over time, ‘partnership’ was forced upon the West through the diaspora movement, the receiving nations in the West losing control of the agenda and pace of change.¹⁴⁹ Not that the emergence of African Christianities ‘negotiating and assimilating notions of the global, while maintaining their local identities’¹⁵⁰ has meant true mutuality in the new countries of reception in the West. Most transnational communities—Koreans in California, Ghanaians in London, Indians in Birmingham—are still in or dominated by their first generation. As Adogame notes with regard to African Christian communities, diaspora has put them in the picture, but they brought the ‘frame’ with them: African Christian communities consisting largely of immigrants, typically develop a set of structures and practices designed simultaneously to help their members to maintain and reproduce their cultural and religious heritage, identities on the one hand, and also assisting immigrants in the process of adapting to the new host context.¹⁵¹

¹⁴⁷ Cf. Duncan, Partnership in Mission. ¹⁴⁸ P. L. Wickeri, ‘Towards a Kenosis of Mission: Emptying and Empowerment for the Church and for the World’, in P. L. Wickeri, ed., Scripture, Community and Mission (London, 2002), p. 349. ¹⁴⁹ Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora, pp. 196–8. ¹⁵⁰ Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora, p. xi. ¹⁵¹ Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora, p. 203.

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This is not to be perceived simply as a ‘black’ issue. In diasporic receiving countries, massive all-white African congregations (in places like London and Perth) have also been established, distinguished not by colour or style of worship but by language and the static nature of their fellowship. There are obvious tensions as these communities become multigenerational, and the space of practice becomes extended (through family, labour, and other connections) across a variety of globally-scattered places. Outwardly, they are world-transforming as perpetual transients both in their chosen locations and at home by their eventual return,¹⁵² targeting local peoples, though inwardly self-maintaining and self-transforming (as is witnessed by the growing autonomy of women).¹⁵³ Such changes are associated with emergent and resilient theologies and spiritualities. While prosperity preaching, for example, is repugnant to most Western theologians (ironically the most privileged of their caste), it is an adaptive set of strategies which has enabled communities to give themselves form through a sense of divine Presence and personal mission. This is particularly true in the Pentecostal movement and is espoused by all races, especially the upwardly mobile whose spirituality is a source of prosperity.¹⁵⁴ Birgit Meyer has noted that Pentecostal self-insertion has become integrated into globalization: In principle. Anything can be imbued with the Holy Spirit and thus be part of a Born-again believer’s life. This is what accounts for the close connection between the spread of capitalism, consumption, and the appeal of Pentecostalism: Pentecostalism ‘embeds’ neoliberal economic policies.¹⁵⁵

This is developed by Asamoah-Gyadu, who suggests that Pentecostal teaching recommends that youth make a difference in all aspects of life including investment, economics, business, banking, land acquisition, landed property, money, and marketing.¹⁵⁶ This is a direct form of dissent from liberationist teachings regarding God’s preferential option for the poor.¹⁵⁷ However, more importantly, as those communities encounter poverty and injustice in their own settings, it gives rise to more nuanced theologies of suffering, social action, and prophetic incarnation. Likewise, the emptying of the traditional Western churches (and the possession of their buildings by diasporic Christian communities) has given greater voice to energetic ‘flourishing’ themes in ¹⁵² Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora, p. 26. ¹⁵³ J. K. McGuiney, ‘Faith Based Organisations and the Work of International Development’, in M. O’Sullivan and B. Flanagan, Spiritual Capital: The Practice of Spirituality in Christian Perspective (Farnham, 2012), pp. 111–18. ¹⁵⁴ Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, p. 5; cf. J. K. Asamoah-Gyadu, Contemporary Pentecostal Christianity: Interpretations from an African Context (Oxford, 2013), pp. 44, 45. ¹⁵⁵ Birgit Meyer, ‘Pentecostalism and Globalisation’, in Allan Anderson et al., eds., Studying Global Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods (Berkeley, 2010), p. 118. ¹⁵⁶ Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, pp. 19–20. ¹⁵⁷ Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, p. 96.

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global settings, such as the World Council of Churches, which has recently turned to capturing reflexive, emerging pneumatologies in its public pronouncements. At its best, the result is ‘not escapism from the challenges of daily life; rather, a genuine spirituality of mission directly confronts the inequities in every society and opposes the false claims of consumerism, rampant individualism, greed, and power.’¹⁵⁸ Here is evidence of a two-way process of adaptation, innovation, and reflection—the zenith of a praxis approach where practice (explicit in liturgy, implicit in community formation) precedes theology as the latter arises out of fluid experiential contexts. This is rarely a smooth process. Adogame’s emphasis on adaptation creating dissent (i.e. resistance and/or rejection or negotiation between world views),¹⁵⁹ explains the resilience demonstrated, for example, in beliefs in the reality of evil ‘principalities and powers’ (‘spirits or superhuman powers’, Romans 8:38) and the practice of spiritual warfare. While these developments are treated in the West as if they were ‘unnatural’ or ‘abnormal’ and ‘are often subjected to spiritual scrutiny and extrapolation’, they can also be interpreted as a fluid discourse between vitality, transformation, and transmigration. Diaspora churches ‘are conduits for member’s self-insertion and integration into the new cultural environment. They also represent, self-evidently, channels for reinventing and maintaining local, religio-cultural identities.’¹⁶⁰ ‘Spiritual warfare’ (reappropriated by contemporary Pentecostalism from Paul’s assertions in Ephesians 6:12)¹⁶¹ has thus readily flowed out of Latin America and Africa into many charismatic settings in the West. It is shortsighted to view these religio-cultural identities as merely part of a top-down politicization process reflecting imagined tensions between religion and secularization.¹⁶² In the Majority World, adaptation commences in a preexisting cosmology, when one ‘recognizes’ parallel Latin American, Asian, Oceanian, or African emphases as these converge on the global pulpit through, for example, the institutional charismatic movement.¹⁶³ Prosperity preaching is an example of adaptation to the ‘existential needs of Africans’ and other

¹⁵⁸ Madge Karecki, ‘A Missiological Reflection on “Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes” ’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 38.4 (October 2014), https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-387828399/a-missiological-reflectionon-together-towards-life, accessed 12/5/2015. ¹⁵⁹ Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora, p. 85. ¹⁶⁰ Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora, pp. 86–7. ¹⁶¹ Charles Agyin-Agare, Power in Prayer: Taking your Blessings by Force (Hoornaar, 2001), p. 16. ¹⁶² Which are, as Stambach notes, interlocked ‘co-ideations’ which in different settings co-opt one another in the interests of practice: Amy Stambach, ‘Spiritual Warfare 101: Preparing the Student for Christian Battle’, Journal of Religion in Africa 39.2 (2009), p. 138. ¹⁶³ Jean DeBernardi, ‘Spiritual Warfare and Territorial Spirits: The Globalization and Localisation of a “Practical Theology” ’, Religious Studies and Theology 18.2 (December 1999), p. 66.

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majority worlders,¹⁶⁴ most evident among Pentecostals and charismatics, but also glossed and negotiated among more rationalized forms of Christianity supported from the First World. Religious identities are also fluid both in time and space. In this it is important not to underestimate the contribution they can make to the host nations out of their substantial spiritual resource benefits. Stambach notes, for instance, the contribution towards inscribing secular space essential for modernizing African nation states,¹⁶⁵ a role historically played in the West by dissenting traditions; while DeBernardi points to social cohesion and/or social continuity functions among ethnic Chinese communities in Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia which contribute significantly to that dispersed community’s wealth and influence¹⁶⁶ as well as to its security. This ‘spiritual capital’ is eminently ‘practical’ (i.e. practicebased) and indigenized, and is not to be confused with merely serving the interests of Minority World exponents seeking to ‘re-enchant’ fading Western Christian traditions. As the century has progressed, some Pentecostal/charismatic churches too were beginning to suffer from symptoms of decline which is also a form of dissent arising out of the demise of the first generation (1930s–50s) of charismatic leaders. This was marked by an absence of youth and children’s ministries, and the concomitant devotion to healing ministries at the expense of discipleship training related to evangelism, expository preaching, and theological education. Added to which these churches had to cope with the positive and negative impact of ‘floating members’.¹⁶⁷ Tensions between classical and neo-pentecostal churches in constituencies as varied as Australia, Indonesia, Argentina, and the USA essentially reflect tensions between adaptations made earlier in the century, and those which emerged in the post-war, neo-liberal period of high globalization. The issue of resistance and/or rejection has deep roots in the mission history of most continents. During the attempt to restore the ‘lost authenticity’ of South African blacks,¹⁶⁸ Indian Dalits, or Queensland Aboriginal peoples,¹⁶⁹

¹⁶⁴ Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora, p. 93; cf. Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, pp. 95–7. ¹⁶⁵ Stambach, ‘Spiritual Warfare 101’, p. 139. ¹⁶⁶ DeBernardi, ‘Spiritual Warfare and Territorial Spirits’, pp. 86–7; and see Heidi Dahles, ‘In Pursuit of Capital: The Charismatic Turn among the Chinese Managerial and Professional Class in Malaysia’, Asian Ethnicity 8.2 (June 2007), pp. 89–109; Daniel P. S. Goh, ‘Chinese Religion and the Challenge of Modernity in Malaysia and Singapore: Syncretism, Hybridisation and Transfiguration’, Asian Journal of Social Science 37.1 (2009), pp. 107–37. ¹⁶⁷ Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora, p. 96. ¹⁶⁸ A. F. Henningsen, ‘On Difference, Sameness and Double Binds, Ambiguous Discourses, Failed Aspirations’, in Nielsen et al., eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters, p. 135. ¹⁶⁹ Howard Le Couteur, ‘The Moreton Bay Ministry of the Reverend Johann Handt: A Reappraisal’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 84.2 (December 1998), pp. 146ff.

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for example, Moravians and Pietists demanded that their standards be rigidly complied with. Only the dispossessed complied with their demands in large numbers. Mass conversions did not take place¹⁷⁰ even when Moravians and Pietists were invited to enter an area—local people often rejected the ‘strategy of sameness’. The case of the Moravian brothers William, Jonathan, and Petros Mazwi is an example of adaptation to the context. Jonathan left the Moravians and joined the Presbyterian Church of Africa, a dissenting church which had seceded from the Free Church of Scotland Mission in South Africa.¹⁷¹ William set himself apart from his brethren whom he treated as ‘other’, all the while criticizing his white mentors. His actions sparked a ‘race versus class’ debate, and saw him marginalized from middle-class white society. All of their responses (not uncommon in German missionary circles, white or black, where their use by British organizations was often attended by alienation) were related to a failure to achieve their aspirations. The strategy of sameness has its counterpart in the ‘strategy of difference’.¹⁷² While rejecting the white hegemonic paradigm, this strategy wishes also to benefit from it. An example is the Moravian Goshen Kloof, where inhabitants used their occupancy of land to secure their future prospects as ‘aboriginals of the country’ so that they could be identified as authentically different.¹⁷³ In both cases, however, the authority to designate people as ‘authentic’ remained with the missionaries. Yet ‘authenticity discourses can work both ways: they can be part of a divide-and-conquer policy while simultaneously being an empowerment tool in the hands of the oppressed’¹⁷⁴ leading to ‘double bind’ communication—‘become like us but stay as you are/were’.¹⁷⁵ In this setting, the puritanism and seeming rejection of traditional religion in, for example, the Balokole, or conversion among the Naga, can be appropriated as a way of co-opting and bypassing artificial nativisms. In another situation, during the 1930s in Natal, South Africa, the American Board Mission encountered difficulties with local pastors due to conflicts regarding policy and status. Even when this was consonant with the government ¹⁷⁰ Henningsen, ‘On Difference, Sameness and Double Binds, Ambiguous Discourses, Failed Aspirations’, in Nielsen et al., eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters, p. 138. ¹⁷¹ Henningsen, ‘On Difference, Sameness and Double Binds, Ambiguous Discourses, Failed Aspirations’, in Nielsen et al., eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters, p. 139; cf. Graham A. Duncan, ‘African Churches Willing to Pay Their Own Bills’: The Role of Money in the Formation of Ethiopian-type Churches with Particular Reference to the Mzimba Secession, African Historical Review 45.2 (2013), pp. 52–79. ¹⁷² Henningsen, ‘On Difference, Sameness and Double Binds, Ambiguous Discourses, Failed Aspirations’, in Nielsen et al., eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters, p. 145. ¹⁷³ Henningsen, ‘On Difference, Sameness and Double Binds, Ambiguous Discourses, Failed Aspirations’, in Nielsen et al., eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters, p. 147. ¹⁷⁴ Henningsen, ‘On Difference, Sameness and Double Binds, Ambiguous Discourses, Failed Aspirations’, in Nielsen et al., eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters, pp. 149–50. ¹⁷⁵ Henningsen, ‘On Difference, Sameness and Double Binds, Ambiguous Discourses, Failed Aspirations’, in Nielsen et al., eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters, p. 153.

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policy of transferring authority to Africans, ‘The quarrels between the missionary leadership and the pastorate in one sense reflected the fact that the indigenisation model was starting to work.’¹⁷⁶ This is an example of contestation which was vital for survival and growth to occur: All missionaries paid lip-service to the idea that, eventually, the churches they had founded would be taken over by their converts, or their descendants. In practice though, most saw this as happening far in the future, far later than was envisaged by their congregations. . . . [T]he result was an insoluble conflict and schism. More often, however, matters did not come to such a pitch, and compromises were continually worked out. In this tension lies the dynamic of much of South African religious history.¹⁷⁷

Such negotiations were not uncommon in mission settings as the twentieth century progressed: whether by design or counter-intentional internal logic, missionaries’ own efforts determined that minority worlders would be making the final choices. This is especially true in the case of the African Initiated Churches (AICs) of the Ethiopian type, where Africans rejected European control while consciously or unwittingly also perpetuating the doctrine, liturgy, polity, and dress of their former masters. Perhaps it was, as Gatwa suggests, something that ‘survived in the subconscious’.¹⁷⁸ Coming out of a Catholic sensibility for debates (internally and with Protestants) over the nature of syncretism, Hastings is less sanguine: ‘time and again’ he notes, Africans chose ‘to steal [the mission churches’] clothes and grow very effectively as just this and little else’.¹⁷⁹ Yet in such cases they now made their own choices even if they were to perpetuate the status quo. Kalu challenges this assumption in his assertion that ‘they were ahead of their times and had started a process of reflection that perceived Christianity as a non-Western religion, asserted African contribution to the Jesus movement and sought to fashion an authentic African response to the gospel’s good news’.¹⁸⁰ Bredekamp and Ross, following the Comaroffs, assert that the indigenous consciousness was not so easily colonized as their land;¹⁸¹ nor was their massive contribution to mission Christianity and politics.¹⁸²

¹⁷⁶ P. B. Rich, ‘Albert Luthuli and the American Board Mission in South Africa’, in H. Bredekamp and R. J. Ross, eds., Missions and Christianity in South African History (Johannesburg, 1995), p. 194. ¹⁷⁷ Bredekamp and Ross, eds., Missions and Christianity in South African History, pp. 3–4. ¹⁷⁸ Gatwa, ‘The Cross-Cultural Mission’, p. 86. ¹⁷⁹ A. Hastings, A History of African Christianity: 1950–1975 (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 265–6. ¹⁸⁰ Kalu, ed., African Christianity, p. 259. ¹⁸¹ Bredekamp and Ross, eds., Missions and Christianity in South African History, p. 4. ¹⁸² D. Werner, ‘Viability and Ecumenical Perspectives for Theological Education in Africa: Legacy and New Beginnings as seen from ETE/WCC’, in Phiri and Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa, p. 82.

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Resistance and separation were more than simply a matter of rejection of Western Christianity. They were simultaneously ‘a resistance movement involving a protest and an affirmation of people’s identity and personhood in the religious context as a matter of their faith commitment’.¹⁸³ It also ‘sought to recreate and moor itself on to the prideful, golden age of African civilisation’¹⁸⁴ which had survived the rise of Islam. Secular matters as well as spiritual matters were the concern of local indigenizing churches. The response to apartheid in South Africa was to be a leading example of this and would influence other ‘reconciliation’ processes around the world, including Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and in reconciliation processes in Rwanda,¹⁸⁵ East Germany,¹⁸⁶ and Australia. Such processes escaped becoming the preserve of ‘professional’ theologians: all citizens became interlocutors. Hence there exists a complementary relationship with liberation theologies, which, though ‘declared dead in the 1990s’ as a result of the collapsing credibility of Marxist social analysis,¹⁸⁷ have re-emerged as a means of wrestling with the parallel issues of authentic self-worth and freedom through empowerment affecting many people in the ‘fourth world’.¹⁸⁸ African Christian identity needed to restore its cultural heritage and religious consciousness as an ontological exercise,¹⁸⁹ one that led to ‘integrity in conversion, a unity of self in which one’s past is genuinely integrated into present commitment’.¹⁹⁰ Similar developments (though much dependent on the size of the constituency and the relative shape of the secular public sphere) may be seen among Asian and Oceanian theologians. As Australian indigenous theologian Evelyn Parkin has noted: ‘We are not only the “Children of God”, we are also the “Children of the Dreaming”.’¹⁹¹ For some inside this ancient Durkheimian point of comparison, traditional religion was ‘a kind of Old Testament precursor to

¹⁸³ Ukpong, ‘Inculturation Theology in Africa’, p. 533 (emphasis in original). ¹⁸⁴ Ogbu U. Kalu, ‘Ethiopianism in African Christianity’, in Kalu, ed., African Christianity, pp. 258–77, 266. ¹⁸⁵ Samuel Cyuma, Picking up the Pieces (Oxford, 2012). ¹⁸⁶ Ralph K. Würstenberg, The Political Dimension of Reconciliation (Grand Rapids, 2009). ¹⁸⁷ Kwok Pui-lan, ‘Liberation Theology in the Twenty-First Century’, in Joerg Rieger, ed., Opting for the Margins: Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology (Oxford and New York, 2003), pp. 72ff. ¹⁸⁸ viz. Thia Cooper, ed., The Reemergence of Liberation Theologies: Models for the TwentyFirst Century (Basingstoke, 2013). ¹⁸⁹ K. Bediako, Theology and Identity: The Impact of Culture upon Christian Thought in the Second Century and in Modern Africa (Oxford, 1993), p. 93. ¹⁹⁰ K. Cragg, ‘Conversion and Convertibility with Special Reference to Muslims’, in J. R. W. Stott and R. Coote, eds., Down to Earth: Studies in Christianity and Culture (Grand Rapids, 1980), p. 194. ¹⁹¹ See Simon Chan, Grassroots Asian Theology: Thinking the Faith from the Ground up (Downers Grove, 2014); Cox, The Invention of God in Indigenous Societies; Evelyn Parkin, ‘The Sources and Resources of Our Indigenous Theology: An Australian Aboriginal Perspective’, The Ecumenical Review 62.4 (December 2010), p. 392.

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the Christian message’,¹⁹² a view which enables continuity and does not disrupt the gains of the present. Such attempts to reframe authenticity touch upon the core issues of orthodoxy and dissent, coherence and power. The validity of such an approach is the catalyst for substantial discussion in Majority World theological circles. For his part, Kwame Bediako was convinced that ‘the African theologian’s concern with the traditional religions of Africa must find its fullest interpretation within the framework of Christian theology’.¹⁹³ Having undertaken a comparative study of the early African Graeco-Roman world and the modern African context, he reached the conclusion that: [I]n the process of the adjustments, adaptations and rejections that took place, that some of the formative factors in the Christian theological tradition were clarified and bequeathed to later generations.¹⁹⁴

The dialogical issues are fraught. On the one hand, mission Christianity’s vision of a fourth world tabula rasa wiped out rich pasts and rendered popular theologies incapable of realistic dialogue. The rise of Majority World theology, concurrent with the rise of Majority World nationalism and Fourth World glocalism, also arose in connection with radical theology in Europe which had intellectualized the one living God out of existence¹⁹⁵ and distanced indigenous peoples (at home and in diaspora) from an immanent Lord known in the continuity of the tradition of the church and in its liturgy. The universality of this latter remains at the core of (g)local ‘grass-roots’ and popular beliefs, and so creates the additional problem of detachment between the energies of popular religious movements and the academy. In Chan’s words, ‘much of what the West knows as Asian theology consists largely of elitist accounts of what Asian theologians are saying, and elitist theologians rarely take grassroots Christianity seriously.’¹⁹⁶ On the one hand, it is not possible to engage ‘authentically’ without taking account of local/glocal culture, or the history which is marked by suffering, exploitation, and liberation. On the other, a critical/conflictual approach which simplifies the terms to ‘the West vs. the rest’, or is swallowed by local nationalisms, denies more academic liberation theologies the ability to impact upon what they theorize as being their natural communities of reception. The objective of theology, after all, is not only to be a theology for a particular community, but the contribution of a particular community to the Christian tradition globally.

¹⁹² Philip Jenkins, ‘The Spirit of Dreamtime’, The Christian Century 132.6 (March 2015), p. 45. ¹⁹³ Bediako, Theology and Identity, p. 5. ¹⁹⁴ Bediako, Theology and Identity, p. 8. ¹⁹⁵ E. B. Idowu, S.V. ‘God’, in K. A. Dickson and P. Ellingworth, eds., Biblical Revelation and African Beliefs (London, 1969), p. 21. ¹⁹⁶ Chan, Grassroots Asian Theology, p. 1.

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These problems are definitional for theological education, where contextualization as ‘listening to the culture and discerning the ways of God within the context’ are equally important.¹⁹⁷ Institution foundation was important— the finding of adequate resources to sustain them even more so. Asian countries, particularly Singapore (where Trinity Theological College, Singapore Bible College, and Asia Theological Centre are all well-connected programmes) were among the best equipped, though at the same time in a region of vast discrepancies. On the one hand, the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Burma, and Cambodia were places with endemic poverty, while ‘in other Asian countries relative economic affluence has been bought at a high price . . . [in the face of] centralized, authoritarian and repressive regimes’.¹⁹⁸ The ‘social harmony’ agenda even in prosperous Singapore remains a significant shaper of theological expression. In Africa, the formation of the Institute of Contextual Theology in 1980 ‘to develop a truly South African theology’¹⁹⁹ helped AICs and others (blacks, youth, feminist, and Kairos theologians, etc.) to speak out for themselves. It also facilitated engagement on contextual issues such as poverty, abuse, HIV and AIDS, and xenophobia through ‘a rigorous social, cultural, historical, economic and political analysis within theological reflection; and more action’.²⁰⁰ For the period, this was particularly innovative and creative. But innovation has been perhaps most marked in the rapidly developing Pentecostal movement.

INNOVATION I N PENTECOSTALISM In colonized nations, it can be argued that Pentecostalism spread as a coping mechanism to manage the effects of colonialism, white settlers, and missionaries²⁰¹ in addition to developing modernism, Islamic pietism, and Calvinistic Protestantism.²⁰² Focusing on mobile and ‘praxis’-oriented forms (such as prayer, prophecy, exorcism, and healing, inter alia weapons in spiritual ¹⁹⁷ M. Naidoo, ed., Between the Real and the Ideal: Ministerial Formation in South African Churches (Pretoria, 2012), p. 163. ¹⁹⁸ Lourdino A. Yuzon, ‘Towards a Contextual Theology’, CTC Bulletin 1.XII–XIII (July 1994–September 1995), http://cca.org.hk/home/ctc/ctc94-02/1.yuzon.htm, accessed 18/5/2015. ¹⁹⁹ A. Nolan, ‘Doing Theology in the South African Context’, in W. Jenkinson and H. O. Sullivan, eds., Trends in Mission towards the Third Millennium (New York, 1991), p. 235. ²⁰⁰ N. Botha, ‘Outcomes Based Education, Accreditation and Quality Assurance in Open Distance Learning: A Case Study on Theology at the University of South Africa’, in Werner et al., eds., Handbook of Theological Education in World Christianity, p. 194. ²⁰¹ Afe Adogame, ‘Foreword’, in Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, p. xvii. ²⁰² Barbara W. Andaya, ‘Christianity in South-East Asia: Similarity and Difference in a Culturally Diverse Region’, in Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity, pp. 108–21, 118.

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warfare against evil powers which are life-destroying), it worked through a marked engagement between the natural and supernatural worlds. This was the case in Rajasthan, India, where Lukose argues for an indigenous origin for Pentecostalism. It originated, he suggests, in numerous simultaneous Spirit revivals which took place in established churches throughout the country (the Tirunelveli-Travancore revival in the 1860s, the Mukti revival of 1905–6, among others) and became the source of a contextual missiology of the Spirit challenging some Pentecostalists’ more traditional outlooks.²⁰³ Personal conversion to God through the spirit (on offer to all without condition), empowers people to be assertive in societies where, often, they have been excluded through a process of democratization. Not only is Pentecostalism ‘world religion’ (Blumhofer), but it is also ‘the option of the poor’ (Freston), particularly of women (Robert), due to its potential for reordering the world, and for providing new openings for leadership and communal respectability.²⁰⁴ In Jenkins’ famous summation of Robert’s work: ‘If we want to visualize a “typical” contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela.’²⁰⁵ As Freston notes, in most cases that woman’s faith will be pentecostal/charismatic in form. The health issues of women are the core business of many Pentecostal ministries, from Enoch Aminu’s Ghanaian Pure Fire miracle Ministries to Mercy Ministries in the USA.²⁰⁶ Pentecostalism has grown readily in regions such as Africa, Asia, and Oceania, where there is a cultural disposition to recognize the existence of a spiritual realm and supernatural events as ‘normal’ along with a ‘pluralistic religious environment’.²⁰⁷ As Andrew Evans, a missionary child who grew up in India and worked in Papua New Guinea before returning to Australia to found a megachurch and lead Australia’s largest Pentecostal movement, has noted, it was only when Pentecostal churches allowed the praxis of the Spirit to match the preaching of the Word, that pentecostalism began to expand rapidly in Papua New Guinea.²⁰⁸ Julie Ma has noted the same among the Kankana-ey in the northern Philippines, where power encounters essentially expunged syncretism.²⁰⁹ By way of comparison, Pentecostalism in Europe and the USA

²⁰³ Wessly Lukose, Contextual Missiology of the Spirit: Pentecostalism in Rajasthan, India (Oxford, 2013), pp. 205, 208. ²⁰⁴ See Dana L. Robert, ‘World Christianity as a Women’s Movement’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 30.4 (October 2006), pp. 180–6, 188. ²⁰⁵ Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York, 2002), p. 2. ²⁰⁶ Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, p. 65. ²⁰⁷ A. H. Anderson, ‘Foreword’, in Asamoah-Gyadu, Contemporary Pentecostal Christianity, p. xv. ²⁰⁸ Interview, 9 October 2009, Pentecostal Heritage Centre, Alphacrucis College. ²⁰⁹ J. Ma, ‘Ministry of the Assemblies of God among the Kankana-ey Tribe in the Northern Philippines: A History of a Theological Encounter’. Fuller Theological Seminary, School of World Mission, PhD Intercultural Studies.

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has always been relatively marginal to public life. While sectarian in origin, its global spread and increasingly social orientation has made many of its constituent movements more open to discussions with other churches. Perhaps this is attributable to Pentecostalism having a developing, rather than a fixed, theology through processes of reformulation and reappropriation. As Pype notes, ‘Pentecostal ideology at large is something that is still being fashioned; it is a belief system that is in the making, under construction and certainly not (yet) fine-tuned . . . This ambiguity produces space for creativity and improvisation and consequently leads to variety within the Pentecostal scene.’²¹⁰ Pype refers to this as apocalyptic imagination while Gifford calls it ‘enchanted imagination’.²¹¹ Gifford distinguishes this belief in pervasive spiritual forces from a ‘disenchanted and internally secularised Christianity’ which is based on human development. Pentecostalism has become the faith of the ordinary person with its emphasis on healing and spiritual renewal; it resonates with traditional religion through local revivals which emphasize prophecy, glossolalia, miracles, and deliverance from satanic powers. On the other hand, originally hostile historic churches have also adapted their traditions to accommodate the charismatic renewal, a major bulwark against the long decline which many have experienced across the twentieth century.²¹² As a result of the rise of Pentecostalism, there has been a revival in many denominations which has, in its commonality of experience, ironically decreased the perceived differences between them.²¹³ The decision, after a ten-year ban, by the Southern Baptist Convention to accept missionaries who speak in tongues, and the ongoing Pentecostal–Catholic dialogue, are late developments in a long-running, if sporadic, rapprochement.²¹⁴ The positioning of pentecostals as a ‘protest movement against [western] “man-made creeds” and against the “coldness” of traditional worship’ also made it a natural matrix into which indigenous traditions could connect.²¹⁵ While rarely an anti-colonial movement, it has been, in its ‘do it yourself ’, autonomous, grass-roots spirituality an effective mechanism for countering

²¹⁰ Katrien Pype, The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama: Religion, Media and Gender in Kinshasa (New York, 2012), p. 58. ²¹¹ Paul Gifford, Christianity, Development and Modernity in Africa (London, 2015), p. 147. ²¹² Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, pp. 8, 9, 177. ²¹³ Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, p. 8. ²¹⁴ Greg Horton and Yonat Shimron, ‘Southern Baptists to open their ranks to missionaries who speak in tongues’, Religion News 14 May 2015, pp. 116–17, https://www.religionnews.com/ 2015/05/14/southern-baptists-open-ranks-missionaries-speak-tongues/, accessed 18/5/2015; ‘On Becoming a Christian’, Report of the Fifth Phase of the International Dialogue Between Some Classical Pentecostal Churches and Leaders and the Catholic Church (1998–2006), http:// www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/eccl-comm-docs/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_ 20060101_becoming-a-christian_en.html, accessed 18/5/2015. ²¹⁵ H. Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (London, 1996), p. 14.

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colonialism and for developing autochthonous traditions. Historically and contemporaneously, In the African context worship is also an engagement with the supernatural world of inanimate beings and ancestors. When the older African initiated churches emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, they were affirmed not only for their ability to incorporate charismatic renewal phenomena into their worship but also for engaging constructively with African ways of being religious.²¹⁶

Hence, people found in pentecostal settings solutions to their problems and needs through prayer. Pentecostalism offers a radical new life—a place to belong and be at home. Central to its innovative style is its ability to stand both inside and beyond traditional culture. It is also innovative in the manner in which it has become the main religious expression in diasporic faith in European immigrant churches²¹⁷ now recognized as New Mission Churches.²¹⁸ It aims ‘at revivalism and the renewal of world Christianity’ and can therefore (ironically, given its often anti-ecclesial expressions) be classified as an ‘ecclesiological experience’.²¹⁹ Asamoah-Gyadu summarizes the situation well: ‘Pentecostalism thus provides the ritual context within which the consequences of evil and spirit possession [as well as good] may be dealt with.’ This has been appropriated by other traditions.²²⁰ These ritual contexts and spaces demonstrate continuity with the older independent church traditions. In Africa, Latin America, and in some parts of Asia (such as Korea), the potency of such renewed Christian spiritualities have largely squeezed traditional religions out of the public sphere. This is not to say, however, that traditional religions have disappeared: there is a ready syncretism in most African countries (in Benin, for example, where voodoo ‘is so interwoven with daily life that it borders on the banal’),²²¹ and in China or Korea the Confucian/ Buddhist syncretism seen in the Taiping Rebellion is just as active in incorporating symbols and practices today. In the global space, as Madsen and Siegler note, ‘The confluence of Asian and Western religious cultures thus swirls in dynamic feedback loops. Chinese religions are both contributors to and recipients of a global search for transcendence.’²²² In declining economic and social conditions, there have been cases of political leaders attempting to revitalize renewal Christianity as a form of anti-colonialism. The rapid growth of populist self-grown churches, particularly those with a materialist and ²¹⁶ Asamoah-Gyadu, Contemporary Pentecostal Christianity, p. 25. ²¹⁷ Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora, and see Openshaw, ‘Home is Where the Spirit Is’. ²¹⁸ Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, p. 27. ²¹⁹ Asamoah-Gyadu, Contemporary Pentecostal Christianity, pp. 5–6. ²²⁰ Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, p. 156. ²²¹ M. Mark, ‘Voodoo in Africa: Christian demonisation angers followers’, The Guardian 7 December 2012. ²²² R. Madsen and E. Siegler, ‘The Globalization of Chinese Religions and Traditions’, in D. A. Palmer, G. Shive, and P. L. Wickeri, eds., Chinese Religious Life (Oxford, 2011), p. 239.

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explicitly self-advancing theology, can result in frictions across tribal lines and with established political leaders. In Africa there is even a small but emerging secularization lobby.²²³ This has led to re-evaluation and reform among the historic churches, providing Majority World churches with fresh opportunities for critical awareness and conscientization with regard to postindependence nation states.²²⁴ This has been as much a problem for the mainline churches as for indigenous movements such as the African Initiated Churches. Ojo attributes this to a number of ‘disconnections’ between spirituality, on the one hand, and ethics, development praxis, governance, quality education, and leadership practice on the other.²²⁵ These disconnections provide Christianity with a full agenda if it is to continue to impact on the Majority World in the twenty-first century. The ‘pick-and-pay’ mentality, for instance, may lead Majority World Christians to choose and/or deselect that which does not appeal to them: for example, the distorted valuation of a wealth motivation. The rise of the Pentecostal and charismatic churches also, however, offers a means of communicating the gospel with the aid of up-to-date media technology, leading to more optimistic faith expressions, hopefully based in moral responsibility and sensitivity. In Pentecostalism, communication is power and all the latest media are employed ‘to dominate the religious life of Africa’²²⁶ with its ‘ability to shape the human mind’²²⁷ as the invention of the printing press did in an earlier generation. Marleen de Witte emphasizes the interface between technology and religion using Weber’s notion of charisma: ‘Media technologies like television and film can make things and persons more beautiful and attractive than they really are, while at the same time presenting them as true and accessible.’²²⁸ These media include books, newspapers, video films, CDs, and DVDs, and members do not draw distinctions between live, print, or electronic media; all are considered investments which contribute to blessing and prosperity. A significant feature of contemporary Pentecostalism is its transnational nature, as exemplified in the name of Nigerian pastor Sunday Adelaja’s Church of the Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for all Nations, in the Ukraine. The vital role of media has seen them take on an almost sacramental status. The Bible remains the prime medium with its testimony to the performative force of words and its main

²²³ Tapang Ivo Tanku, ‘Cameroon’s president orders Pentecostal churches closed’, CNN 15 August 2013, https://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/14/world/africa/cameroon-churches/, accessed 18/5/2015. ²²⁴ M. A. Ojo, ‘African Spirituality, Socio-Political Experience and Mission’, in Ma and Ross, eds., Mission Spirituality and Authentic Discipleship, p. 48. ²²⁵ Ojo, ‘African Spirituality’, in Ma and Ross, eds., Mission Spirituality, pp. 49–50. ²²⁶ Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, p. 28. ²²⁷ Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford, 2009), p. 3. ²²⁸ Marleen de Witte, ‘Altar Media’s Living Word: Televised Charismatic Christianity in Ghana’, Journal of Religion in Africa 33.2 (2003), p. 174.

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tool is the microphone, which has also appropriated performative effect in the often spontaneous development of oral theology. The impact of the development of technology has not only affected Pentecostal churches alone: ‘Their innovative appropriations have stirred the older churches in emulative action.’²²⁹ On the other hand, uncontrolled ‘franchising’, populism, and the importation of American fundamentalist agendas presents the danger that this innovative framework will also become entangled in the problems of divided nation states. The result is, in the West, a radical rationalization of the public square (with growing attempts to exclude religious self-claims of any type),²³⁰ and in the Majority World, the imposition of controls often in contravention of international undertakings with regard to the freedom of religion. Between ‘public morality’ cases involving anti-witchcraft and homosexuality campaigns, and lack of personal probity,²³¹ on the one hand, and the secularizing politics of the non-governmental/faith-based organization ‘third sector’, on the other, it is a vibrant but troubled time for Majority World pentecostals. Such problems in the public spheres of (and usually created by) nation states, however, should not be confused with the continuous cycles of entrepreneurship and innovation inherent in popular religious mobilizations. Religious innovation among Africans, for example, is related to the motives of those receiving the mission either in spiritual or material ways. Worship is unique in each context even when the imposing styles of historic denominations are taken into account. A creative and integrative blend marked by contemporaneity, freedom of movement, spontaneity, joyfulness, relevance, and a shared experience of anointing of the Spirit, is consonant with indigenous religious traditions (trance, visions, healing, dreams, and dance) all leading to the divine visitation in worship. Emotion is linked to experience of God and may be marked by noise, tears, sorrow, laughter, and smiles. Prophecy aids understanding and growth. This is a context in which the primal imagination transcends (sometimes by incorporation) traditional religion²³² and transforms Pentecostal Christian faith in a meaningful and relevant manner.²³³ The values and beliefs of traditional religion are appropriated by Pentecostal faith and challenge the rationally based faith of the historic churches. ²²⁹ Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, pp. 58, 95. ²³⁰ See, for instance, the debate over ‘Obamacare’ in the USA, and the ‘Purple Economy’ in Australia. Alan Matheson, ‘The Purple Economy’, http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp? article=7592, accessed 18/5/2015; Jonathan V. Last, ‘Obamacare vs. the Catholics’, The Weekly Standard 17.21 (13 February 2012), pp. 11–12, 14. ²³¹ ‘David Yonggi Cho Responds to Guilty Verdict: “Hardest Day in 50 Years of Ministry Service” ’, Gospel Herald 24 February 2014; Cheryl Wetzstein, ‘Singapore megachurch founder Kong Hee on trial in religious freedom test case’, Washington Times 8 February 2015. ²³² See, for instance, Tabona Shoko, Karanga Indigenous Religion in Zimbabwe (Aldershot and Burlington, 2007). ²³³ Asamoah-Gyadu, Contemporary Pentecostal Christianity, p. 30; K. A. Dickson, Theology in Africa (London, 1984), p. 111.

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In particular, Pentecostal churches provide a means of challenging the ‘evil powers’ which confront people regularly. As the prominence of the charismatic churches in Singapore, the underground Church in China, and in South Africa demonstrate,²³⁴ theological ideas on healing, exorcism, and pastoral care are deliberately developed within the context of the primal vision of Majority World societies.²³⁵ The genius of Pentecostalism has been its ability to innovate, taking account of these religious world views in a Christian context. This is not a novel development. It was evident a century ago in the prophetic ministries of William Wade Harris, Garrick Sokari Braide, Simon Kimbangu, and Isaiah Shembe. The election of the first South American pope, and coverage of his ‘liberationist and charismatic’ practices, demonstrated the influence such grass-roots Protestant fusions are having around the world. Francis I represented ‘a powerful synthesis of what has been the two competing theological tendencies in Latin America’.²³⁶ The ascension of a practitioner of dissenting spiritualities to a position definitive of orthodoxy thus set off tremendous energies on both wings of the Roman Catholic Church. Forms of worship—including prayer vigils, revival services, healing camps (the use of oil in anointing as a means of healing is viewed as interventionist), and evangelistic crusades—are oriented towards edification and to the restoration of ‘wholeness and balance in life’.²³⁷ In addition—as shown by Asamoah-Gyadu,²³⁸ Kalu,²³⁹ and Adogame²⁴⁰—prayer plays a significant role in the preparations for migration. Innovative Majority World Pentecostal faith acknowledges the authenticity of spiritual beings,²⁴¹ including palpable forms of evil (cf. Eph. 6:11–12), which are no longer taken so seriously by a Western psyche ‘domesticated by modernity’.²⁴² This is an essential point of address to traditional cultures which see illness, mischance, poverty, and the diminution of life as originating in witches, evil powers, and harmful supernatural forces. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, West African prophets, such as Garrick Braide (Ghana), challenged that world view through powerful preaching with regard to the Holy Spirit.²⁴³ But they also accumulated a superstitious

²³⁴ Kalu, ed., African Christianity, p. 398. ²³⁵ Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford, 2009), p. 148. ²³⁶ ‘A Liberationist and Charismatic Pope?’ Religion Watch 28.6 (September/October 2013), pp. 1, 3. ²³⁷ L. Magesa, African Religion: The Moral Traditions of Abundant Life (New York, 1997), p. 195. ²³⁸ Asamoah-Gyadu, Contemporary Pentecostal Christianity, pp. 35–57. ²³⁹ Kalu, Clio in a Sacred Garb, p. 282. ²⁴⁰ Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora, p. 22. ²⁴¹ Ogbu U. Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford, 2008), p. 176. ²⁴² Yung, Mangoes or Bananas, p. 197. ²⁴³ Cf. D. Killingray, ‘Passing on the Gospel: Indigenous Mission in Africa’, Transformation 28.2 (April 2011), pp. 93–102.

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reverence for their personal charisma which had an activated spiritual force.²⁴⁴ Early pentecostal missionaries found their Holy Spirit language and praxis fitted readily with these indigenizing movements. Norman Burley of the Lebombo Pentecostal Mission, for example, regularly reported on cases in which biblical scripts were written over African daily realities. At one kraal, he narrated: The husband begged the servant of God to deliver his wife, and the evangelist said he would pray. Instantly the demons threw the woman on the ground, where she frothed at the mouth until a pool of saliva was standing on the ground where she lay. IN THE NAME OF THE LORD JESUS CHRIST THE DEMONS WERE BOUND AND CAST OUT, AND IN THE SAME NAME HER HEALING WAS ASKED AT THE HANDS OF A GOD OF MERCY AND LOVE. The woman was immediately quieted, and rose to her feet perfectly healed. The amazement of the people was such that none dared to speak for a while. Then the very heathen began to praise the Living God and Jesus Christ, Whom He had sent to be the Saviour of all mankind, even of such as they were.²⁴⁵

As Andrew Walls has noted, in Majority World contexts where daily reality was much closer to first century realities, biblical literalism was a more plausible construction than highly intellectualized critical approaches.²⁴⁶ Such emphases have made Pentecostalism among the most versatile and flexible of Christian expressions. It is multi-dimensional, makes significant innovations and links ancient traditions with the modern world by means of unmediated accessibility to the ‘real’ behind the synthetic or the illusory. In a sense, then, Pentecostalism is an indigenizing brand of religious expression not so far removed from traditional religion that it cannot mobilize visions of a God who is creative, faithful, powerful, and reliable.²⁴⁷ As Lockhead notes, such ideologies of encounter involve hostility, isolation, competition, partnership, and dialogue.²⁴⁸ Theologies of the Holy Spirit in the context of suffering and persecution are efficacious insofar as they take seriously indigenous, gendered, and socio-economically located world views of mystical causality and evil. It provides a hopeful expectation of, and a techne towards, the defeat of evil and the restoration of harmony individually and collectively.

²⁴⁴ Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, pp. 70, 71. ²⁴⁵ ‘Foreign Missions’, Good News 21.4 (1 April 1930), p. 17; and see C. Au, ‘ “Now Ye Are Clean”: Sanctification as a Formative Doctrine of Early Pentecostalism in Hong Kong’, Australasian Pentecostal Studies 15 (January 2013), http://aps-journal.com/aps/index.php/APS/article/ view/124, accessed 19/5/2015; cf. Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, 92. ²⁴⁶ ‘Introduction’, in Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History. ²⁴⁷ F. Nkomazana, ‘The Development and Role of Pentecostal Theology in Botswana’, in Phiri and Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa, p. 409. ²⁴⁸ D. Lockhead, The Dialogical Imperative: A Christian Reflection on Interfaith Encounter (New York, 1988).

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THE ROL E OF W OME N Dissent looms large when the role of women in the church is investigated. Inculturation not only brought about a transformation of the cosmos, but of the social relationships within it. Women in particular discovered new roles and identities throughout Majority World Christianity. Again, the biblical scripts transferred to daily life raised questions about the nature of the ‘new creation’ in which there was neither ‘male nor female’, and the New Testament’s glimpses of women in leadership positions.²⁴⁹ Dissent in the church was evident from its earliest days where we see women like Phoebe, Junia, Mary, and Priscilla ‘sharing responsibility for the growth of the Church. All of this was totally radical in a culture where women were defined by the men in their lives.’²⁵⁰ Many Majority World settings saw grass-roots movements commenced and, in some cases, ultimately run by women. In some of these, the role of ‘wordy women’ (to use Derek Peterson’s term from the East African Revival in Kenya)²⁵¹ was a driving force in the construction of counter-cultural identities. Margaret Wangare was one of the first of a growing coterie of women church founders and leaders who have played a significant role in becoming role models in promoting gender equality in churches and in society,²⁵² Their role is a two-way process; as women develop in their civil society roles, this, in turn, is reflected in their higher profile in ecclesiastical affairs. Women also highlight the underutilization of the churches’ human resources, while their rejection of traditional roles has led to their admission to theological education. The emerging role of Majority World women poses a direct challenge to biblical literalism and patriarchy. The ‘democratization, innovation and freedom of grass-roots revivalism are nowhere seen so clearly as in the life and work of the women’s manyano [guild] movement in South Africa. In the face of substantial opposition they forged a novel form of solidarity which gave them strength both personally and socially in cultures where they were seriously undervalued.’²⁵³ This was particularly true at times of grief, mourning, tragedy, self-discipline, and repentance. From the close of the nineteenth century ‘the manyanos seem to have been part of a more general indigenisation of religious initiative’.²⁵⁴ Their work was based in a boundary challenging,

²⁴⁹ e.g. ‘our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchreae’, Rom. 16:1. ²⁵⁰ Miles and Crawford, eds., Stopping the Traffick, p. 106. ²⁵¹ D. Peterson, ‘Wordy Women: Gender Trouble and the Oral Politics of the East African Revival in Northern Gikuyuland’, Journal of African History 42 (2001), p. 469. ²⁵² Kalu, African Pentecostalism, p. 149. ²⁵³ D. Gaitskell, ‘Praying and Preaching: The Distinctive Spirituality of African Women’s Church Organisations’, in Bredekamp and Ross, eds., Missions and Christianity in South African History, p. 218. ²⁵⁴ Gaitskell, ‘Praying and Preaching’, in Bredekamp and Ross, eds., Missions and Christianity in South African History, p. 212.

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enthusiastic revivalist (umvuselelo) form of worship including prayer, praise, preaching, exhortation, confession, and repentance, intrinsic to preaching and ‘witnessing’. Here women found the voices they were denied in the mission churches: coming from oral cultures they were well equipped to exercise their gifts to the full and without official training. Gaitskell alludes to blending ‘tradition and creativity, memorisation and improvisation, the communal and the individual’.²⁵⁵ Worship life was complemented by visitation of nonChristian women in their communities, while their solidarity (spiritual unity) became a source of strength in the face of the trauma of the early twentieth century. These well-educated women were among the first and second generation of their kind to graduate from mission schools.²⁵⁶ Gaitskell could affirm that at that time ‘the manyanos in their prayerfulness are being identified as the epitome of African Christianity’.²⁵⁷ In the informal ecclesial establishment, they were a significant source of transformation and appropriation of mission Christianity in African communities. Subsequently, the formalization of engendered theological education would become one effective means of challenging Western assumptions (in, for example, the work of the Circle of Concerned Women Theologians).²⁵⁸ This movement towards reflexivity has made a substantial contribution to the development of theology in Africa. Similar trends are seen in the reconstruction of postcolonial indigenous traditions under pressure elsewhere in the Majority World, such as among indigenous women in Australia²⁵⁹ and the Pacific.²⁶⁰ In the wider context, Kalu introduces a sparring metaphor to describe the impact of women’s theological contribution: ‘The liberationists are like southpaw boxers who fight within the system, attack the system without confronting it directly, but seek to transform it by using its internal logic.’²⁶¹ Their roles vary from the rejectionist, loyalist, reformist-liberationist, and reconstructionist. ²⁵⁵ Gaitskell, ‘Praying and Preaching’, in Bredekamp and Ross, eds., Missions and Christianity in South African History, p. 225. ²⁵⁶ Gaitskell, ‘Praying and Preaching’, in Bredekamp and Ross, eds., Missions and Christianity in South African History, p. 215. Cf. D. E. Albrecht, Rites in the Spirit: A Ritual Approach to Pentecostal/Charismatic Spirituality (Sheffield, 1999); E. J. Rybarczyk, ‘Pentecostalism, Human Nature, and Aesthetics: Twenty-First Century Engagement’, Journal of Pentecostal Theology 21.2 (2012), pp. 240–59. ²⁵⁷ Gaitskell, ‘Praying and Preaching’, in Bredekamp and Ross, eds., Missions and Christianity in South African History, p. 223. ²⁵⁸ I. Phiri and L. Siwila, ‘The Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians – Transforming Theological Education’, in Phiri and Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa, pp. 966–73. ²⁵⁹ Frances Wyld, ‘Aboriginal Women and Leadership in the Academy’, Frontline 18 (October 2010), p. 14. ²⁶⁰ Martha Macintyre and Ceridwen Spark, Transformations of Gender in Melanesia (Canberra, 2017), p. 148. ²⁶¹ Kalu, African Pentecostalism, p. 154.

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Sanneh and Asamoah-Gyadu agree on the function of women in prophetic roles and as charismatics as saviours of African Christianity.²⁶²

REFLEXIVITY, AGAIN Reflexivity implies that ‘we learn from our past—from our failures, successes and silences’.²⁶³ However, Botha writing about theological education from a social constructionist approach raises the prior question: Did they learn from their experience, and if so, what?²⁶⁴ For most Majority World dissenters, remembering the past refers to the colonial past in which they were involved through adaptation and innovation. But between these two processes there was inevitably a process of either tacit or explicit reflection. What we learn from reflection on the experience of subjects and objects of mission during the colonial and imperial period is that indigenous objects were quick to adapt to missionary incursions into their spiritual domain while the missionary subjects were very slow to adapt to the contexts which they invaded.²⁶⁵ As Botha notes, ‘all knowledge is contextual knowledge and therefore contradicts the notion of readymade universally-valid ideas that could be appropriated and applied to different contexts.’²⁶⁶ This has serious implications for theology, and especially theological education in the Majority World. There has been little room for modernist abstractions here. Rather, Majority World Christians adopt a problem-solving approach to religion. In the indigenous church movements of the Majority World (though not restricted to them) the role of collective prayer as praxis, as ‘a process of collective reflection’,²⁶⁷ reflexively transcends the purely spiritual and theological dimensions and leads to common understanding of problems and possible approaches to their resolution. As the result of such reflexivity, African and Asian Initiated Churches became, from the end of the nineteenth century, centres of community construction based on mutual care and concern, at the margins of larger communities. In these counter-cultures they have learned to critique and

²⁶² Lamin Sanneh, ‘The Horizontal and Vertical in Mission: An African Perspective’, International Review of Mission 7.4 (1983), pp. 165–71; Asamoah-Gyadu, Sighs and Signs, p. 143. ²⁶³ J. N. J. Kritzinger, ‘Overcoming Theological Voicelessness in the New Millenium’, Missionalia 40.3 (2012), p. 241. ²⁶⁴ Botha, ‘Outcomes Based Education, Accreditation and Quality Assurance’, in Werner et al., eds., Handbook of Theological Education in World Christianity, pp. 144–53. ²⁶⁵ Kritzinger, ‘Using Archives Missiologically’, in Lems, ed., Mission History, p. 40. ²⁶⁶ Botha, ‘Outcomes Based Education, Accreditation and Quality Assurance’, in Werner et al., eds., Handbook of Theological Education in World Christianity, pp. 145–8. ²⁶⁷ N. Lubaale, ‘Doing Mission at the Margins of Society: Harnessing Resources of Local Vision’, in Ma and Ross, eds., Mission Spirituality and Authentic Discipleship, p. 31.

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reject the ethos of Western individualistic and secularized societies based on colonialism and imperialism: ‘People develop their understanding of mission through listening to the voice of the Spirit and reading the scriptures in the situations in which they are placed.’²⁶⁸ But how do the change agents analyse that specific context? They cannot do it independently of those who have imposed novel standards for ‘reflexivity . . . highlights the wholeness and situatedness of the specific encounter . . . the description . . . can easily become a form of “othering” ’.²⁶⁹ Theologians such as Kritzinger favour making explicit the dynamics of the encounter: ‘[W]e need to start listening to the “self-identification” of religious believers if we wish to overcome the . . . inevitable essentialism produced by such an approach.’²⁷⁰ ‘Culture’ in this frame is no longer an essential aspect of indigeneity, but rather a negotiable construct in the global ‘space of flows’ wrapped often around individual and migrant identities.²⁷¹ The reality of the Christian presence in such settings is tested by the implications of injustice and alienation, leadership structures and organizational patterns, and ethnic, gender, class, and ‘racial’ make-up. Reflexivity is made explicit through debates over questions such as: ‘What is the quality of our agency?’; ‘Can we submit ourselves, our beliefs and practices to scrutiny and critique by others?’ In light of the democratization of spiritual gifts from below, the threats to denominational identity and commitment are clear. The common habitus and its issues, rather than the distinctions of historic denominational origin, or the intellectual segmentation and cerebral forms of formal religious identities, become the driving elements. Where such conscientized theologies meet grass-roots mobilizations, the potential for globalization of concerns and spiritualities was increased. As was the case with Pandita Ramabai’s involvement with the Young Women’s Christian Association and women’s ‘rooms’ in India,²⁷² the particular issues of oral Lutheran or Presbyterian or Congregationalist women’s cultures in Africa or Asia (or, as is noted in references to mujerist theology in this volume) become attached to global women’s issues. Such trends have had significance for lay and ordained ministry,²⁷³ the ability to have a Christian ‘presence’ at the village level, and the ²⁶⁸ Lubaale, ‘Doing Mission at the Margins of Society’, in Ma and Ross, eds., Mission Spirituality and Authentic Discipleship, p. 31. ²⁶⁹ J. N. J. Kritzinger, ‘Faith to Faith: Missiology as Encounterology’, Verbum et Ecclesia 29.3 (2008), p. 766. ²⁷⁰ Kritzinger, ‘Faith to Faith: Missiology as Encounterology’, p. 767. ²⁷¹ B. M. Howell and J. W. Paris, Introducing Cultural Anthropology: A Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids, 2011), pp. 235–8. ²⁷² Uma Chakravarti, ‘The Myth of “Patriots” and “Traitors”: Pandita Ramabai, Brahmanical Patriarchy and Militant Hindu Nationalism’, in K. Jayawardena and M. de Alwis, eds., Embodied Violence: Communalising Women’s Sexuality in South Asia (London, 1996), pp. 190ff. ²⁷³ Nkomazana, ‘The Development and Role of Pentecostal Theology in Botswana’, in Phiri and Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa, pp. 407–8.

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issues which register within various communities of thought as matters of theological significance.

CONCLUSIO N From its inception, Christianity has been a missionary faith and has interacted with and within the cultures it encounters. In this process, participants, societies, and cultures have been transformed by the gospel of Christ as it has been incarnated in their many cultural contexts. The outcome is long-term renewal and revitalization through the ability to escape the particular agendas of colonizing host societies by mobilizing intrinsically universalizing aspects of the faith. Much of the Majority World has been the subject to colonizations, including through the co-options implicit in Western theology brought by missionary agents. Western forms of theology still hold sway, in part due to the disconnection between academic theologies and the counter-cultural mobilizations from below. These are constantly challenged from within the context of real communities and lived experience, however, in ways which are giving rise to truly indigenized, reflexive forms of thought. As Du Toit notes, ‘The dynamics of growth, reinterpretation and redefinition is a hallmark of . . . religious and cultural development.’²⁷⁴ The challenge in entering the global space, of course, is that here, too, there are colonizing forces which can strip mobilizations from below of their particularity and authenticity, co-opting their energies for other purposes. As David Martin has noted, the bourgeoisification of the Minority World charismatic movement through the 1970s and 1980s threatens such movements, and their emerging intelligentsias, with being placed ‘in a queue awaiting liberalization’.²⁷⁵ With him, we can perhaps ‘await with interest’ to see how dissenting Majority World peoples affected by the downward mobilizations of spiritual energies shape their movements across the global stage. What is clear historically during the twentieth century with no prospect of change in the twenty-first is that dissent breeds dissent. The term ‘dissent’ needs to be revalued to include growth, reinterpretation, resilience, redefinition, and revitalization. This keeps it true to the semper reformanda principle of Reformational Dissent, as it confronts, challenges, subverts, and becomes an agent of change and transformation, renewal and even conflict.

²⁷⁴ C. W. Du Toit, African Challenges: Changing Identities (Pretoria, 2009), p. 97. ²⁷⁵ Martin, Pentecostals: The World Their Parish, p. 4.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Adogame, Afe, The African Christian Diaspora: New Currents and Emerging Trends in World Christianity (London, 2013). Andaya, Barbara W., ‘Christianity in South-East Asia: Similarity and Difference in a Culturally Diverse Region’, in C. E. Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity (Oxford, 2012), pp. 108–21. Asamoah-Gyadu, J. Kwabena, Sighs and Signs of the Spirit: Ghanaian Perspectives on Pentecostalism and Renewal in Africa (Oxford, 2015). Bediako, Kwame, Theology and Identity: The Impact of Culture upon Christian Thought in the Second Century and in Modern Africa (Oxford, 1993). Bredekamp, H. C. and R. J. Ross, eds., Missions and Christianity in South African History (Johannesburg, 1995). Chidester, David, ‘Dreaming in the Contact Zone: Zulu Dreams, Visions, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century South Africa’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76.1 (March 2008), pp. 27–53. de Witte, Marleen, ‘Altar Media’s Living Word: Televised Charismatic Christianity in Ghana’, Journal of Religion in Africa 33.2 (2003), pp. 172–202. Engelsviken, Tormod, Notto R. Thelle, and Knut Edvard Larsen, A Passion for China: Norwegian Mission to China until 1949 (Eugene, 2015). Freston, Paul, ‘The Changing Face of Christian Proselytization: Actors from the Global South’, in R. I. J. Hackett, ed., Proselytization Revisited: Rights Talk, Free Markets and Culture Wars (London, 1999). Gifford, Paul, Christianity, Development and Modernity in Africa (London, 2015). Goh, Daniel P. S., ‘Chinese Religion and the Challenge of Modernity in Malaysia and Singapore: Syncretism, Hybridisation and Transfiguration’, Asian Journal of Social Science 37.1 (2009), pp. 107–37. Hastings, Adrian, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997). Howell, B. M. and J. W. Paris, Introducing Cultural Anthropology: A Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids, 2011). Jenkins, Philip, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York, 2002). Kalu, Ogbu U., African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford, 2008). Kim, Kirsteen and Andrew Anderson, eds., Edinburgh 2010: Mission Today and Tomorrow (Oxford, 2011). Kwiyani, Harvey C., Sent Forth: African Missionary Work in the West (Maryknoll, 2014). Lukose, Wessly, Contextual Missiology of the Spirit: Pentecostalism in Rajasthan, India (Oxford, 2013). Ma, Wonsuk, Veli-Matti Kärkäinen, and J. Kwabena-Asamoah, eds., Pentecostal Mission and Global Christianity (Oxford, 2014). Macintyre, Martha and Ceridwen Spark, Transformations of Gender in Melanesia (Canberra, 2017). Mekonnen, Alemayehu, Culture Change in Ethiopia: An Evangelical Perspective (Oxford, 2013).

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Oddie, Geoff A., ‘Indigenization and Nationalism’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions 43e Année, No. 103 (July–September 1998), pp. 129–52. Palmer, D. A., G. Shive, and P. L. Wickeri, eds., Chinese Religious Life (Oxford, 2011). Phiri, I. and D. Werner, eds., Handbook of Theological Education in Africa (Oxford, 2013). Schmalz, M. N., ‘Dalit Catholic Tactics of Marginality at a North Indian Mission’, History of Religions 44.3 (February 2005), pp. 216–51. Walls, Andrew F., The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Maryknoll, 2002). Woods, Paul, Theologising Migration: Otherness and Liminality in East Asia (Oxford, 2015). Yung, H., Mangoes or Bananas: The Quest for an Authentic Asian Theology (Oxford, 2014).

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11 Dissenting Traditions and Missionary Imaginations Novel Perspectives on the Twentieth Century Justin D. Livingstone

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the British Dissenting traditions manifested an optimism won from their struggles and achievements in the preceding century.¹ Yet if a ‘buoyant spirit’ was the prevailing mood at the outset of a new era, twentieth-century Nonconformity would be marked more by decline.² Already, fissures could be detected: dwindling church attendance and the increasing fragmentation of the ‘cohesive political bloc’ that had marked Victorian Nonconformity at the height of its influence, were signs of future atrophy.³ Such decline, however, should not be mistaken for total disintegration. Although a distinctive Dissenting identity was fading, twentieth-century Nonconformist traditions also bear evidence of creative change, in part through diversifying forms of Protestant spirituality.⁴ The aim of this chapter is to address one aspect of Dissenting literary culture across this period: the missionary novel. Overseas mission had long been significant to most branches of Nonconformity. Ian Randall argues that

¹ Special thanks must go to Neil Dickson for directing me to a range of Nonconformist missionary sources and for drawing my attention to a letter by Elsie Milligan. Thanks to the University of Manchester Special Collections, which holds the Christian Brethren Archive, for permission to quote this letter. I’m also grateful to Joanne Ichimura for helping me navigate the SOAS library catalogue and identify London Missionary Society material. ² David Bebbington, ‘Evangelism and Spirituality in Twentieth-Century Protestant Nonconformity’, in Alan P. F. Sell and Anthony R. Cross, eds., Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century (Carlisle, 2003), p. 186. ³ Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, 1999), p. 163. ⁴ Bebbington, ‘Evangelism and Spirituality’, in Sell and Cross, eds., Protestant Nonconformity, p. 215.

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early British missions were influenced by the ‘Moravian vision’, the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and by the Evangelical Revival. The ‘activism’ of the Revival—particularly manifest in Methodism—instilled an ‘evangelistic impulse’ that extended beyond domestic fields and came to characterize Protestant Dissent more broadly.⁵ With this global commitment, missions soon became ‘an integral part of Nonconformist identity’.⁶ Historical scholarship on the mission movement—and its relationship with the imperial project—has developed apace since the 1980s. As Tony Ballantyne observes, this research has particularly intensified since the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1990s, when missionaries were identified both as ‘actors within the drama of colonialism’ and ‘as key agents in the production of ideas about human difference’. Attention has fallen not only on their activities in the field, but on the ways in which they influenced ‘British metropolitan culture’.⁷ Within this scholarship, there has been some consideration of the importance of print culture and publishing networks in promoting the missionary cause. Anna Johnston’s Missionary Writing and Empire, for instance, has gone a considerable way towards scrutinizing the ‘hybrid genres’ of missionary literature while, more recently, Esme Cleall has argued that missionaries’ ‘copious published writings’ produced a ‘much-consumed strand of colonial discourse’.⁸ Yet in a field dominated by historians and anthropologists, studies with an explicitly literary focus are rare: the need remains for a sustained examination of the textual cultures of the missionary enterprise. If missionary literature as a whole has received less critical analysis than it deserves, this is particularly true of the corpus of missionary novels. This chapter aims to redress that neglect by examining a range of fictional texts penned by Nonconformist missionaries or published by mission presses. The scope for such a project is considerable, and so I limit my geographical parameters to texts set in sub-Saharan Africa. Since these regions have loomed large in the missionary imagination, have been intimately bound up with European imperial politics, and have (as noted by other authors in this volume) witnessed an explosive growth in Christianity since decolonization, the African missionary novel provides fertile material for the investigation of Dissenting Protestantism as it engaged with the twentieth century. My coverage will necessarily be selective and uneven, but the purpose here is to delineate the recurring tropes and thematics of a once familiar, but now largely ⁵ Ian M. Randall, ‘Nonconformists and Overseas Mission’, in Robert Pope, ed., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (London, 2013), pp. 383–4. ⁶ Randall, ‘Nonconformists and Overseas Mission’, in Pope, ed., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity, p. 387. ⁷ Tony Ballantyne, ‘Humanitarian Narratives: Knowledge and the Politics of Mission and Empire’, Social Sciences and Missions 24.2–3 (2011), pp. 234–5. ⁸ Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire (Cambridge, 2003), p. 32; Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourse: Negotiating Difference in the British Empire, c.1840–95 (New York, 2012), p. 2.

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forgotten, form of fiction. Yet this chapter not only sets its sights on missionary fiction, but also on missions in fiction.⁹ If Nonconformist missionaries published their share of creative works, they also make revealing appearances in other British novels. By offering readings of several critics of mission— including imperial administrators-turned-authors—I extend previous research on contemporary responses to the Dissenting tradition. Questions of reception, moreover, raise the crucial issue of African response. As recipients of missionary endeavour and often education, African authors since decolonization have registered nuanced reactions to mission and its legacy. Addressing African voices through the anglophone postcolonial novel offers critical perspectives while also compelling recognition of the complexity of the missionary encounter.

DISSENTING MISSIO NS AND THE IM AGINA TI ON O F AFRICA It has been argued that, in the nineteenth century, the combined efforts of chapels, churches, and Sunday schools provided the ‘single most important popular source of information about non-Western people’.¹⁰ Although sources of global information proliferated through the twentieth century (making distant peoples and places increasingly familiar) missionary writing continued to try and make known the locales in which mission agencies were operating. This is perhaps particularly true of the important tradition of missionary anthropology which, as Patrick Harries points out, negotiated the tension between documenting indigenous cultures and ‘propagat[ing] a fundamental reformation of the lives of the people’ encountered.¹¹ Missionary fiction, largely written for juvenile audiences, lacked the ethnographic rigour of such work, but it did seek to bring distant parts of the globe into its readers’ horizons. And it often did so with a high degree of geographical specificity. Constance M. Whitfield’s novels, At Spear Point and Sealed Treasure, for instance, are set among the Malagasy in Madagascar, while Elsie Milligan’s Banana Cottage and Kachabinda deal with missionaries to the Venda and the Lunda respectively.¹² ⁹ Jamie S. Scott, ‘Missions in Fiction’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 32.3 (2008), p. 121. ¹⁰ Jeffrey Cox, ‘Were Victorian Nonconformists the Worst Imperialists of All?’, Victorian Studies 46.2 (2004), p. 246. ¹¹ Patrick Harries, ‘Anthropology’, in Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford, 2005), p. 247. ¹² C. M. Whitfield, Sealed Treasure (London, 1942); C. M. Whitfield, At Spear Point (London, 1953); Elsie Milligan, Banana Cottage (London, 1960); Elsie Milligan, Kachabinda: Little Hunter (London, 1956).

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Bringing distant regions into the purview of the readership was connected to the propaganda function of missionary fiction. Often bearing affiliation with a particular society, these documents cast attention on fields in need of evangelization and domestic support. They tended to be written for Sunday schools, which had become in the nineteenth century both a major feature of chapel life and a key means of community engagement.¹³ At their peak, Sunday schools were a powerful social force; in 1900, up to 80 per cent of British children had some involvement.¹⁴ Despite gradual decline, their cultural significance was long-lived; as late as 1960 over 20 per cent continued to attend.¹⁵ Since Nonconformist Sunday schools regularly raised sums for overseas fields, missionary fiction acted to encourage giving and to draw explicit attention to financial needs. Arthur T. Rich’s 1935 novel, The Schoolboy Missionaries (published by the Religious Tract Society), for instance, has missionary funding as one of its central concerns. The novel tracks the twins, Hugh and Robert Richmond, as they visit their missionary parents, experience conditions in the field, and develop in maturity. Critical to their learning process is their recognition of the financial constraints under which missionaries operated. The myth ‘about missionaries having lots of money’, which has been promoted by the school bully Laws, is quickly dispelled.¹⁶ At the understaffed missionary clinic, they observe that there is often no option but to ‘send people away’: ‘If only I had twenty trained black nurses who could tour the villages’, says their father, ‘[b]ut . . . we cannot afford them.’¹⁷ The boys learn just ‘what a great sacrifice a missionary and his wife make’ and resolve to encourage their classmates to ‘give twice as much as they had given before’.¹⁸ In offering a model of effective support raising, when they successfully redouble the school’s commitment to overseas mission, The Schoolboy Missionaries makes explicit a function shared by numerous Sunday school prize books.¹⁹ Many of the novels that aspired to disseminate knowledge about mission fields and encountered peoples can be described as broadly ‘humanitarian’. Such narratives have received considerable criticism for construing Africa as a

¹³ John H. Y. Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity, 1662–2000’, in Pope, ed., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity, pp. 10–11. ¹⁴ Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity’, in Pope, ed., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity, p. 20. ¹⁵ Bebbington, ‘Evangelism and Spirituality’, in Sell and Cross, eds., Protestant Nonconformity, p. 203. ¹⁶ Arthur T. Rich, The Schoolboy Missionaries (London, 1935), p. 44. ¹⁷ Rich, The Schoolboy Missionaries, p. 53. ¹⁸ Rich, The Schoolboy Missionaries, p. 43, 52. ¹⁹ For a recent discussion of Sunday school prize books, see Kimberley Reynolds, ‘Rewarding Reads? Giving, Receiving and Resisting Evangelical Reward and Prize Books’, in Julia Briggs, Dennis Butts, and M. O. Grenby, eds., Popular Children’s Literature in Britain (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 189–208.

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space of need and for valorizing the intervention of benevolent Europeans. Gareth Griffiths, for instance, identifies a particular humanitarian trope common in African missionary texts, which he describes as the ‘recaptive’ or ‘release’ plot.²⁰ This focuses, he argues, on the escape or emancipation of a slave (a common trope in Christian narratives from the early Church onwards)²¹ who finds sanctuary and conversion with missionaries. For Griffiths, perpetuating an image of Africa as ‘riven by tribal divisions, warfare, and intertribal enslavement’, and accentuating the contrast between the convert’s present and prior conditions, served to provide legitimation for missionary endeavour.²² Developing in the abolitionist campaign of the early nineteenth century and flourishing during the later Victorian campaign against the Indian Ocean slave trade, such plots continued to be circulated well into the twentieth century.²³ A typical example, drawn from Dissenting fiction, appears in a short story collection by Dollie Bee entitled Sam, the African Boy, published in 1904 by the Methodist publisher, Robert Culley. The title tale recounts the captivity and release of a young boy from the shores of Lake Ngami. Establishing a semi-paradisiacal background of stunning scenery and domestic harmony, ‘terrible calamity’ is ushered in one evening with ‘loud reports of firearms’. His father is killed and the rest are ‘seized and bound’ by slavers and marched off under the whip.²⁴ After Sam’s mother collapses with the strain and is abandoned, he manages to escape. Wandering alone, he fails to locate Lake Ngami and instead winds up on the coast. On arriving, he hears ‘a silvery laugh’, ‘a human voice, soft and sweet’. Tracing it to a woman ‘with straight auburn hair, and a face as white almost as a Springbok’s breast’, he is initially wary but his trust is quickly gained. The woman, who it emerges is ‘a missionary’s wife’, hears Sam’s story and welcomes him into the compound where he ‘became a permanent inmate of their home’.²⁵ While initially ‘ignorant and very superstitious’, he is soon converted and leads a ‘godly life, setting a Christian example to a barbarous and dark-hearted people’.²⁶ Such plots— which projected an increasingly anachronistic vision of Africa as the century developed—were designed to elicit sentiment, provoke moral outrage, and to cast Africans as human victims requiring European protection.

²⁰ Gareth Griffiths, ‘Trained to Tell the Truth: Missionaries, Converts, and Narration’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, pp. 153, 156. ²¹ J. Albert Harrill, ‘Ignatius, “Ad Polycarp” 4.3 and the Corporate Manumission of Christian Slaves’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 1.2 (1993), p. 107. ²² Griffiths, ‘Trained to Tell the Truth’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, p. 167. ²³ Manumission, of course, was a marker of the early Christian Church, and so the emancipation plot may also allude obliquely to Nonconformist primitivism. ²⁴ Dollie Bee, Sam, the African Boy (London, 1904), pp. 11–12. ²⁵ Bee, Sam, the African Boy, pp. 18–19. ²⁶ Bee, Sam, the African Boy, p. 21.

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Given that the ways in which such humanitarian narratives provided legitimacy to the British imperial project in the later nineteenth century have been well documented, it has perhaps become too easy to overlook their capacity for political criticism. As Ballantyne points out, the images of indigenous suffering they contained could be politically mobilized in different ways. In certain contexts, records of sufferings served to castigate the ethical shortcomings of empire, particularly by illustrating graphically the ‘excesses of settler colonialism’.²⁷ The locus of narrative, moreover, from within the emotional world of the subject, could also counter broader tendencies to dehumanize Africans. The humanitarian narrative, it is crucial to recognize, was thus able to function as ‘a potent tool of political critique’.²⁸ This sort of critical implementation is apparent in a publication of 1910, Bokwala: The Story of a Congo Victim, written under the auspices of the Baptist CongoBalolo Mission. The book’s purpose is laid out in emphatic terms in the preface by the mission’s founder, H. Grattan Guinness. ‘Old-time conditions of savage barbarity were awful’, he writes, ‘but it has been reserved for socalled “Christian Civilisation” to introduce the system of atrocious oppression and hopeless despair under which, during the last fifteen years, millions of helpless natives have perished’; in articulating ‘the voice of a Congo victim’, the book would direct attention to ‘the greatest humanitarian issue’ of the present and the efforts of the Congo Inquiry.²⁹ Certainly, Baptist missionaries were important in revealing the atrocities of the Congo Free State and rallying public opinion. By activating ‘religious networks’ and supplying photographic evidence of brutality, Guinness and the Congo-Balolo Mission provided crucial support to E. D. Morel’s Congo Reform Association.³⁰ The highly emotive narrative of Bokwala staged itself as authoritative evidence of exploitation, and was crafted in order to arouse indignation. Told as the autobiographical account of a Congolese slave, it follows the arrival of the European rubber trade and the deteriorating conditions of local peoples. It seeks, on occasion, to visualize the violence to which they were subject under the Congo regime. When the eponymous Bokwala is publicly whipped for failing to deliver the ‘prescribed quantity’ of rubber, we read how ‘lash after lash’ of the ‘hippo hide whip’ cut ‘clean into the flesh at every stroke’.³¹ Yet as important as the bodily torment rendered on the page is

²⁷ Ballantyne, ‘Humanitarian Narratives’, p. 239. ²⁸ Ballantyne, ‘Humanitarian Narratives’, p. 239. ²⁹ H. Grattan Guinness, ‘Preface’, in Anon., Bokwala: The Story of a Congo Victim (London, 1910), p. 5. ³⁰ Andrew N. Porter, Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004), p. 310. ³¹ Anon., Bokwala, p. 58.

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the narrator’s statement of restraint. Bokwala declares that he has not told ‘one-tenth of the bad things’, and that ‘the worst of the things cannot even be mentioned’.³² This is confirmed by the authorial foreword, which emphasizes that the ‘whole truth’ cannot be represented. It is ‘written only in tears and blood’ and if it were put down in ‘pen and ink, it could not be printed or circulated’.³³ The sense both of constrained telling—of suffering too extreme for the public eye—and of a horror altogether beyond representation, serve to heighten the affective response that the book is designed to elicit. The audience, moreover, is confronted by Bokwala’s direct and interrogative questioning. ‘[C]an you listen to such things unmoved?’, Bokwala appeals to his readers.³⁴ The book concludes with provocative challenges to oppose humanitarian abuses: ‘Why are these things so?’ he asks the ‘people of Europe’, and ‘how long will it last?’³⁵ In making these appeals, it is important that Bokwala remains under the conditions of slavery at the end of the narrative. With the title character still longing for ‘salvation from rubber’, the conclusion defies the neat resolution of the ‘recaptive’ or ‘liberation’ plot.³⁶ Indeed, leaving Bokwala’s emancipation an open-ended question is a strategy serving the ultimate purpose of pricking the Nonconformist conscience and inciting the public to challenge the conditions of the Belgian Congo. As the author contends in the foreword, although the ‘name and personnel of the administration’ had changed in 1908 when the Congo Free State was transferred from the private control of King Leopold to the Belgian government, there had been ‘no change in the system’.³⁷ Bokwala can of course be criticized for ventriloquizing an African voice and for relying on an image of passive victimhood; the text, moreover, doesn’t so much contest imperialism as recall it to the ideals of trusteeship. Nevertheless, this fictive autobiography stands as a clear example of the ‘exposé literature’ that some missionaries developed, and of the political capacity for critique that the humanitarian narrative offered.³⁸ It reminds us of the profound ekstasis from which pre-millennial Nonconformists such as Guinness—a key figure in the eschatological and faith missions discourses of his time—viewed their own societies.

³² Anon., Bokwala, p. 107. ³³ Anon., Bokwala, p. 9. ³⁴ Anon., Bokwala, p. 71. ³⁵ Anon., Bokwala, pp. 122–3. ³⁶ Anon., Bokwala, p. 124. ³⁷ Anon., Bokwala, p. 10. ³⁸ Harries., ‘Anthropology’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, p. 239. Guinness’ preface insinuates that ‘Bokwala’ has a real-life referent, telling ‘his own story’ through the medium of a missionary amanuensis. But the anonymous author’s own foreword and the narrative itself suggest that Bokwala is an imaginative creation (pp. 5–6): his story is not individual but representative, ‘the life which has been lived by hundreds and thousands of Congo natives’ (p. 9). Since we are told that the name ‘Bokwala’ translates as ‘slave’, it clearly has been chosen for symbolic reasons.

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S I C K N E S S , H E A L T H , AND HE ALI NG: FI C TI ONS OF MEDICAL MISSION Missionary fiction, of course, didn’t stand in stasis across the century. The literature changed to reflect developments in the missionary enterprise itself. One area in which this can be detected is in the medical plot, which became an increasingly prevalent feature of Dissenting missionary fiction. Missionary medicine had been developing since the mid-nineteenth century. Its growth had initially been slow, but was encouraged by the heroic reputations acquired by key individuals like David Livingstone and Albert Schweitzer.³⁹ When Livingstone joined the London Missionary Society (LMS), he was one of only a handful of qualified medical agents active in the field. By the 1870s, however, medical missions were becoming more common and the interventions of Western medicine were recognized as productive tools of evangelization.⁴⁰ Nonconformity played a significant part in this gradual development. As David Hardiman documents, the rise of British Dissenting medical institutions in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, founded on an evangelical and philanthropic basis, contributed to a new emphasis on public health and the medical welfare of the poor: in this context, medical work overseas came to be regarded as a ‘logical extension’ of domestic commitments.⁴¹ At the same time, the rise of missionary medicine was facilitated by contemporary developments in biomedical science. As European medicine offered increasingly successful treatments in the course of the nineteenth century, it acquired a new capacity to provide effective alternatives to traditional methods of healing.⁴² By 1910 medical missions were sufficiently recognized to have a sectional meeting at the celebrated Edinburgh World Missionary Conference.⁴³ At this stage, the iconic figure of the heroic medical missionary was already established, but in the twentieth century we can register medical themes occupying larger space in the missionary imaginary. As Hardiman argues, ‘[t]he status of medical missions within the missionary movement in general was enhanced in the post-First World War period’.⁴⁴ Important in this was the fuller development of a theological underpinning to missionary medicine; caring for the body as well as the soul was to follow the example of Christ. More ³⁹ Norman Etherington, ‘Education and Medicine’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, p. 275. ⁴⁰ Etherington, ‘Education and Medicine’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, pp. 278–9; Michael Jennings, ‘Healing of Bodies, Salvation of Souls’: Missionary Medicine in Colonial Tanganyika, 1870s–1939’, Journal of Religion in Africa 38 (2008), p. 35. ⁴¹ David Hardiman, ‘Introduction’, in David Hardiman, ed., Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa (Amsterdam, 2006), p. 23. ⁴² Jennings, ‘Healing of Bodies’, p. 29. ⁴³ Etherington, ‘Education and Medicine’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, p. 279; Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference: Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids, 2009), p. 74. ⁴⁴ Hardiman, ‘Introduction’, in Hardiman, ed., Healing Bodies, Saving Souls, p. 20.

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practical factors played their part too, such as increased sources of funding which enabled missionary medicine to improve its services.⁴⁵ In accompaniment to these developments, mission fiction made more of the medical contributions of its agents as a crucial facet of their work. In The Schoolboy Missionaries, for instance, the Richmonds may not be trained professionals, but they seek ‘to cure the people with the little knowledge of medicine they had’: daily, they devote time to ‘examine the sick people, give them medicine, send them inside for slight operations’.⁴⁶ Likewise, the hero of the 1927 missionary adventure novel Jackson’s Ju-Ju, by the prolific Methodist Arthur E. Southon, has ‘spent two years at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in preparation for the work to which he had given his life’. It is his ability to tackle ‘dirt and ignorance’, which together ‘mean disease’, that offers him ‘a chance to reach the priest-ridden people’.⁴⁷ Since the total number of medical missionaries in the Protestant world never reached great heights, healing narratives appear to have figured disproportionately in the missionary imagination and in their printed discourse.⁴⁸ Such descriptions of benevolent healing are by no means neutral. Images of sickly locals and generous healers cast the encounter between indigenous peoples and Western medicine as a confrontation between superstition and rationality, sickness and sanitation. What is striking is just how pervasive medical plots were. Even in the aftermath of the Second World War, and continuing until the 1960s, a considerable number of novels foregrounded medical interventions. Ambrose Haynes’ Return of the Witch-Doctor, published by Victory Press in 1957, is set in the village of Filembu where the Jamesons are medical missionaries to the ‘Gzendi’ people. When the local witchdoctor, Kikembu, convinces the people to abandon their commitment to the church, he leads them to destroy the school, hospital, and chapel.⁴⁹ As the hospital burns to the ground, Michael, the Jamesons’ son, takes the initiative to rescue the crucial ‘vaccines which his father had only three days ago received’.⁵⁰ After a series of adventures, the novel concludes with Kikembu contracting a ‘dangerous tropic fever’ which

⁴⁵ Hardiman, ‘Introduction’, in Hardiman, ed., Healing Bodies, Saving Souls, p. 20. ⁴⁶ Rich, The Schoolboy Missionaries, pp. 47, 53. ⁴⁷ Arthur E. Southon, Jackson’s Ju-Ju (London, 1927), p. 53. ⁴⁸ Etherington notes that although more colonized peoples who encountered Western medicine did so through missionary agencies than state-funded activities, medical missions were never numerically large. In 1925, for instance, European and North American Protestant missions only employed a combined ‘1,157 doctors and 1,007 nurses’: Etherington, ‘Education and Medicine’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, pp. 275, 279. Likewise, Jennings argues that ‘Missionary medicine before 1945 was fragmented, small-scale, lacking in resources’: Jennings, ‘Healing of Bodies’, p. 27. ⁴⁹ Ambrose Haynes, Return of the Witch-Doctor (London, 1957). Victory Press was initially an Elim publisher, but by the mid-twentieth century had gravitated to become a more general evangelical press. ⁵⁰ Haynes, Return of the Witch-Doctor, p. 41.

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presents ‘an imminent danger’ to the whole tribe.⁵¹ Although Kikembu has persistently plotted against the Jamesons, Michael’s father takes his hypodermic needle and vaccinates his enemy, before inoculating the whole village. In this case, modern medicine triumphs over the forces of superstition. This is compounded when Kikembu abandons witchcraft and converts to Christianity; he has not only been healed physically, but conquered spiritually. Elsie Milligan, a widely distributed Brethren author, also wrote a series of African stories in which medicine is key. Her fiction emerged from her own experience in the field. Having been commissioned to Central Africa by ‘Echoes of Service’ in 1920, she spent twenty-one years at the Kalene Hill mission in Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia), working first in the hospital and dispensary, before taking charge of the mission school and later establishing outstations in surrounding villages.⁵² In three of her books, Kachabinda: Little Hunter (1956), Kapepa: Little Breeze of the Wind (1959), and Ngoma the Drum-Beater (1964), the receipt of healing is instrumental in the conversion of the young African protagonists. When Kachabinda catches ‘tick fever’, he is taken to the hospital—the ‘House of Healing’—where he is cared for by Christian orderlies who ‘talked to them about the Lord Jesus Christ’.⁵³ Likewise, it is when Kapepa’s brother is healed by ‘white medicine’ after the witchdoctor has failed that she and her mother think that perhaps ‘the God of the Christians heard their prayers’.⁵⁴ Finally, when Ngoma spends several weeks in the ‘House of Healing’, he finds himself attracted to whatever motivates ‘the white people’ to ‘show such mercy to the sick ones of our people’.⁵⁵ In Milligan’s formula, curative medicine is a demonstration of Christian principles and a highly effective means of conversion. In this sense, her fiction enacts a popular theology of medical mission. Given the late publication date of Milligan’s writing, these novels suggest the longevity of medical justifications for mission work. When missions were increasingly subject to critique in the late imperial period and during decolonization, reminders of the humanitarian benefits of healthcare and efficacious treatments offered a convincing counter-rationale; involvement in medicine as a social institution, moreover, provided missionary societies with an effective mechanism for managing the tensions between the retreating influence of theology and the advancing claims of science. Yet missionary medicine had ⁵¹ Haynes, Return of the Witch-Doctor, p. 83. ⁵² Elsie Milligan, ‘Letter to Editors’, 13 March 1982, Echoes of Service Collection, Christian Brethren Archive, University of Manchester Library, GB 133 EOS. Milligan turned to literature to continue her ministry when serious illness forced her early retirement from Central Africa in 1942. She wrote her books ‘with a view to the Lord blessing & using them to the blessing & perhaps salvation of people’. ⁵³ Milligan, Kachabinda, p. 37. ⁵⁴ Elsie Milligan, Kapepa (Little Breeze of the Wind) (London, 1959), p. 22. ⁵⁵ Elise Milligan, Ngoma the Drum-Beater (London, 1964), p. 61.

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already come under fire from nationalists and colonial critics. Gandhi, for instance, criticized Christian schools and hospitals for posing ‘as disinterested benevolence when in fact this was the “bait”’ for conversion.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, the constellation of medical fiction at the end of empire suggests an ongoing warrant for missions that Western medicine could provide. In recent decades, postcolonial scholars have revisited such narratives with critical lenses. Images of illness, it has been argued, had the effect of pathologizing Africa, rendering the continent itself as a sick space.⁵⁷ This is borne out to some degree by Milligan’s Banana Cottage; here, Janet McGaw, a missionary nurse in Northern Rhodesia, merges physical and spiritual illness when she thinks ‘of the patients she had treated that morning, so needy! so dark in their minds’.⁵⁸ Yet it is important to recall, as Jennings argues, that focusing on idealized missionary narratives can obscure ‘the richness and variety of the medical mission sector’.⁵⁹ The authors examined here were concerned with public consumption, writing stirring narratives to attract largely juvenile audiences. Taken in isolation they could convey an impression of missions as a simple tool of empire, and so distract from their ‘myriad of impulses’ and their complex relationships with state authorities.⁶⁰ The efforts of medical missions to provide ‘front-line’ services in rural communities, offering the choice of access to Western methods of healing and focusing on ‘the dayto-day needs of the majority of Africans’, cannot be dismissed lightly.⁶¹ At the same time, however, I would suggest that close scrutiny of popular missionary narratives can reveal more complex dynamics than have often been acknowledged. For instance, in Banana Cottage, the village women look on medicine ‘not as specific treatment for their complaint, but rather as the white man’s magic’.⁶² Here, and in other fiction, we can perceive an anxiety of misperception that plagued many missionaries. In the collision of divergent epistemologies they weren’t always in control of their own reception, and some worried that their scientific interventions were comprehended as merely an alternative form of ‘magic’. Concerns surrounding local responses also rear their head in Southon’s novel, King of the World. This time, the local evangelist, Fatuyi— who has received college-level training—frets that more interest is shown in his stock of medicines than in his teaching.⁶³ Dispirited by the demand for treatment rather than testimony, he despairs that ‘[h]e had come as a preacher, not as a doctor’.⁶⁴ Such sentiments hint at a reality of the mission field that ⁵⁶ Timothy Yates, Christian Mission in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1994), p. 75. ⁵⁷ Megan Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge, 1991); Cleall, Missionary Discourse, p. 79. ⁵⁸ Milligan, Banana Cottage, p. 17. ⁵⁹ Jennings, ‘Healing of Bodies’, pp. 28–9. ⁶⁰ Jennings, ‘Healing of Bodies’, pp. 31, 34. ⁶¹ Jennings, ‘Healing of Bodies’, p. 37. ⁶² Milligan, Banana Cottage, p. 14. ⁶³ Arthur E. Southon, King of the World (London, 1931), p. 127. ⁶⁴ Southon, King of the World, p. 150.

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some found troubling; indigenous peoples could prove ‘avid consumers’ of medical services and its advantages without also being attracted to the Christian message.⁶⁵ The medical plots examined here are largely formulaic and tend to reduce the medical encounter to simplistic models of intercultural engagement. Yet careful reading discloses revealing moments of vulnerability and critical questioning that could easily be overlooked.

W R I T I N G RE S I S T A N C E : M I S S I ONARY NOV E LS AND THE WITCHDOCTOR PLOT Another pervasive—and related—theme in Dissenting missionary fiction is the ‘witchdoctor’ encounter. Cast as the embodiment of superstitious practices and as a fundamental opponent of missionary endeavour, the witchdoctor is a near ubiquitous figure in texts with an African setting. The fantastic plotlines of the adventure novels of Methodist author Arthur E. Southon, published in the 1920s and 1930s, offer particularly dramatic collisions between missionary heroes and local ‘priests’. In Jackson’s Ju-Ju (1927), the protagonist, Nairne, is a muscular Christian who has given up ‘certain fame’ at home in favour of the missionary cause.⁶⁶ Based in a West African town, ruled over by Chief Kwangu, he has chosen a locale in which ‘[a]ll the evils of a polygamous system and blind fetich-worship were found at their worst’.⁶⁷ The plot consists of two interrelated narrative threads. In the first, two European traders— Mayhew and Stretton—conspire to swindle Kwangu out of his gold supplies by having the drunkard Jackson disguise himself as a ‘fetich priest’ whose god demands the return of his stolen wealth.⁶⁸ Ultimately, disaster is averted by the intervention of Nairne and his wife, Jessie. The second thread is concerned with the efforts of Keshona, the town’s ‘leading priest’, to drive out the missionaries. His ‘implacable opposition’ to their presence is crudely commercial, stemming from ‘the heavy financial loss [Nairne’s] free treatment of disease’ was costing him.⁶⁹ The witchdoctor connives at consolidating his hold in the town by stirring up political instability. Throwing his support behind Kwangu’s second son, Twala, who seeks to displace the legitimate heir— Moshala—from his birthright, Keshona hopes to eventually become the ‘real ruler’ himself.⁷⁰ In a plot familiar from nineteenth-century imperial romance, the white protagonist plays a major role in the restoration of order; in this case, Nairne also initiates tribal conversion by winning key individuals to his cause. ⁶⁵ ⁶⁶ ⁶⁸ ⁷⁰

Etherington, ‘Education and Medicine’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, p. 280. Southon, Jackson’s Ju-Ju, p. 55. ⁶⁷ Southon, Jackson’s Ju-Ju, p. 80. Southon, Jackson’s Ju-Ju, p. 132. ⁶⁹ Southon, Jackson’s Ju-Ju, pp. 12, 63. Southon, Jackson’s Ju-Ju, p. 96.

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In Jackson’s Ju-Ju, the witchdoctor is thus a source of division and disorder. In extorting his own people, Keshona is represented as an enemy within. Southon goes further in this, moreover, by making him an active agent of disease. In his forest hut Keshona keeps ‘gruesome relics . . . on which the germs of loathsome diseases swarmed’; he has been personally responsible for outbreaks of smallpox that have ‘killed or blinded or disfigured hundreds’.⁷¹ In construing an indigenous spiritual representative as an embodiment of evil and a menace to his own people, Southon aims to delegitimize opposition to the missionary presence. Such caricature discredits resistance as abhorrent, and distils it into the convenient figure of a single malevolent individual. In contrast to those missionary memoirs which offer evidence of genuine attempts to engage local spiritual authorities, the witchdoctor serves here as a catch-all trope signifying everything that the missionary sought to contest. This symbolic figure offers staged confrontations, rather than the complex exchange that often characterized mission encounters.⁷² In his discussion of material published by the Congregationalist LMS between 1860 and 1890, Robbie McLaughlan argues that ‘[t]he frequency with which the medicine-man or witchdoctor appears . . . reflects an anxious and abiding fascination’.⁷³ Indeed, as Carter notes in Chapter 6 in this volume, witchcraft presented one of the more obviously alien elements of African cultures for European readers. In many respects, such literature followed broader trends in the late Victorian period, which witnessed a widespread resurgence of gothic narratives that have regularly been read as manifestations of contemporary sociocultural apprehensions.⁷⁴ Of interest here, however, is the extent to which unease is present in the later missionary witchdoctor narratives of the early to mid-twentieth century. Another of Southon’s sensationalized publications, A Yellow Napoleon: A Romance of West Africa (1923), ⁷¹ Southon, Jackson’s Ju-Ju, p. 121. ⁷² For a mid-nineteenth century example of the complex cultural exchange of the missionary encounter, consider Livingstone’s reported dialogue with the ‘rain doctor’ in Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), in which he conveys the rigour of his interlocutor’s arguments and exposes compelling epistemological challenges to his own position (pp. 23–5). See Justin D. Livingstone, Livingstone’s Lives: A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon (Manchester, 2014), pp. 52–4, and Brian Stanley, ‘The Missionary and the Rainmaker: David Livingstone, the Bakwena, and the Nature of Medicine’, Social Sciences and Mission 27 (2014), pp. 145–62. A particularly interesting twentieth-century example is Brethren missionary Dan Crawford’s Thinking Black (1912), which borrows Bantu speech patterns in an effort to create a narrative style conveying the richness of an African thought world. See Mark S. Sweetnam, ‘Dan Crawford, Thinking Black, and the Challenge of a Missionary Canon’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 58.4 (2007), pp. 705–25. ⁷³ Robbie McLaughlan, Re-Imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in Fin De Siècle Literature (Edinburgh, 2012), p. 69. ⁷⁴ For such a reading, see Patrick Brantlinger’s discussion of the late nineteenth-century convergence of gothic representation and imperial fiction in the subgenre that he terms the ‘imperial gothic’. Patrick Brantlinger, Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh, 2009), pp. 45–52.

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offers a particularly acute exhibition of political anxiety. In ways, this novel is unusual in the corpus of missionary fiction. The ‘Yellow Napoleon’ of the title refers to the ‘half-caste’ protagonist Tulasi, the son of an African woman and a dissolute Irish drunkard.⁷⁵ Growing up, he becomes an ‘outcast’ with a ‘dual’ nature, a divided self in whom ‘white’ and ‘native blood’ struggle for dominance.⁷⁶ This preoccupation with ‘racial evolution’ and the inherent effects of bloodlines is relatively rare in missionary records.⁷⁷ It is generally acknowledged that the ‘cultural racism’ of missionary accounts is distinguishable from ‘more biologically fixed racialisms’.⁷⁸ This novel’s allergy to interracial mixing, however, cast fundamentally as a ‘crime’, exceeds concerns founded solely on the basis of social and cultural difference.⁷⁹ The ‘fetich priest’, as it appears in A Yellow Napoleon, is no sincere identity but one assumed for ulterior motives. Tulasi adopts the guise of the witchdoctor in order to play on West African superstitions and realize his aspirations to political power. Motivated by a desire for ‘vengeance . . . on all the white race’, he conceives of ‘a great African Empire, with himself as its head’.⁸⁰ By creating the mythology of a powerful new god, Mimba-karo, he aims to secure the allegiance of the disparate tribes and unify them into a cohesive military force. Europeans would be swept out of this ‘Black Empire’, under the motto of ‘Africa for the Africans’.⁸¹ Here the witchdoctor figure is directly connected to mounting concerns about the threat of pan-Africanism and black nationalism. The fantasy of a major rebellion manifests anxieties about the vulnerability of the European presence—missionary and colonial—in West Africa. In fact, the novel is what Yumna Siddiqi describes as ‘counterinsurgent fiction’, in which a ‘native’ insurrection is quashed by the effective actions of a few capable individuals. Such fictions appeared in the early twentieth century, when the object of imperialism in Africa was no longer expansion ‘but the defense and administration of territory’. While these texts ‘rhetorically disavow the efficacy of anticolonial insurgency’, they are equally indicative of the empire’s political instability.⁸² In A Yellow Napoleon, the ‘few hundred white men’ residing in the Karambana District, where the commissioner is ‘the sole representative of Britain’s might’, are in an imperilled position.⁸³ This vulnerability is compounded by the nature of the rising. Tulasi sets up ‘a Secret Service system’, establishing a communication network of ⁷⁵ Arthur E. Southon, A Yellow Napoleon: A Romance of West Africa (London, 1926), p. 12. ⁷⁶ Southon, A Yellow Napoleon, pp. 14, 40–1. ⁷⁷ Southon, A Yellow Napoleon, p. 143. ⁷⁸ Thorne, Congregational Missions, p. 169. ⁷⁹ Southon, A Yellow Napoleon, pp. 13, 14. ⁸⁰ Southon, A Yellow Napoleon, pp. 36, 42. ⁸¹ Southon, A Yellow Napoleon, p. 43. The phrase ‘Africa for the Africans’ is most famously associated with the ideas of Marcus Garvey. ⁸² Yumna Siddiqi, Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue (New York, 2008), pp. 105–6. ⁸³ Southon, A Yellow Napoleon, pp. 43, 33.

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‘trusted agents in all the principal towns’.⁸⁴ Warning that ‘Secret societies have an irresistible fascination for the African’, and that ‘no one outside the movement had the slightest suspicion of the growing menace’, Southon imagines an escalating anti-colonial resistance that has the terrifying ability to evade surveillance.⁸⁵ In the end, the missionary presence dispels the threat. While Tulasi is defeated by the Commissioner, Harvey Fane, the missionary (Frank Rilston) makes a key intervention by achieving the mass conversion of the Kwandi; by ‘chang[ing] the people themselves’ he removes the potential for the politicized manipulation of ‘heathenism’.⁸⁶ In A Yellow Napoleon, the witchdoctor plot is clearly politically embedded. By making Tulasi a fraud who uses the trappings of indigenous practices for his own purposes, the novel discredits the sorts of cultural revivals that were important to anti-colonial projects. Ultimately, the book is connected to concerns about missionary security, as well as wider issues of colonial instability in a period of developing nationalisms. At a later historical moment too, the witchdoctor narrative continued to have political significance. In Dissenting missionary fiction, a resurgence of such plots can be detected in and around decolonization. In 1961, for instance, the Brethren press Pickering & Inglis published Marion Percy Williams’ Jewel of the Light. This children’s book traces the journey of a 12-year-old girl, Rikwe, as she converts to Christianity. Her primary opposition comes from an advocate of ‘the black man’s “Tsafi” (witchcraft)’ named Wur.⁸⁷ Wur rallies opposition to the missionaries, prevents Rikwe from buying one of their booklets, and conspires to burn down their new church. When Rikwe attends the missionary ‘prayer hut’ against her family’s will, the local ‘Dodo’ is summoned to perform an intimidating ceremony in order ‘to frighten her into obedience’.⁸⁸ Eventually, however, Rikwe finds sanctuary from witchcraft and from an arranged marriage at the evangelist’s compound. The Africa projected in Jewel of the Light is familiar from representations belonging to much earlier periods; in focusing on a rural region—‘a very backward district’—the novel does little to engage African modernity and harks back to an Africa of the past where ‘civilizing’ work remains imperative.⁸⁹ In many of their tropes, other witchdoctor tales of the 1950s and 1960s are likewise reminiscent of well-worn narratives. In Kachabinda, for instance, the witchdoctor remains the emblem of opposition, committed to the ‘ancient customs of our people’ and insistent on forcing the young protagonist through initiation ceremonies.⁹⁰ In these books, gothic descriptions regularly appear,

⁸⁴ ⁸⁶ ⁸⁷ ⁸⁸ ⁹⁰

Southon, A Yellow Napoleon, p. 38. ⁸⁵ Southon, A Yellow Napoleon, pp. 166, 168. Southon, A Yellow Napoleon, p. 251. M. P. Williams, Jewel of the Light (London, 1961), p. 7. Williams, Jewel of the Light, p. 59. ⁸⁹ Williams, Jewel of the Light, p. 40. Milligan, Kachabinda, p. 47.

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rendering the witchdoctor and his threat both monstrous and irrational. In Haynes’ Return of the Witchdoctor, Kikembu wears a ‘great wooden mask’ with a ‘horrible grin’ and performs incantations with a ‘glistening body’ ‘painted in streaks of red’.⁹¹ Likewise, in Milligan’s The Witchdoctor’s Revenge, Chimbuki wears a ‘skirt made of grey monkey skins’, and a coronet of feathers ‘recently dipped in the blood of a fowl’.⁹² Ultimately, the witchdoctor represents the menacing prospect of a return to the heathen past. In some cases this is conveyed by rendering him ancient, a dangerous remnant of an age that threatens resurgence. Kikembu, for instance, has ‘a wrinkled, evil face’, while at the end of Ngoma, the witchdoctor is still ‘malevolent’, ‘[v]ery old now and more cadaverous than ever’.⁹³ According to the pattern of these novels, traditional religion belongs to the past, while Christianity—whose converts are young and vigorous—presents hope for the future. Missionaries responded to anti-colonialism and nationalism in diverse and complex ways. Adrian Hastings argues that ‘[t]he large majority of white missionaries’ recognized ‘the legitimacy of a movement towards self-government but greatly hoped it would not come too fast’.⁹⁴ Certainly, the concentration of witchdoctor narratives at the political juncture of the 1950s and 1960s, suggests an urge to convey the imperative for ongoing mission in the context of decolonization. Appearing at the end of empire, they warn of heathen resurgence in the event that the missionary presence is expelled. Arguably, they reflect a concern among missionaries, detected by David Maxwell, that ‘cultural nationalism might revive paganism’ and undermine their achievements.⁹⁵ While I have argued that the narratives discussed here are symptomatic of unease, it is notable that they occasionally make more direct political reference. In Milligan’s The Witchdoctor’s Revenge, Chimbuki has evaded arrest before and is likely to have fled to Angola to avoid capture.⁹⁶ Haynes’ Return of the Witch-Doctor is more explicit, when it emerges that Kikembu ‘is the leader of one of the groups to drive out the white man from Africa’.⁹⁷ While he uses ‘his witchcraft to impress the Africans’, he is also a ‘leader of some terrorist group’. The threat is dispelled in the event of his conversion, but similar attempts to remove Europeans are ‘happening all over Africa’.⁹⁸ It would be a mistake to treat these books as generally representative of the attitudes of Nonconformist missionaries, which varied widely according to circumstance. But the texts examined here do manifest a wariness of anti-colonial developments and a sense—following movements ⁹¹ ⁹² ⁹³ ⁹⁴ ⁹⁵ ⁹⁶ ⁹⁷ ⁹⁸

Haynes, Return of the Witch-Doctor, pp. 17, 19. Elsie Milligan, The Witchdoctor’s Revenge (London, 1967), pp. 100–1. Haynes, Return of the Witch-Doctor, p. 36; Milligan, Ngoma, p. 94. Adrian Hastings, A History of African Christianity 1950–1975 (Cambridge, 1979), p. 97. David Maxwell, ‘Decolonization’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, p. 285. Milligan, The Witchdoctor’s Revenge, p. 139. Haynes, Return of the Witch-Doctor, p. 58. Haynes, Return of the Witch-Doctor, pp. 59, 63.

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like the Mau Mau in Kenya—that the position of missionaries was becoming increasingly dangerous.⁹⁹

LOCAL TRAN SMISSIONS OF CHRISTIANITY: NARRATIVES OF AFRICAN AGENCY For the most part, plots centring on medical missions and witchdoctor encounters foreground the agency of Western missionaries. In these texts, we are reminded of the missionary’s capacity to win converts, provide healthcare, and tackle resistance. Yet it is also important to draw attention to a different trend, which sought to highlight the role of indigenous agency in the spread of Christianity. As historians of African Christianity have often observed, its massive growth in the twentieth century owed less to external missionaries than to local converts who disseminated the faith they had adopted; as Philip Jenkins writes, ‘what made Christianity succeed was the networking effect’.¹⁰⁰ In fact, the significance of the local church has long been discerned in the missionary movement itself and progressively received acknowledgement. In his discussion of the major missionary conferences from 1900, Timothy Yates notes the ‘growing recognition . . . that mission had become increasingly the realm of the indigenous churches’.¹⁰¹ To some extent, this can be seen in the growth of publications focusing on the experience and activities of converts. While these are conversion narratives, in that they foreground the transformation of African subjects, they also seek to exhibit these individuals’ capacity as missionary agents themselves. This preoccupation is particularly exhibited in various semi-fictional works produced by the LMS. By semi-fiction, I refer to literature recounting episodes from the life stories of real individuals, while drawing on techniques commonly associated with narrative fiction—including reported speech, scenic description, and even a sense of character interiority.¹⁰² In Yarns of African Youth by one-time LMS General Secretary, Arthur Chirgwin, the focus is on the evangelistic achievements of a series of local converts. In his story, ‘Isaac of the Great Thirst Land’, the protagonist passes through missionary training with the great aim of returning home to ‘win the people of the Great Thirst Land for God’; eventually, he devotes himself to ⁹⁹ Maxwell, ‘Decolonization’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, p. 285. ¹⁰⁰ Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford, 2002), p. 43. ¹⁰¹ Yates, Christian Mission, p. 120. ¹⁰² This style of writing is readily detectable in stirring convert narratives published by the society, but it is also apparent in popular missionary biographies such as Basil Mathews’ Livingstone: The Pathfinder (1912), which narrates the protagonist’s life as a quest romance.

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itinerant mission in the Kalahari, determining ‘to put [his] feet on every part of the Great Thirst Land’.¹⁰³ Likewise, ‘Blind John of Johannesburg’ tracks the development of a young man, blinded in a mining accident, who in due course becomes a powerful preacher. Establishing congregations in the Johannesburg mines, ‘Blind John’ builds up an enormous Christian community.¹⁰⁴ Of course, such stories continue to make the case for European mission; while Chirgwin praises those Africans who embark ‘on evangelistic work without any instigation from Europeans’ as ‘very successful in commending Christianity’, he reminds readers that often ‘Europeans have to come in and help at a certain stage’.¹⁰⁵ Despite such caveats, however, the more conspicuous feature is the collection’s acknowledgement that African Christian activism contributed crucially to the missionary enterprise. An emphasis on the agency of converts also emerges in the work of Mabel Shaw. As the first single female agent to be sent to Central Africa by the LMS and the founder of a girl’s boarding school in Northern Rhodesia, she became celebrated in missionary circles as an expert on mission education.¹⁰⁶ Shaw’s widely read publications largely revolve around the experiences of pupils educated in her Mbereshi school. Dawn in Africa: Stories of Girl Life (1927), for instance, dwells on the transition from girlhood to womanhood as a series of young Christians negotiate the terrain between their cultural traditions and the new faith. It is again an avowedly factual work, based on ‘real girls, living to-day in Africa’, but written to create a readerly experience akin to prose fiction.¹⁰⁷ One of the protagonists of Dawn in Africa is Lise Mulenga, a sincere believer caught in the tension between social convention and her new convictions. We follow her as she makes the courageous decision to adopt a ‘chinkula’ child destined for death, and then struggles under the weight of local consternation.¹⁰⁸ While she marries her husband ‘according to the new way’, she permits traditional ceremonies as well because she ‘could not refuse the elders’ and ‘her husband wholly believed in them’.¹⁰⁹ Her marriage becomes increasingly strained, particularly when she moves to Masampa and experiences the additional pressures of an urban environment. In foregrounding such difficulties, Shaw’s focus, as Rebecca Hughes argues, is the ‘lived experience’ of women as they strive to ‘lead fulfilling Christian lives’. Refusing to

¹⁰³ A. M. Chirgwin, Yarns of African Youth (London, 1935), p. 13. ¹⁰⁴ Chirgwin, Yarns of African Youth, p. 30. ¹⁰⁵ Chirgwin, Yarns of African Youth, p. 69. ¹⁰⁶ Rebecca C. Hughes, ‘The Legacy of Mabel Shaw’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 37.2 (2013), p. 105. Shaw began life as a Congregationalist, but joined the Anglican Church Missionary Society in the 1940s when she left the LMS. See Hughes, ‘The Legacy of Mabel Shaw’, p. 105. ¹⁰⁷ Mabel Shaw, Dawn in Africa: Stories of Girl Life (London, 1932), preface. ¹⁰⁸ Shaw, Dawn in Africa, p. 17. ¹⁰⁹ Shaw, Dawn in Africa, p. 20.

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idealize her converts, or demonize their cultural background, Shaw aims to present them as rounded ‘flesh-and-blood humans’ facing genuine struggles on a daily basis.¹¹⁰ In Dawn in Africa, missionaries are largely kept in the background. What we encounter instead is a community of women, making efforts to sustain one another. In Masampa, Chishimba and the steadily growing Christian meetings they run together provide a lifeline to Lise: ‘more and more came until the little house couldn’t hold them’.¹¹¹ Rather than merely presenting her characters as subjects acted upon, transformed by missionary efforts, Shaw accents their agency, portraying them as ‘active members of a changing society’.¹¹² By dwelling on the activities and day-today experience of African Christians, the book stresses the capacity and contributions of local believing communities. Shaw can be criticized for presuming to speak on behalf of her subjects, but there is little doubt that her sympathetic representation was designed to unsettle her readers’ assumptions about African people and society. Such publications are indicative of a growing recognition, particularly following the First World War, that indigenous efforts were indispensable to the spread of Christianity. Since Southon wrote some of the more extreme missionary adventure novels of the 1920s, it is surprising that this development can also be traced in his corpus. Nevertheless, the plot of his 1931 novel, King of the World, centres on the efforts of Nigerian evangelist Michael Fatuyi to ‘develop Christianity in the Ileran country’. Perhaps the novel’s most striking feature is Fatuyi’s capability; he is intelligent, well educated, and fully equipped for the ‘pioneer work’ he has embarked on.¹¹³ As an African himself, moreover, he values local initiatives, knowing that ‘churches were being established by educated clerks and traders who gave their spare time to preaching the Gospel’.¹¹⁴ Southon’s aim is to show that Fatuyi’s cultural origin enables him to engage West Africans in a particularly persuasive way. In the preface, Southon claims to have been motivated by a sense that the ‘white races have calmly appropriated the Lord Jesus as their very own’.¹¹⁵ In place of a Eurocentric ‘ready-made Christian religion’, he stresses the value of looking ‘at Jesus through the eyes of Africa’. By imagining the ways that ‘an African minister’ might ‘tell his people about the Lord Jesus’, the novel tries to do just that.¹¹⁶ In King of the World, Fatuyi communicates what—in Southon’s view at least—a truly West African Christianity might look like. Fatuyi’s Christian experience is Pentecostal in character: he regularly has pictorial visions that are directly applicable to his immediate circumstances. He also learns to relay his message effectively, translating it into his listeners’ context; his task was to ¹¹⁰ ¹¹² ¹¹⁴ ¹¹⁶

Hughes, ‘The Legacy of Mabel Shaw’, p. 106. ¹¹¹ Shaw, Dawn in Africa, p. 35. Hughes, ‘The Legacy of Mabel Shaw’, p. 106. ¹¹³ Southon, King of the World, p. 3. Southon, King of the World, p. 27. ¹¹⁵ Southon, King of the World, p. viii. Southon, King of the World, pp. ix–x.

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‘make the truth live through illustrations from things which were familiar to them’.¹¹⁷ Finding expository preaching unproductive, Fatuyi opts instead to tell biblical stories from ‘the sayings of the Lord Jesus’, to which he occasionally adds local colour.¹¹⁸ Travelling around the lake as an itinerant missionary, his oral method suits his environment and enables him to attract a large following. For Southon, in other words, Fatuyi represents a successful effort to Africanize Christianity. Southon’s effort to see Christianity through African eyes was—as he recognized himself—‘presumptuous’ to say the least. He acknowledged that he was seeking to ‘do what only an African can successfully accomplish’.¹¹⁹ In spite of this, the novel is clearly different in tone to his other works examined here. This is best explained by publishing context. King of the World was released by Atlantic Press, an imprint of the Methodist West African Literature Society, which published English language texts for distribution in West Africa.¹²⁰ The intended audience was thus not only—or even primarily—British readers, but an emerging generation of literate African Christians. Written while Chair of the West African Literature Society, Southon’s efforts to emphasize indigenous ventures may have been primarily for the benefit of such readers; as Griffiths suggests, following the First World War missionary interests made efforts to offer ‘appropriate reading matter’ to this growing ‘target audience’.¹²¹ Nevertheless, Southon’s decision to plot a novel around an effective African evangelist stands as a testament to the awareness in missionary circles of the limits of European agency. The crucial role that Africans played in the expansion of Christianity is one reason that the religion didn’t decline, but rather prospered, in the aftermath of decolonization. As Maxwell puts it, empire had ‘assisted the spread of Christianity, but the faith outlasted its framework of transmission’. As ‘African Christians seized the religious initiative’, indigenizing and appropriating its resources for their own ends, ‘Christian adherence’ could flourish even as ‘anti-colonial sentiment’ deepened.¹²² Such indigenization (which resulted in new theologies, liturgies, and ecclesial forms) could of course prove problematic in the international forums dominated by European orthodoxies. Many of these developments were alarming to missionaries, and it certainly is true—as Etherington observes—that missionary discourse pays less tribute to indigenous evangelists than the historical record indicates is their due.¹²³ Yet as I have ¹¹⁷ Southon, King of the World, p. 31. ¹¹⁸ Southon, King of the World, p. 165. ¹¹⁹ Southon, King of the World, p. x. ¹²⁰ For information on the West African Literature Society, see John Pritchard, Methodists and their Missionary Societies 1900–1996 (Farnham, 2014), pp. 118–19. ¹²¹ Griffiths, ‘Trained to Tell the Truth’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, p. 166. ¹²² Maxwell, ‘Decolonization’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, pp. 286, 296. ¹²³ Norman Etherington, ‘Missions and Empire Revisited’, Social Sciences and Missions 24.2–3 (2011), p. 180.

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shown here, alongside recurring medical plots and witchdoctor narratives, some Dissenting missionary writing shifted the locus of its attention to African agency, as it became clearer that the spread of Christianity relied on indigenous believers and not primarily on the foreign presence.

ANXIOUS CRITICS: DISSENTING MISSIONS I N I M P E R IAL F I C T I O N Having examined the representative practices of a wide range of missionary fiction, it is worth considering how Dissenting missionaries have been represented by others. In the nineteenth century, religious, social, and political debates guaranteed the appearance of Dissenting characters in contemporary fiction; major novelists like Eliot, Gaskell, and Hardy engaged with Dissent as a significant force in a rapidly changing Victorian society. While it figures less conspicuously in twentieth-century fiction, as its social and political potency dwindled, there are some striking engagements with Dissenting missionaries in Africa that reveal much about their contemporary reception. I will focus on two colonial authors, Harry H. Johnston and Joyce Cary, both of whom were active in imperial officialdom as administrators in Central and West Africa. In 1921, Harry H. Johnston (1858–1927) went to press with his novel The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance of East Africa. Having held a double vice-consulship in the Oil Rivers Protectorate and the Cameroons in the mid-1880s, and later served as the first Commissioner of British Central Africa, the King’s College London-educated Johnston was a major figure in the African scramble. He was an imperial expansionist and strategist, directly involved in treaties to secure British influence in Central and East Africa.¹²⁴ Johnston was also a prolific author, best known for his writings on exploration and empire. Nevertheless, he also turned to fiction, notably writing sequels to some Victorian classics. In The Man Who Did the Right Thing, Johnston looks back on the period of African partition from the vantage point of the postFirst World War world. Approaching it with a mixture of nostalgia and satire, the novel traces the imperial career of Roger Brentham, an administrator and aspiring explorer, whose ambitions are never quite fulfilled. In the context of this chapter, however, the most interesting feature of Johnston’s romance is the space given to the Dissenting missionary interest in East Africa. While Johnston’s satire roves widely, it is directed most conspicuously at Nonconformists. The book’s chief missionary is John Baines, a ‘simple-minded, ¹²⁴ For information on Harry Johnston, see Roland Oliver, Sir Harry Johnston and the Scramble for Africa (London, 1957).

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unintellectual Englishman’ who joins the Methodist East African Mission.¹²⁵ While John is himself ‘good-hearted’, he is represented as coming from bigoted stock. His mother is ‘austerely devout’, yet ‘unsympathetic’ and ‘thoroughly unlovable’. Taking pleasure in judging others, her biggest concern is whether someone has ‘scoffed at Genesis’, ‘spoken flippantly of Noah’s Ark’, or ‘been seen reading fiction on a Sunday’.¹²⁶ For Johnston, the sects that John Baines and his mother typify are out of step with modern intellectual life. John views ‘Darwin and other infidel writers’ with anxiety, while his mother’s reading matter goes little further than ‘Baxter’s sermons’.¹²⁷ Set against Brentham’s scepticism, which considers ‘religious truths’ to be only ‘tentative explanations which have lost their value’, Johnston’s Nonconformists are intended to appear old fashioned and intellectually restricted.¹²⁸ Eventually, Mrs Baines loses her faith when her son is killed in East Africa. Distraught with grief she passes ‘from the most narrow-minded piety to a raging disbelief ’, publicly denying ‘the very existence of a God’.¹²⁹ When faced with difficult circumstances, her Nonconformity fails to provide her with adequate resources. According to Roland Oliver, Johnston was ‘[t]he most self-advertised of unbelievers’.¹³⁰ In giving Mrs Baines’ convictions the fragility of fanaticism, I would suggest that he repeats older establishment critiques of Nonconformism, and discredits a tradition for which he has little time. Approaching Nonconformity with biting satire, his novel characterizes it as a remnant from the past with diminishing value in the modern world. Johnston’s attitude reflects both the self-satisfied rationalism of an imperial bureaucrat, and the shifting nature of the public cultures of the imperial nation state whose interests he represented. His approach resembles the strategy of those Victorian novelists for whom Dissent (after the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828) was increasingly a spent force. As Valentine Cunningham argues, even while Nonconformity retained social and political power, authors outside the tradition tended to cast it as obsolete and ‘anachronistic’. Such representations, in which Dissent was placed in the past and denied contemporary relevance, were often antagonistic and ideological.¹³¹ In The Man Who Did the Right Thing, Johnston certainly signals Dissent’s irrelevance while exhibiting some hostility. By sending Mrs Baines to an asylum and eventually having her retreat into speechlessness, he arguably subjects her to an imaginative punishment that he considered befitting for one of her religious persuasions. ¹²⁵ Sir Harry Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing (New York, 1921), p. 4. ¹²⁶ Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, pp. 8–9. ¹²⁷ Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, pp. 19, 10. ¹²⁸ Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, p. 79. ¹²⁹ Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, p. 393. ¹³⁰ Oliver, Sir Harry Johnston, p. 6. ¹³¹ Valentine Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 1975), pp. 278–80.

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Johnston’s satire of Dissent continues with the missionaries in the field. When John Baines goes to join the mission at Hangodi ahead of his wife, he writes to tell her of his difficulties in explaining ‘the gospel through an interpreter’; he found the Walunga ‘suspicious and quarrelsome’ and on the whole, they ‘paid him little attention’.¹³² His report to the parodically named missionary magazine, Light to Them that Sit in Darkness, in contrast, transforms his experience into heroic mission, stressing his effective communication and enthusiastic reception. In the Nonconformist publication, John celebrates the ‘earnest spirit of inquiry’ amongst the people ‘who listen with rapt attention’— ‘spellbound’—to his ‘simple exhortations’.¹³³ By accentuating the divergence between private and public records, Johnston caricatures the crafted reports of missionary societies, casting doubt on their reliability and poking fun at the public demand for idealized material. While Johnston lampoons all his missionary characters, his representation of Ann Jamblin is particularly interesting. A single woman, she is sent out by the Mission Board to marry Brother Anderson only to deny ‘all knowledge of such an engagement’ when she arrives. She is a busybody who writes mediocre pious verse and—as Johnston tells us—has an ‘unattractive appearance’.¹³⁴ Ann later comes into her own, helping to defend the Hangodi mission and defiantly refusing to return to Britain. Yet although there is some admiration of her independence, we learn that she is known locally as the ‘manwoman’.¹³⁵ The independent, self-sufficient female missionary is given limited credit and is instead pilloried as almost unnatural. It is important to note (as Rademaker does in Chapter 12 in this volume) that mission work often extended leadership opportunities to women beyond those readily available in Britain. From the revivals of the 1850s and 1860s, avenues for involvement had been extended to women until, by the start of the twentieth century, they made up ‘a clear majority of missionary personnel’.¹³⁶ In The Man Who Did the Right Thing, however, the female activism that played such an essential—if under-acknowledged—role in the Dissenting missionary movement, is offered up more for derision than esteem. The point is that Johnston’s critique of Nonconformist missionaries isn’t simply unproblematic satire. Indeed, his attitude is at least partly influenced by class distinctions. John Baines is from an artisan background, a social sphere that Johnston admits ‘had furnished quite the best type of colonist abroad’. But while John may be ‘chaste and sober’, Johnston allows him few social graces. With ‘sloping shoulders, long arms’, a ‘hearty appetite for plain food’, ¹³² Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, p. 52. ¹³³ Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, p. 56. ¹³⁴ Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, p. 130. ¹³⁵ Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, p. 307. ¹³⁶ Etherington, ‘Missions and Empire Revisited’, p. 179. See also Randall, ‘Nonconformists and Overseas Mission’, in Pope, ed., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity, p. 395.

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and a disposition suited to manual work, the ‘backwoods life suited him to perfection’.¹³⁷ While there were certainly exceptions, British missionary societies often recruited personnel from the lower social echelons; in the colonies, where class distinctions were active, they tended to occupy the bottom end of the spectrum.¹³⁸ Johnston’s attitude to his Dissenting missionaries manifests no small share of class condescension. In the novel, moreover, the church– chapel division is operative. The ‘ladies of the Anglican Mission’ come from ‘a social stratum one or even two degrees higher’ than the personnel of the East African Mission, and were little inclined to be ‘tolerant of Nonconformists’.¹³⁹ To be fair to Johnston, those who make too much of social differences are themselves offered up for critique. Brentham’s social superiority is revealed, for instance, when he refers ‘depreciatively’ to the East African Mission as ‘Nonconformist, Plymouth Brethren, or something of the kind’. And Ann Jamblin’s contention that colonial authorities ‘always sneer at Nonconformist Missionaries’ carries force.¹⁴⁰ Nevertheless, Johnston’s criticisms of Dissenting missionaries are coloured by a palpable class prejudice that his parody of social snobbery fails to counteract. In spite of his unbelief and the attitude manifest in The Man Who Did the Right Thing, Harry H. Johnston was not a wholehearted opponent of missions. Elsewhere, he argued that they warranted ‘consideration and support’ for their function in preparing ‘brutish savages’ for ‘the approach of civilisation’.¹⁴¹ For Johnston, however, the effort to teach Africans Christianity was redundant, since their ‘low-grade minds’ were ‘scarcely capable’ of appreciating its ‘doctrines and dogmas’ or applying them to ‘the practical purposes of life’.¹⁴² But while it would be preferable for mission to support empire by acting purely as a ‘school-board for savages’, he felt that it was wise to ‘let the missionaries dogmatise and indoctrinate without let or hindrance, on account of the education and civilization which they laterally introduce’.¹⁴³ In The Man Who Did the Right Thing, Johnston grants the value of industrial missions that teach Africans ‘hard work’ and ‘ambition’, ‘something besides these rotten hymns and prayers’.¹⁴⁴ But the moral and proselytizing efforts of Nonconformists, whose ‘mouths are full of texts’, he deems to be fruitless.¹⁴⁵ When ¹³⁷ Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, pp. 4–5, 128. ¹³⁸ Norman Etherington, ‘Introduction’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, p. 15. ¹³⁹ Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, p. 95. ¹⁴⁰ Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, pp. 71, 200. ¹⁴¹ H. H. Johnston, ‘British Missions and Missionaries in Africa’, The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review 22.129 (1887), p. 723. ¹⁴² H. H. Johnston, ‘Are Foreign Missions a Success?’, Fortnightly Review 45.268 (1889), p. 489. See also Johnston’s report on the Oil Rivers to Lord Salisbury, quoted in Oliver, Sir Harry Johnston, p. 129. ¹⁴³ Johnston, ‘Are Foreign Missions a Success?’, p. 489. ¹⁴⁴ Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, p. 326. ¹⁴⁵ Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, p. 71.

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Ann Jamblin seeks help from ‘girl interpreters’ to translate ‘her favourite canticles into the native language’, they take pleasure in misleading her ‘into rendering the most sacred phrases and symbolism by gross obscenities’.¹⁴⁶ Ann’s efforts, moreover, to focus on the ‘elevation of the native women’ by addressing ‘chastity’ and the ‘sex question’, meet with no success at all.¹⁴⁷ In fact, Johnston’s novel is marked by scepticism about the mission adherents who attend school and chapel. In the older mission girls, he sees ‘an illconcealed expression of over-fed idleness tending towards imaginings of sensuality’.¹⁴⁸ Johnston may have argued elsewhere that the civilizing efforts of missionaries were worth supporting, but the satire he targets here at evangelical Nonconformity is underscored by racial doubts about African character and capacity. For him, the girls would have been better put to ‘hard, manual labour’ in advance of their lessons so as to take ‘the sauciness out of them’.¹⁴⁹ In other words, Johnston’s critical parody of the East African Mission is bound up with a cynical outlook on potential converts and what he deemed to be the misdirection of missionary efforts. Johnston highlights the problematic nature of at least some of the criticisms levelled against Dissenting missions in the late imperial period. Of particular note are the racial prejudices responsible for part of the opprobrium directed at missionary aspirations and methods. Indeed, in the works of some other detractors, it is clear that their critique of the missionary enterprise is underpinned by a deep-seated distrust of indigenous agency. This emerges, for instance, in the short stories of Edgar Wallace, a prolific author of mysteries and thrillers in the early twentieth century. In his ‘Commissioner Sanders’ stories, which follow the efforts of a colonial administrator to maintain order in a vast region of West Central Africa, missionaries prove an endless source of trouble. For Sanders, they are naïve, inexpert in the art of managing the native; his feelings about mission personnel were those ‘of the skilled matador who watches the novice’s awkward handling of an Andalusian bull’.¹⁵⁰ In Wallace’s second Sanders’ collection, The People of the River (1912), Mr Haggins of ‘the Modern Baptist Mission’ is a former ‘London street preacher, hot for glory, and a radical constitutionally opposed to government’, who proves a thorn in the commissioner’s side. Condemning Sanders’ supposedly ‘atrocious treatment of one of [his] native evangelists’, Haggins dogmatically refuses to believe that his convert had ‘amused himself in his spare time with certain women’.¹⁵¹ It is such credulity that, for Wallace, makes missionaries a major source of colonial unease. Indeed, in his stories, those who adopt the guise of ¹⁴⁶ ¹⁴⁷ ¹⁴⁸ ¹⁴⁹ ¹⁵⁰ ¹⁵¹

Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, p. 131. Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, pp. 369–70. Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, p. 137. Johnston, The Man Who Did the Right Thing, p. 137. Edgar Wallace, The People of the River (Teddington, [1912] 2003), p. 63. Wallace, The People of the River, p. 84.

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the convert present the biggest threat to political stability. In ‘The Sickness Mongo’, for instance, an indigenous evangelist named Joseph is in reality a leader in a secret society plotting insurgency. While making the country ‘rotten with rebellion’, he has been ‘playing the fool’ to the ingenuous missionary, whose misplaced trust is revealed when his station is set ablaze and he is burned to death.¹⁵² In Wallace, the critique of missionaries, and particularly Dissenters, is thus bound up with anxieties about imperial vulnerability and founded on the assumption that converts are dissembling figures who threaten to disrupt colonial order. If anxieties rear their head in Johnston and Wallace, they are particularly acute in Joyce Cary (1888–1957). While those who adopt Christianity in The People of the River are dissimulators, the proselytes of Cary’s first novel, Aissa Saved (1932), are terrifying in their sincerity. In this novel, the reader is presented with a nightmarish fantasy of the unforeseen effects of mission, in which Christianity is taken in unpredictable directions in African hands. As in Wallace, the Dissenting missionaries of the Nigerian ‘Winkworth Memorial Mission’ are characterized by blindness. They fail to perceive their followers with clarity, unaware that they ‘have private meeting places’ away from the missionary eye, where they ‘can laugh, shout, dance in the native style’.¹⁵³ The missionaries fail, moreover, to discern the profound misapprehensions and disturbing syncretic tendencies of their adherents. At the beginning of the novel, the converts are characterized as the mimics that regularly appear in colonial fiction. Ojo, the mission’s ‘chief pupil teacher’, imitates the missionaries down to the very ‘intonations’ of their speech, while Aissa is sure to perform ‘the appropriate sad faces current at the mission’ when joining in hymns.¹⁵⁴ Progressively, however, the vision of indigenous acolytes becomes more disturbing. Contesting the idealized representations of missionary writing, Cary discredits converts by amplifying their tendency to backslide. When reunited with friends at Fanta’s beer-house, Aissa relapses into her old life with little resistance. Represented as inherently bodily and sensual, she is soon throwing off her loincloth and dancing ‘in a trance’ with her ‘muscles jigging like parts of a machine’.¹⁵⁵ Yet Cary isn’t satisfied with insinuating the unreliability of the proselyte, in whom the missioners place their trust. While Aissa’s temporary regression establishes a fundamental instability in African converts, Cary is more concerned with how they act while in the grips of belief. Making no space for any legitimate practice of African Christianity, the faith and activities of Cary’s believers are intended to appear debased. In a sermon, for instance, Ojo mangles the doctrine of the Atonement, describing a negotiation between ¹⁵² Wallace, The People of the River, pp. 136, 132. ¹⁵³ Joyce Cary, Aissa Saved (London, [1932] 2000), p. 131. ¹⁵⁴ Cary, Aissa Saved, pp. 11, 47. ¹⁵⁵ Cary, Aissa Saved, p. 53.

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the Son and the Father in which God initially rejects Christ as an insufficient sacrifice: ‘There are many people and you are only one.’ In response, Jesus replies, ‘but if I die slow, slow, with much pain, will that not do for many people?’¹⁵⁶ Similarly, Brimah, a Hausa carrier, tells listeners that Christianity has ‘three gods: The Father, the Son, Jesus, and the Spirit’. The last of these, he explains, is ‘God’s Waziri’, the agent of his ‘dirty work’.¹⁵⁷ In Cary, then, converts hold heretical positions unconsciously and spout blasphemy in their ignorance. His novel altogether denies the capacity of Africans to comprehend the message and engage with it in productive ways. Recognizing that missionaries were not always in control of the reception of their message, Cary responds anxiously. In one scene, he imagines the converts using Scripture as an enchanted document, taking single verses chosen at random as ‘oracles’ with calamitous consequences.¹⁵⁸ Envisioning literacy intermingling with local superstitious practices, Cary denigrates African Christians and reveals a distrust of missionary education with its unpredictable results. In Cary’s fantasy-nightmare, Christianity fails to bring civilizing benefits but rather exacerbates the dangerous tendencies of its adherents. When the commissioner, Bradgate, forbids Christian meetings in Kolu following a collision with the followers of the local religion, it is not long before the converts return to wage battle. Aissa has been cowed by an earlier altercation, in which she was maimed and imprisoned, but it is her revitalized Christian conviction that inspires her renewed violence. Having ‘gulped the dark liquid’ of Communion, she has a powerful religious experience in which ‘waves of heat burning out all her cold wickedness’ pass through her body.¹⁵⁹ Convinced she is communing with Jesus, she hears him tell her to ‘go fight for me with dem bad pagan’.¹⁶⁰ In the ‘holy war’ that follows, Cary pens scenes of horrifying violence. Shangoedi, a particularly savage Christian, is soon ‘flourishing two knives’, screaming ‘[f]ight for Jesus’ and cutting throats.¹⁶¹ In Aissa Saved, Christianity fuels violent tendencies by lending the powerful conviction of divine warrant. And although they wage war on the ‘pagans’, for Cary the mission converts remain essentially pagan themselves. Indeed, it is a syncretic blend of twisted theology and pagan practice that produces the novel’s climactic scene of horror. When Aissa becomes convinced that Jesus requires her to surrender her baby, Abba, he is offered as a sacrifice and his head severed by the blow of a sword. Ojo initially protests that they are participating in ‘juju’, but on witnessing Aissa’s ‘look of exaltation’ he realizes he is ‘fighting against the very spirit of love and sacrifice’.¹⁶² Cary ensures that even the most fervent converts have irrepressible primitive urges, which re-emerge to produce ¹⁵⁶ ¹⁵⁸ ¹⁶⁰ ¹⁶²

Cary, Aissa Saved, p. 40. ¹⁵⁷ Cary, Aissa Saved, p. 38. Cary, Aissa Saved, pp. 131–2. ¹⁵⁹ Cary, Aissa Saved, p. 159. Cary, Aissa Saved, p. 162. ¹⁶¹ Cary, Aissa Saved, p. 165. Cary, Aissa Saved, pp. 216–17.

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horrifying religious perversions. Ultimately, then, his suspicion of mission is based on a racial prejudice that denies the ability of Africans to handle Christianity responsibly. From among the dispossessed Irish landed gentry, Joyce Cary had direct involvement in imperial affairs, having worked as a District Officer in the Northern Nigerian political service from 1914 to 1920, before pursuing a career as a full-time author.¹⁶³ In writing fiction derived from his experience of administrative postings, in Bauchi province and in Borgu district, he approached the empire with a certain amount of irony. In Aissa Saved, Bradgate, the colonial official, is an impotent figure. While locals tolerate his presence, the imperial administration is out of touch with those under its dominion. But Cary was one of those late imperial authors who stopped short of substantial critique; he was prepared to ironize empire, but not fundamentally challenge it. In his work, as Elleke Boehmer argues, British rule is represented ‘as a constant, unbudgeable presence’ and alternatives are not entertained.¹⁶⁴ Indeed, I would suggest that there are connections between Cary’s reaction to mission and his continuing commitment to imperialism. In the Christian converts, whom he is at pains to discredit, Cary detects a political threat. When they attack Kolu, Ojo is fast to announce the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, believing that God ‘had decreed the end of the emirates and the empire’. In instituting the law of God, he pronounces that ‘the white men who are not Christians shall be driven away’.¹⁶⁵ Cary’s aggressive defamation of mission converts might have been influenced by concerns about the anticolonial potential of Christianity when appropriated by Africans. Certainly, Ojo resembles the prophetic figure associated with the flowering of African Independent Christianity. As Jenkins argues, since the late nineteenth century a ‘prophetic pattern’ has regularly occurred across Africa, in which a convert becomes estranged from the mission church and, on receiving a revelation, embarks on an independent ministry.¹⁶⁶ As noted by Brown (Chapter 1) and Carter (Chapter 6) in this volume, the diverse efforts of such figures to adapt the faith to local cultures and dissociate it from European traditions were crucial in the rapid expansion of Christianity during the colonial period and following decolonization. By making the converts’ erratic faith a threat to order, and in casting Ojo as an illegitimate prophet, Cary gives voice to anxieties surrounding the subversive potential of African initiated movements. In Johnston, Wallace, and Cary, Nonconformist missions come under fire. While their satire and critique is levelled on many fronts, it is clearly allied with racial preconceptions that render African converts a cause of concern. ¹⁶³ Alan Bishop, ‘Cary, (Arthur) Joyce Lunel’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2012), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32318, accessed 6/1/2016. ¹⁶⁴ Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford, 1995), p. 154. ¹⁶⁵ Cary, Aissa Saved, pp. 188–9. ¹⁶⁶ Jenkins, The Next Christendom, p. 48.

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If Johnston is scathing about the African capacity to absorb the message, Cary borders on the paranoid. In fact, read alongside the output of Dissenting missions themselves, it is clear that the critics of mission were often as problematic as the subjects of their critique. It is striking, moreover, that these authors—two of whom held imperial office—focused their attention on Dissenters. At the risk of generalization, it is worth noting that Nonconformists regularly conflicted with colonial officialdom. As Randall argues, since Nonconformity ‘rejected the idea of an Established church at home it has also often been at odds with the “Establishment” abroad’.¹⁶⁷ In the fiction examined here Dissenting missions are certainly troublesome. The responses they provoke suggest that, for authors invested in empire, Dissenting missions and their activities could prove a significant source of colonial unease.

MEMORIES OF MISSION: AN TI-COLONIAL P R O T E S T AN D T H E AFRI C AN NOV E L Having turned from missionary fiction to missions in fiction, it is left now to assess the literary responses of those on the receiving end of the encounter. Since many of the first generation of African novelists developed their literacy and language skills in Christian schools, an engagement with the missionary legacy emerges as a regular feature of their fiction. Although it is not uncommon for commentators to note this phenomenon, the complex response that African literature registers has seldom received sustained attention. Since many postcolonial authors have been preoccupied with what Ngugi wa Thiong’o calls ‘decolonising the mind’, and have written to resist ‘the narrative of Africa’s salvation’ by Europeans, their fiction has often been critical of missionary activity.¹⁶⁸ But only reductive reading practices would mistake such critique for unequivocal rejection. As Megan Cole Paustian argues, in some African literature, missions are regarded not only as ambivalent in their effects but as the ‘ambiguous ally’ of the anti-colonial imagination.¹⁶⁹ In examining works addressing Dissenting missions by two Zimbabwean authors, Wilson Katiyo (1947–2003) and Stanlake Samkange (1922–88), this section traces the established postcolonial critique of the intersections

¹⁶⁷ Randall, ‘Nonconformists and Overseas Mission’, in Pope, ed., T & T Clark Companion to Nonconformity, p. 400. ¹⁶⁸ Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London, 1986); Megan Cole Paustian, ‘ “A Real Heaven on their own Earth”: Religious Missions, Africans Writers, and the Anticolonial Imagination’, Research in African Literatures 45.2 (2014), p. 7. ¹⁶⁹ Paustian, ‘ “A Real Heaven” ’, p. 9.

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between mission and empire, while also disclosing the ways in which Christianity and the mission inheritance could fuel anti-colonial resistance. Katiyo and Samkange were important figures in the development of the Zimbabwean novel, in the run up to independence. Katiyo was active in nationalist politics in the 1960s, until encounters with the police led him to flee to London, where he studied at Queen Mary (University of London), before spending time in France and Switzerland. He returned to Zimbabwe in the 1980s, where he took on the editorship of the critical magazine Moto and involved himself in the developing post-independence film industry.¹⁷⁰ Disillusioned with the new nation state, however, Katiyo left Zimbabwe again later in the decade and adopted London as his domicile. Although he published only two novels, with a third unfinished, his work marked an important effort to provide a ‘detailed portrayal of an African’s living and working conditions in colonial Rhodesia’.¹⁷¹ The work examined here, A Son of the Soil (1976), emerged during his first period of political exile, beyond the literary censors of colonial Rhodesia and before his later disenchantment. Samkange was a leading intellectual, publishing widely in African history and historical fiction. He was the first Shona speaker in Southern Rhodesia to acquire an undergraduate degree, and the founder of Nyatsime College (1962), one of the first training institutions to be established by Africans for Africans. Following postgraduate studies in Indiana, he later taught at a number of US universities, notably in the African American Studies department at Northeastern.¹⁷² Samkange was part of a family active in both religion and politics; his father, Thompson Douglas Samkange, was an influential Methodist minister who made efforts to indigenize Christianity, and a pioneer of the nationalist movement who helped found the Southern Rhodesia Bantu Congress.¹⁷³ Stanlake was initially a moderate and ‘reformist’ nationalist like his father, but adopted a position of more radical resistance from the 1960s in the face of increasingly restrictive government legislation. Emerging from his anti-colonial and nationalist commitments, Samkange’s The Mourned One (1975) was published just before his return from the United States in 1978 to assist with the ‘internal settlement’ following the extended Rhodesian Bush War.¹⁷⁴ Katiyo’s and Samkange’s fiction shares terrain in following the life story of a protagonist whose formative education has taken place in a Methodist school. ¹⁷⁰ Ranka Primorac and Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo, ‘Wilson Katiyo (1947–2003)’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39.2 (2004), pp. 125–6. ¹⁷¹ Primorac and Dodgson-Katiyo, ‘Wilson Katiyo’, p. 126. ¹⁷² Lorna Lueker Zukas, ‘Samkange, Stanlake’, in Emmauel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates Jr, eds., Dictionary of African Biography, vol. 5 (Oxford and New York, 2012), pp. 257–9. ¹⁷³ Moses Chikowero, ‘Samkange, Thompson Douglas’, in Akyeampong and Gates, eds., Dictionary of African Biography, vol. 5, pp. 259–61. ¹⁷⁴ Zukas, ‘Samkange, Stanlake’, in Akyeampong and Gates, eds., Dictionary of African Biography, pp. 258–9.

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Both A Son of the Soil and The Mourned One can, I suggest, be read as engagements with missionary writing and particularly with narratives of conversion and education. In these works, the familiar trajectory of ‘improvement’ is contested as the protagonists find themselves in impossible circumstances. Katiyo and Samkange react to the glorification of missionary efforts by offering narratives of ‘non-deliverance’.¹⁷⁵ In A Son of the Soil, Alexio is relentlessly harassed and wrongfully imprisoned by the police for suspected political involvement, which ironically inspires him to join the resistance movement. Likewise, in The Mourned One, Ocky finds himself the victim of the white supremacist state when he is convicted for rape on the flimsiest of evidence. Of the two texts, A Son of the Soil offers the more standard response to European mission. In various ways, it resists the representations that recur in missionary literature. In place of the caricatured ‘witchdoctor’ who embodies unreason, the ‘eminent medicine-man’ in A Son of the Soil performs important spiritual and social roles, conducting ‘ceremonies and consecrations’ and settling ‘land, marriage and a variety of other disputes’.¹⁷⁶ In seeking to revise established Western images, the novel participates in the project of early postcolonial authors who sought to restore the dignity to African traditions that had been denied them under colonialism.¹⁷⁷ Katiyo also contests the sorts of medical narratives that Nonconformist missionaries regularly published. When Alexio takes his mother to a clinic for stomach pains, she contracts typhoid and dies instead of being cured of her complaint.¹⁷⁸ The imagery of restoration and health is inverted, as the hospital becomes less a place of healing than of death. The novel’s opening critique of missionaries comes from the medicine man, Sekuru. Using this figure to recount the story of their arrival in the village, Katiyo is sure to foreground the critical and intelligent response of local people. When the Methodist missionary, Reverend Mills, says that he has come to give the people ‘the opportunity to worship God’ and to establish a ‘school and a clinic’, Chief Chuma challenges his claim to offer new advantages. The children ‘don’t need your school to know to love or to give or to be kind’, he replies. While missionary narratives figured Africa as a space of need, Chuma refuses to submit to this image. ‘In this village, we have several eminent medicine-men’, he tells Mills; ‘[w]e do not need your medicine’.¹⁷⁹ In Sekuru’s story of transition, the missionary simultaneously resists and participates in colonialism. Ultimately, Mills is permitted to settle in the village

¹⁷⁵ Paustian, ‘ “A Real Heaven” ’, p. 7. ¹⁷⁶ Wilson Katiyo, A Son of the Soil (Harlow, 1976), pp. 5–6. ¹⁷⁷ For instance, the work of Chinua Achebe, beginning with the celebrated Things Fall Apart (1958), and the early writings of Ngugi wa Thiong’o. ¹⁷⁸ Katiyo, A Son of the Soil, p. 104. ¹⁷⁹ Katiyo, A Son of the Soil, p. 14.

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because of his opposition to extreme colonial violence; when a group of ‘white mineral hunters’ attacks the settlement, ‘everyone would have been killed’ without the Methodist’s intervention.¹⁸⁰ Despite this, however, for Sekuru the missionary is an agent of dispossession. When Mills preached in Mtoko’s village, he set himself against traditional practices, ‘attacking witchdoctors, witches’, and branding ‘them all as evil’. And when Mtoko eventually tells his people to ‘follow “whatever it is” that Mills preached’, he immediately ‘began to lose his authority’.¹⁸¹ Although the missionary ameliorates colonial excesses, from Sekuru’s perspective his presence destabilizes historic power structures. The teachings of the school and church, moreover, undermine cultural identities and result in alienation; through the missionary, the people learn ‘[t]o lose [their] traditional ways’.¹⁸² In Katiyo’s estimation, Christianity also facilitates white superiority by encouraging passivity. When Alexio’s cousin Rudo is released from prison, she retreats from political engagement, joining a group called ‘The Apostles’ through which she becomes ‘actively anti-political’.¹⁸³ When he is himself imprisoned without trial and placed in solitary confinement, the injustice of it compels him to challenge the principles received from his early missionary education. ‘Someone has to pay for this one day! To hell with Rev Cope and turning the other cheek’, he thinks. ‘Forgive! Forgive! All the way into the grave.’¹⁸⁴ In Alexio’s assessment, the Christian ethic fails to provide the resources to contest the structural injustices of the supremacist state. Before joining the resistance movement, he thus rejects his Christian name in a symbolic move and re-embraces ‘Chikomborero’, by which he had been known prior to his parents’ conversion.¹⁸⁵ In making Alexio’s repudiation of the Methodist influence a precondition of political action, Katiyo insinuates that Dissenting missionaries participated in colonizing the consciousness. In A Son of the Soil we encounter the now familiar postcolonial assessment in which emancipation requires the colonized to contest or, as Frantz Fanon put it, ‘vomit’ up the values imposed on them.¹⁸⁶ Samkange’s The Mourned One offers a yet more sustained and nuanced engagement with Nonconformist mission. To some extent, it shares the critical direction of A Son of the Soil. As in that novel, Samkange writes in order to dignify African traditions and contest cultural disruption. In the opening pages, the narrator strikes out at those guilty of ‘arrogantly uprooting, in the name of Christianity and civilization, countless values in the African way of life’. For Ocky, the protagonist who faces the injustices of a supposedly

¹⁸⁰ Katiyo, A Son of the Soil, pp. 20–1. ¹⁸¹ Katiyo, A Son of the Soil, pp. 20–1. ¹⁸² Katiyo, A Son of the Soil, p. 22. ¹⁸³ Katiyo, A Son of the Soil, p. 105. ¹⁸⁴ Katiyo, A Son of the Soil, pp. 134–5. ¹⁸⁵ Katiyo, A Son of the Soil, p. 138. ¹⁸⁶ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, [1961] 2004), p. 8.

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Christian judicial system, ‘the so-called pagan and primitive society’ was surely ‘higher and better’.¹⁸⁷ Throughout the novel, Samkange reminds his readers that traditional culture possessed values of considerable worth. ‘In our society’, writes Ocky, the demands of hospitality dictated that ‘a visitor was welcome to be a guest in their homes at any time’.¹⁸⁸ With his own people, moreover, he encounters ‘an attitude to life and to other people’ that he ‘had never detected in the European community’; a ‘humanness’ or ‘personness’ embodied in the Shona concept ‘hunhu’ and the Sindebele ‘ubuntu’.¹⁸⁹ By identifying worthy practices and ethics, Samkange seeks—without idealizing the past—to redress the denigration of African cultures. As a fictionalized autobiography of a mission-educated African who finds himself sentenced to death, The Mourned One can be read as a rewriting of the ‘exemplary life’ genre. Having been adopted by the mission, raised ‘a Christian, educated and “civilised” native’, Ocky initially follows a trajectory that might have been upheld as a model in missionary publications.¹⁹⁰ Defying the celebratory approach of such writings, Samkange instead uses Ocky to offer an intimate and ambivalent insight into the Wesleyan mission school Waddilove—the school that Samkange himself attended. In certain respects, Ocky’s retrospective account is affectionate. The sporting competition with the rival school, Domboshawa, is recounted with nostalgia, while various teachers and their idiosyncrasies are recalled with fondness. Governor Searle is known as ‘the cock’ for his temper, but is really ‘a very kindly man indeed’, while Mr J. K. Tsolo has ‘a Falstaffian sense of humour which allowed him to get away with murder’.¹⁹¹ But for Ocky, the result of his mission upbringing is a deculturation that leaves him discontented. Having been ‘brought up like English children’, he ‘spoke English before [he] could utter a word of Shona’; ‘And yet who was I?’ he asks himself.¹⁹² Although he is supposed to be ‘one of the fortunate African boys’, Ocky is ‘not satisfied’, his sense of alienation surpassing the pleasure he takes in his privilege.¹⁹³ As the narrative progresses, Ocky isn’t just estranged from his own culture, but increasingly from missionary institutions as well. In important respects, the mission’s emphasis on human equality made it a unique social space that functioned quite differently to society at large. Ocky realizes this as he goes beyond the walls of Waddilove and comes into confrontation with ‘the white man’s law as it was applied to “natives”’. On being detained for violating the ‘pass laws’, which required all Africans to carry ‘a registration certificate’, he perceives that the mission has sheltered him from the ‘harsh realities’ that

¹⁸⁷ ¹⁸⁸ ¹⁹⁰ ¹⁹²

Stanlake Samkange, The Mourned One (London, 1975), p. 5. Samkange, The Mourned One, p. 38. ¹⁸⁹ Samkange, The Mourned One, p. 96. Samkange, The Mourned One, p. 27. ¹⁹¹ Samkange, The Mourned One, pp. 71, 75. Samkange, The Mourned One, p. 90. ¹⁹³ Samkange, The Mourned One, p. 93.

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were ‘commonplace to others of [his] race’.¹⁹⁴ Yet Ocky’s increasing exposure to racial discrimination enables him to see the ways in which missions themselves participate in institutionalized racism. When he accepts a position as a teacher at St Joseph’s mission, he soon senses ‘an undercurrent of hostility’ that he suspects arises from his ‘general attitude towards white people’. His refusal to ‘kowtow’ was ‘secretly deeply resented’, since ‘the Mission Station, no less than the Native Commissioner’s Office, insists on a “native” knowing and keeping his place’. For Ocky, the missionary declaration ‘of equality and brotherhood’ is little more than ‘a skin-deep veneer’.¹⁹⁵ In this assessment, missions and the discourse of universalism are compromised by the failure to fully challenge patterns of racism. What is striking, however, is that it is not the Christian faith that Samkange takes issue with so much as the ways in which mission is imbricated with racist structures of authority. Rather, the book actually critiques the invidious system of the Rhodesian state using the standard offered by Christianity. Writing from prison, Ocky commits his tale of injustice to God: ‘I am sure of only one reader of these lines, and that is God.’ If his narrative makes it outside the ‘strong walls of this jail’, it will only be because God ‘wishes others to hear of and benefit from my experience’.¹⁹⁶ In being found guilty of rape by a ‘kangaroo’ court, Ocky condemns the ‘learned Christian judge’ for upholding an ‘unchristian law’. In perpetuating structural injustice, the judge should realize that ‘it is his soul that the lord needs to have mercy on and not that of the prisoner’.¹⁹⁷ In The Mourned One, then, Christianity is not rejected outright, but is found to provide powerful social critique. Ultimately, the biblical message is put to radical work on the part of anti-colonial politics. Christianity is not reduced to a tool of empire and Europeanization, but is read for its emancipatory potential in the face of domination. At Ocky’s funeral, a verse from the Shona Methodist Hymn Book provides mourners with a song of protest: ‘Look at this land of ours / Forgive its wickedness / Ignore Thine anger / Let not its progeny perish.’¹⁹⁸ It is the Christian message, moreover, that also resources Ocky’s censure of missions. While awaiting execution he tells his twin brother that ‘the missionary only wants me to be his brother in Christ, not his brother in law. He only wants to sing and preach about Christianity on Sundays, not to practice it.’ Evaluating missions against a higher standard, Ocky protests that the missionary ‘considers himself a white man first and a Christian second’.¹⁹⁹ Yet it is important to note that the novel doesn’t simply embrace Christianity while altogether rejecting European missions. Samkange makes space to recognize ¹⁹⁴ ¹⁹⁵ ¹⁹⁷ ¹⁹⁹

Samkange, The Mourned One, pp. 98–9. Samkange, The Mourned One, pp. 126–7. Samkange, The Mourned One, pp. 127, 4. Samkange, The Mourned One, p. 145.

¹⁹⁶ Samkange, The Mourned One, p. 4. ¹⁹⁸ Samkange, The Mourned One, p. 150.

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a radical ‘school of militant missionaries, always championing the cause of Africans’, epitomized by the Wesleyan founder of Waddilove, John White.²⁰⁰ And, more significantly, alongside its vigorous critique The Mourned One is attentive to the ways in which mission can actually facilitate anti-colonial politics. As Ocky says to his brother, ‘[o]ur greatest benefactor is the missionary, even though he is helping us for different reasons’. The message received in the Dissenting mission, ‘that we are equals of the white man in the sight of God’, can galvanize resistance, not so much by ‘telling us something new’ but by ‘confirming what we already know, feel and believe’.²⁰¹ If universal humanity was preached more than practised, it was nevertheless a concept that could be mobilized in the self-empowerment of the marginalized. Although Samkange has explored the cultural estrangement that can result from Western schooling, moreover, he also sees major possibilities in missionary education. It ‘will ultimately enable us’, suggests Ocky, ‘to meet the white man on his own ground and topple him from his pedestal.’²⁰² Since many advocates of nationalism and independence received their early training in missionary schools, the advantages of education were certainly turned to political ends. As Samkange appreciates, mission could be used for subversive purposes; it provided tools that could be appropriated in the struggle against white dominance. If twentieth-century Nonconformist missions proved a source of colonial anxiety to British authors concerned with imperial stability, postcolonial writers instead addressed the ways that missions participated in the imperial project. Yet, together, the works of Katiyo and Samkange demonstrate the complexity of the missionary encounter and the extent to which its legacy remains a space for debate. While Katiyo offers the more familiar postcolonial contestation, Samkange engages in an ambivalent assessment. Given his Methodist background and mission-school education, Samkange was well placed to interrogate Dissenting missions.²⁰³ Indeed, in The Mourned One we encounter what Paustian describes as ‘strategic alliances between progressive politics and religious thought’. While thoroughly critiqued, missions are seen to provide ideas that contribute to the anti-colonial imagination and to the development of ‘emancipatory narratives’.²⁰⁴ As part of their response to Dissenting missions, moreover, both authors revisit the representations and motifs of missionary literature. In rewriting plotlines centring on mission life and exemplary converts, these texts indicate that anglophone African ²⁰⁰ Samkange, The Mourned One, p. 28. John White had trained Samkange’s father, Thompson Douglas Samkange, as a teacher and evangelist in Nenguwo school, the institution which later became known as Waddilove. Chikowero, ‘Samkange, Thompson Douglas’, pp. 259–61. ²⁰¹ Samkange, The Mourned One, p. 146. ²⁰² Samkange, The Mourned One, p. 146. ²⁰³ For information on the Samkange family, see T. O. Ranger, Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920–64 (Harare, 1995). ²⁰⁴ Paustian, ‘ “A Real Heaven” ’, p. 3.

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literature is more explicitly engaged with the textual cultures of the missionary enterprise than has generally been acknowledged. * * * In this chapter, I have surveyed some of the dominant thematics of twentiethcentury Dissenting missionary novels set in sub-Saharan Africa. Many of these reflect the ‘economies’ in which their production took place. Mission presses published humanitarian fiction, often directed to younger readers, which served to generate support and disseminate information about mission fields. Although other themes might have been distinguished, I have focused here on medical plots, witchdoctor encounters, and narratives of indigenous agency as the staple subject matters of this literature. But it is important to point out that Dissenting missionary fiction was also bound up with identity. As Jan Blodgett observes in her study of Protestant literary culture, the act of reading certain genres can mark individuals as members of particular communities.²⁰⁵ Consumers of British missionary fiction consolidated their sense of identity by reading novels that expressed their values and addressed their areas of interest. Although the publications of certain presses bore allegiance to particular denominations or missionary societies, for the most part they were directed more broadly. Bebbington argues that at the beginning of the twentieth century an ‘essentially evangelical’ ethos characterized most of Nonconformity.²⁰⁶ And it was this ethos, I would suggest, that remained dominant in Dissenting missionary fiction published across the twentieth century. Their concerns and intended readership were broadly evangelical rather than narrowly denominational. In the 1930s, for instance, various texts released by the London Missionary Society’s Livingstone Press and the Baptist Missionary Society’s Carey Press advertised books ‘From all Missionary Societies’ on their jackets instead of promoting only their own publications. The latest Dissenting missionary fiction discussed here was released in the early 1960s. Although familiar titles—alongside missionary biographies— continued to circulate for some time, the form dwindled rapidly in Britain and few new missionary novels were published. There were notable exceptions, such as Paul White’s successful and enduring ‘Jungle Doctor’ series, but no doubt this general trend was to do with the quickening secularization that accompanied the consumerist culture and sexual revolution of the decade.²⁰⁷ The significant decline of the Sunday school certainly eroded the demand that ²⁰⁵ Jan Blodgett, Protestant Evangelical Literary Culture and Contemporary Society (Westport, 1997), p. 57. ²⁰⁶ Bebbington, ‘Evangelism and Spirituality’, in Sell and Cross, eds., Protestant Nonconformity, p. 185. ²⁰⁷ Bebbington, ‘Evangelism and Spirituality’, in Sell and Cross, eds., Protestant Nonconformity, p. 203. See also Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London, 2001). Australian missionary author Paul White wrote the first of the ‘Jungle Doctor’ stories in the 1940s, and continued to publish new titles and revise older ones

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had sustained this publishing industry. While a ‘new Nonconformity’ can be seen to have emerged in the midst of secularization—chiefly in the rise of ‘black-led churches’ and ‘charismatic renewal’—the African missionary novel no longer had such a ready market.²⁰⁸ The constituency of world Christianity was also changing. The centre of gravity was shifting rapidly to the global South and, from the 1970s, African churches were appealing for ‘a moratorium on Western missions’, which they argued had hindered local enterprises.²⁰⁹ In this context, where Western paternalism was increasingly rejected, the African missionary novel may have seemed less in tune with the present. Since this fiction had often intersected with imperial concerns, moreover, its decline was associated with the challenges to British political power and cultural authority at the end of empire.²¹⁰ Yet the relationship between Dissenting missions and empire was by no means simple. Interactions between missions and colonial authorities on the ground were often strained. And where missions were embroiled in empire, they operated with a different set of priorities and horizons. As Jeffrey Cox acknowledges, the wider ‘Empire of Christ’ was ‘multiracial, multinational’, and by no means confined to the limits of British territory.²¹¹ In that sense, Dissenting missions were a mechanism for a parallel but distinct globalization from the imperial project, the source of both ‘pull’ and ‘push’ forces in the indigenization of Christianity across the African continent. It is also important to note, moreover, that the overlap with European imperialism represents just a ‘small chapter’ in the long history of Christian missions.²¹² The fiction addressed here of course shows that twentieth-century missionary writing did indeed participate in imperial discourses. Yet in these texts criticisms of other Europeans and exploitation are not uncommon. Although they rarely mount sustained critique, they were concerned that humanitarian ideals should be retained; to an extent, Dissenting missionary writing reveals an imperative not only to convert Africans but, as Dana Robert puts it, to ‘“convert” colonialism’ itself.²¹³

until his death in the early 1990s. For discussion of White and the genres of ‘jungle doctor’ memoirs and fiction, see Megan Vaughan, Curing their Ills, pp. 155–79. ²⁰⁸ Bebbington, ‘Evangelism and Spirituality’, in Sell and Cross, eds., Protestant Nonconformity, pp. 214–15. ²⁰⁹ Jenkins, The Next Christendom, p. 42. ²¹⁰ Such decline may have been less clearly a feature in other parts of the anglophone world. In the United States, major evangelical publishers such as Zondervan continued an industry of missionary novels beyond their decline in Britain. A fuller investigation of missionary publishing in a comparative international context is an important area for future research. ²¹¹ Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700 (New York, 2008), p. 14. ²¹² Etherington, ‘Introduction’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, p. 2. ²¹³ Dana L. Robert, ‘Introduction’, in Dana L. Robert, ed., Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914 (Grand Rapids, 2008), pp. 20, 4.

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This chapter has aimed to extend the debate on mission and empire by directing attention to issues of reception. Examining the representation of Dissenting missions in twentieth-century imperialist fiction reveals the colonial anxieties that missions could trigger. The responses of these authors, I have argued, were interwoven with a suspicion of missionaries’ racial politics and a distrust of African converts. If Johnston was cynical about African capability, Wallace and Cary quite explicitly treated the ‘mission converted’ as a political threat. Case studies chosen from African fiction complicate the picture further. With the reaction to cultural imperialism that accompanied decolonization and the rise of postcolonialism, Dissenting missionaries were often contested as ideological agents of empire. While this line of criticism is borne out in much African fiction, as it is in Katiyo’s A Son of the Soil, the missionary legacy is not uniformly rejected. Some writers were not just interested in how Christianity might have served colonialism, but in its potential to provide a powerful language of critique. Indeed, in Samkange’s fictional engagement with his Wesleyan Methodist roots, he doesn’t simply dismiss missionary Christianity but rather appropriates the so-called ‘dissidence of Dissent’ for his own purposes of anti-colonial protest.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Anon., Bokwala: The Story of a Congo Victim (London, 1910). Bee, Dollie, Sam, the African Boy (London, 1904). Blodgett, Jan, Protestant Evangelical Literary Culture and Contemporary Society (Westport, 1997). Boehmer, Elleke, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford, 1995). Brantlinger, Patrick, Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh, 2009). Briggs, Julia, Dennis Butts, and M. O. Grenby, eds., Popular Children’s Literature in Britain (Aldershot, 2008). Brown, Callum G., The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London, 2001). Cary, Joyce, Aissa Saved (London, [1932] 2000). Chirgwin, A. M., Yarns of African Youth (London, 1935). Cleall, Esme, Missionary Discourse: Negotiating Difference in the British Empire, c.1840–95 (New York, 2012). Cox, Jeffrey, The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700 (New York, 2008). Etherington, Norman, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford, 2005). Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, [1961] 2004). Hardiman, David, ed., Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa (Amsterdam, 2006). Haynes, Ambrose, Return of the Witch-Doctor (London, 1957). Johnston, Anna, Missionary Writing and Empire (Cambridge, 2003).

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Johnston, Harry, The Man Who Did the Right Thing (New York, 1921). Katiyo, Wilson, A Son of the Soil (Harlow, 1976). Livingstone, Justin D., Livingstone’s Lives: A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon (Manchester, 2014). McLaughlan, Robbie, Re-Imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in Fin De Siècle Literature (Edinburgh, 2012). Milligan, Elsie, Banana Cottage (London, 1960). Milligan, Elise, Kachabinda: Little Hunter (London, 1956). Milligan, Elise, Kapepa (Little Breeze of the Wind) (London, 1959). Milligan, Elise, Ngoma the Drum-Beater (London, 1964). Milligan, Elise, The Witchdoctor’s Revenge (London, 1967). Paustian, Megan Cole, ‘ “A Real Heaven on their own Earth”: Religious Missions, Africans Writers, and the Anticolonial Imagination’, Research in African Literatures 45.2 (2014), pp. 1–25. Porter, Andrew N., Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004). Pritchard, John, Methodists and their Missionary Societies 1900–1996 (Farnham, 2014). Ranger, T. O., Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920–64 (Harare, 1995). Rich, Arthur T., The Schoolboy Missionaries (London, 1935). Robert, Dana L., ed., Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914 (Grand Rapids, 2008). Samkange, Stanlake, The Mourned One (London, 1975). Scott, Jamie S., ‘Missions in Fiction’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 32.3 (2008), pp. 121–8. Sell, Alan P. F. and Anthony R. Cross, eds., Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century (Carlisle, 2003). Shaw, Mabel, Dawn in Africa: Stories of Girl Life (London, 1932). Siddiqi, Yumna, Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue (New York, 2008). Southon, Arthur E., Jackson’s Ju-Ju (London, 1927). Southon, Arthur E., King of the World (London, 1931). Southon, Arthur E., A Yellow Napoleon: A Romance of West Africa (London, 1926). Sweetnam, Mark S., ‘Dan Crawford, Thinking Black, and the Challenge of a Missionary Canon’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 58.4 (2007), pp. 705–25. Thorne, Susan, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, 1999). Wallace, Edgar, The People of the River (Teddington, [1912] 2003). Whitfield, C. M., At Spear Point (London, 1953). Whitfield, C. M., Sealed Treasure (London, 1942). Williams, M. P., Jewel of the Light (London, 1961).

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12 Gender, Race, and Twentieth-Century Dissenting Traditions Laura Rademaker

By the end of the twentieth century, the shift to the global South noted elsewhere in this volume meant that the ‘typical Christian’ was no longer white, male, and North American, but a young, black, African or South American woman.¹ Dissenting Protestantism became a multi-racial, global movement. People of colour were the numerical majority. Dissenting churches in the global South that had previously operated as missions under white supervisors became autonomous churches, often with organizations such as the World Council of Churches giving them full recognition on an international level. Women, a numerical majority in nonconformist churches throughout the twentieth century, claimed and expanded opportunities available to them in religious contexts and beyond. In many (d)issenting denominations, they gained the right to full equality in leadership offices. These rapid changes of authority, autonomy, and demography within Dissenting Protestantism involved significant changes in conceptions of race and gender. In the century of decolonization, globalization, and civil rights movements, nonconformist churches adopted varying approaches to questions of race. On the one hand, the ideals of Protestantism inspired independence movements, claims for the extension of rights and new pride in racial identities. On the other, white church establishments were often slow to listen to the insights of people of colour both on issues of social justice and of theology. By the early 1970s, leaders from the global South such as Luis Palau and David Cho, were appearing at meetings of evangelical missions executives in the First World and (facilitated by rapid electronic communications and air

¹ Dana Lee Robert, ‘Shifting Southward: Global Christianity since 1945’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 24.2 (2000), p. 50.

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transport) at congresses such as Billy Graham’s World Congress on Evangelism.² Yet the bureaucratized, wealthy North still dictated these processes.³ The relationship between feminism and Protestantism has been similarly complex; the two being mutually reinforcing or antagonistic in various times and contexts over the century.⁴ Given their antagonism, historians of feminist movements and of religion have tended to work in isolation from one another. The past two decades, however, have seen a ‘religious turn’ in feminist and gender history. Historians are increasingly uncovering synergies between feminism and religion, particularly with evangelical Protestantism.⁵ Rather than addressing race and gender separately, therefore, I approach this chapter with both in mind. Kimberley Crenshaw has called on scholars to ‘embrace the intersection’ of categories of race and gender to avoid overlooking lived, embodied experiences of people as both ‘gendered and raced’.⁶ In the Christian tradition, too, race and gender are interrelated concepts. Both can be understood as social categories eclipsed in the same way by believers’ unity in Christ where ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek . . . no male and female’.⁷ The reorientation of dissenting traditions towards the global, moreover, has produced a fresh awareness of human embodiment as people move from space to space within global scapes. I am therefore interested in how experiences of race and gender as well as the changing expressions and understanding of these categories have been held in dynamic tension with Christianity’s universal visions for all peoples over the course of the century.⁸ It is suitable, then, to begin this chapter with reference to Pentecostalism’s fresh expressions of gender and conceptions of race, often interpreted as evidence of the Spirit’s gifts ‘poured out on all flesh’. I then move to women’s work in the international missionary movement and the social gospel. From ² See David Cho, ‘Innovation in Protestant Missions’, EFMA Missions Executive Retreat 1974 Records, 30 September 1974, in EFMA Collection, no. 165, Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, USA. Cho is not to be confused with David Yonggi Cho, the megachurch pastor whose ministry is explored in Carter’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 6). ³ Lars Dahle, Margunn Serigstad Dahle, and Knud Jorgensen, eds., The Lausanne Movement: A Range of Perspectives (Eugene, 2014). ⁴ Margaret Bendroth and Virginia Lieson Brereton, Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism (Urbana, 2002), p. xiii. ⁵ Joanna Groot and Sue Morgan, ‘Beyond the “Religious Turn”? Past, Present and Future Perspectives in Gender History’, Gender & History 25.3 (2013), pp. 395–422. ⁶ Kimberley Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-Discrimination Doctrine, Femininst Theory, and Anti-Racist Politics’, in Helma Lutz, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar, and Linda Supik, eds., Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies (Farnham, 2011), pp. 25, 40. See also Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta, 1989), p. 6. ⁷ Galatians 3:28. ⁸ Though, arguably, the category of sexuality has operated in a similar way, space does not permit an analysis of sexuality in this chapter.

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where I write (in Australia), Dissenting Protestantism has been an important shaper of feminist and humanitarian activism as well as of relations between white Australia and indigenous people. I consider new dissenting Christianities and expressions of racial identities in a context of decolonization and the rise of independent churches as well as in settler-colonial contexts such as Australia. I then turn to exploring how the civil rights movement in the USA and the rise of second-wave feminism presented new challenges to Nonconformist Churches, particularly white evangelical churches that were made to consider questions of race and gender afresh. Conservative reactions to evangelical feminism, ‘complementarian’ gender roles, became, for some, a shibboleth of doctrinal orthodoxy. For others, among younger evangelicals, ‘emergents’, and the declining liberal Dissenting constituency, race and gender were opportunities to re-engage the public sphere. Finally, I consider the demographic shift in (D)issenting Protestantism—the rise of the global South—and the ways the South challenges the established positions of the North on questions of gender, race, and mission.

RACE, GENDER, AND THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT The emergence of Pentecostalism in the early twentieth century gave new energy to the nonconformist revivalist tradition and broke new ground for racial politics and identities within Christian churches. The believers hailed the coming together of different races in worship as a sign of the presence of the Spirit, poured out upon all nations at the end of the Age.⁹ Shared fellowship across colour lines in centres of revival such as Azusa Street in Los Angeles or the Mukti Mission in South India was evidence of the baptism of the Spirit.¹⁰ Pentecostalism’s racial diversity quickly expanded beyond these centres. In the southern hemisphere, its expansion over the twentieth century was so dramatic that some have called it a ‘new Reformation’.¹¹ The first independent Pentecostal churches in Latin America were planted before the First World War. After the 1950s, they quickly grew, accounting for most Protestant Church growth. By the end of the century they made up most Protestants in some Latin American countries, and had significantly influenced

⁹ Harvey Cox, Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the 21st Century (London, 1996), p. 126. ¹⁰ Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, 1992), p. 386. ¹¹ Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford, 2002), p. 7. See Mark P. Hutchinson, ‘Australasian Charismatic Movements and the “New Reformation of the 20th Century?” ’, Australasian Pentecostal Studies 19 (2017), pp. 24–53.

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most evangélico (and much Catholic) practice outside their own walls.¹² In Africa, independent Pentecostal Churches also grew rapidly. Many had North American origins but others stemmed from ‘pentecostalized’ African independent churches: all quickly developed an African leadership. Harvey Cox notes Pentecostalism’s aptitude for adopting the language, music, culture, and religious tropes of wherever it lives.¹³ This flexibility was responsible for its rapid spread beyond North America and Europe to peoples of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds. In 1910, Engenas Barnabas Lekganyene, for example, established South Africa’s Zion Christian Church. This church endorsed local traditions such as polygamy and ritual taboos and upheld African religious beliefs that missionaries rejected. It developed into a diverse movement, and in Ogbu Kalu’s words, ‘appropriated the charismatic dimensions of the gospel . . . and stamped it with an African identity’.¹⁴ Pentecostalism’s message of the power of the Spirit today for all believers proved remarkably versatile. It presented diverse peoples with opportunities to assert the value of their cultural and racial identities within a Christian framework. It also offered (as Livingstone notes in Chapter 11 of this volume) a ‘grassroots’ critique of racial hierarchies operating in colonial and mission contexts, even as more formal ‘top-down’ critiques were developing among postcolonial African elites. But racial divisions emerged within Pentecostal movements almost as quickly they were founded. In the same year as the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church experienced its revival (1907) its black members left to organize an alternative church. Charles Fox Parham, a white founder of the Apostolic Faith Movement, was open to including African Americans in his ministry, but expressed disgust at what he considered the ‘negroism’ of Pentecostalism: There was a beautiful outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Los Angeles . . . Then they pulled off all the stunts common in old camp meetings among colored [sic] folks . . . That is the way they worship God, but what makes my soul sick and make[s] me sick at my stomach is to see White people imitating unintelligent, crude negroism of the Southland, and laying it on the Holy Ghost.¹⁵

In the Assemblies of God, which grew into the largest global network of Pentecostals, entrenched racial segregation progressed with institutionalization. Leaders established a ‘coloured branch’, designed not so much as to promote African American leadership as to protect the ‘whiteness’ of the denomination. Into the 1940s and 1950s, white leaders in the Assemblies of God encouraged African American candidates for ordination to approach the

¹² Jenkins, The Next Christendom, p. 63. ¹³ Cox, Fire From Heaven, p. 259. ¹⁴ Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford, 2008), p. 24. ¹⁵ 3 April 1925, cited in Robert Mapes Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (Peabody, 1992), p. 190.

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majority black Church of God in Christ, in the belief that integrated churches might hinder evangelism.¹⁶ The Pentecostal revivalist preacher, Aimee Semple McPherson was, at least at first, committed to transcending the colour line in her congregations. As an itinerant preacher, she included black preachers on her stage and argued for integrated worship services. Yet as her ministry turned into a Church, and her Church into a denomination she also came to support the racial segregation of churches for what she considered ‘practical’ reasons.¹⁷ In South Africa, similarly, the Pentecostal Apostolic Faith Mission began with a non-racial policy, but quickly changed this to a policy of segregated baptisms. Pentecostal fluidity and cultural openness, its emphasis on the prophetic individual—the keys to Pentecostalism’s success among people of diverse cultures—could also sideline social critique and communal prophecy, leading to the absorption of local cultural divisions and racial hierarchies.¹⁸ There was a tension between an ideal unity of all nations in the Spirit and pragmatic or ‘practical reasons’, a tension also evident in the charismatic and Church Growth movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In the case of Pentecostalism, this tension emerged as deference to mainstream bishops’ typification of charismatic worship as ‘Black religion’, while in the Church Growth movements it appeared in the recreation of the American colour-line in the name of the ‘the homogenous unit principle’.¹⁹ Pentecostalism also re-drew gendered behaviours according to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Though many Pentecostal churches’ literalist hermeneutic lead them to exclude women from the pastorate, their emphasis on spiritual gifting presented female evangelists with opportunities to lead and minister. Anyone baptized in the Spirit—woman, man, boy, girl—was empowered to preach as the prophet Joel had foretold: ‘your sons and your daughters shall prophesy’.²⁰ From the Azusa Street Revival in 1906, women participated in public Pentecostal ministries. Perhaps the most famous was McPherson herself. Her disciple, Mina Ross Brawner, was even more forthcoming, calling for ‘no distinction’ between male and female ministry.²¹ At the Methodist Episcopal mission in Valparaiso, Chile, missionary May Hoover learned the Asuza

¹⁶ Joe Newman, Race and the Assemblies of God Church: The Journey from Azusa Street to the ‘Miracle of Memphis’ (Youngstown, 2007), p. 130. ¹⁷ Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 30–1. ¹⁸ Cox, Fire From Heaven, pp. 259–60. ¹⁹ Edward R. Dayton and David Allen Fraser, Planning Strategies for World Evangelization (Grand Rapids, 1990), p. 99. ²⁰ Joel 2:28. ²¹ M. Hutchinson, ‘Brawner, Mina Conrod Ross (1874–1960?)’, Australasian Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (2010), http://webjournals.ac.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ ADPCM/ article/view/189/186, accessed 15/9/2015; and S. Clifton, ‘Pentecostal Hermeneutics and First-Wave Feminism: Mina Ross Brawner, MD’, Australasian Pentecostal Studies 2 (2006), http://webjournals.ac.edu.au/ojs/index.php/PCBC/article/view/8854/885, accessed 15/9/2015.

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message from her former Moody Bible Institute roommate Minnie Abrams in 1907. Hoover’s ministry (together with her husband) sparked a charismatic revival in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Chile.²² In many Pentecostal churches, it was common for husband and wife teams to minister together; the roles of wife and mother being compatible with and complementary to the role of pastor.²³ Prior to the expansion of American Pentecostalism, indeed, in many countries (such as Australia) most early Pentecostal churches were established and run by women. When Pentecostalism became a global phenomenon, women were also its main evangelists and made up the majority of Pentecostals.²⁴

MISSIONARY FEMINISM AND F EMALE ACTIVISM Women’s involvement in social activism and international missions meant that, at the opening of the twentieth century, nonconformist conceptions of femininity were already shifting. The interdenominational temperance movement was at its peak. Frances Willard (Methodist) had founded the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1873, mobilizing Protestant women around the globe for the cause of social order and domestic harmony.²⁵ Willard was also an outspoken advocate of women’s right to preach, along with many other women who built their ministries through WCTU or Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) networks. The WCTU trained thousands of women around the world in evangelism, public speaking, and political activism. Their activism was as much political and economic as it was spiritual: the woman who could preach in church on Sunday also had a platform to preach temperance and franchise reform on Monday. Women’s perceived moral authority on the issue of temperance was, for WCTU members, a means to step beyond the spheres of home and church and to lobby for women’s political rights and social status.²⁶ Nonconformist leaders did not universally support the activities of these women. Iva Vennard’s Epworth Evangelist Institute for training Methodist deaconesses, for instance, faced opposition from male clergy who re-wrote the Institute’s charter in 1909 to replace female faculty members with male clergymen and to refocus the curriculum on more ‘feminine’ skills. Whereas male preachers could study ²² M. Hutchinson, ‘Abrams, Minnie Florence (1859–1912)’, Australasian Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (2010), http://webjournals.ac.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ADPCM/ article/view/189/186, accessed 15/9/2015; see also Hutchinson, ‘Brawner, Mina Conrod Ross’. ²³ Kalu, African Pentecostalism, p. 149. ²⁴ Cox, Fire From Heaven, p. 137. ²⁵ Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, p. 297. ²⁶ Patricia Grimshaw, ‘Gender, Citizenship and Race in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Australia, 1890 to the 1930s’, Australian Feminist Studies 13.28 (1998), p. 201.

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theology, women, they claimed, were needed to ‘work with children, care for the sick and visit the poor’.²⁷ Similar trends developed in the birth and growth of Dissenting mission organizations, many of which were founded and funded by women and only later taken over by men when they became an important part of denominational funding.²⁸ Women were also finding opportunities to reshape feminine roles in the international missionary movement. In fact, many of the volunteers for the WCTU also worked as Protestant missionaries at some stage.²⁹ To white dissenting Protestants at the beginning of the twentieth century, the evangelization of the whole world seemed a possibility in the near future as ‘Christian civilization’ continued its march across the globe.³⁰ White women flocked to missions: they outnumbered men two to one on the mission field in the early twentieth century.³¹ In Australia, women made up the majority of evangelical missionaries, with single women most dominant among them.³² For example, in the early twentieth century, over 65 per cent of missionaries in one of the most active missionary and influential organizations to Aboriginal people, the Aborigines Inland Mission (founded by a Baptist woman, Retta Dixon), were single.³³ Single women were signing up for mission work like never before. Mission work offered socially conservative women with a sense of calling a respectable alternative to marriage, along with opportunities to exercise professional authority and pursue careers in ways not possible at home.³⁴ Many considered it an adventure.³⁵ An ethos of ‘women’s work for women’ underpinned their work. This was based on the presumption of ‘separate spheres’ for men and women—the domestic for women and the public for men—and of women’s natural affinity with other women. Through this, Dissenting Protestant women could affirm their existing social role while also expanding its boundaries. Women worked beyond the home by extending their ‘natural’

²⁷ Priscilla Pope-Levison, ‘Separate Spheres and Complementarianism in American Christianity’, in Priscilla Pope-Levison and John Levison, eds., Sex, Gender, and Christianity (Eugene, 2012), p. 59. ²⁸ M. Hutchinson, Iron in Our Blood: A History of the Presbyterian Church of NSW, 1788–2001 (Sydney, 2001), pp. 218–19. ²⁹ Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Durham, 1991), p. 87. ³⁰ Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, p. 294. ³¹ Dana Lee Robert, Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, 2002), p. xi. ³² Anne O’Brien, God’s Willing Workers: Women and Religion in Australia (Kensington, 2005), p. 122. ³³ O’Brien, God’s Willing Workers, p. 142. ³⁴ Elizabeth E. Prevost, The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in Colonial Africa and the British Metropole (Oxford, 2010), pp. 4–5. ³⁵ Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire, p. 89.

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sisterly and motherly obligations to a global scale.³⁶ The presumed equality and sisterhood of all women behind ‘women’s work for women’ also created a framework for a global missionary feminism. Women’s evangelism to women mobilized what became a transnational network of feminist humanitarians.³⁷ Among them were Mary and Margaret Leitch, Presbyterian sisters from Vermont who worked in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) with the American Board of Missions, returned to Virginia to teach emancipated slaves and later became leaders in the WCTU, travelling the world for the cause of prohibition.³⁸ For many accomplished missionary women who returned from the missions, however, they often found themselves relegated to fundraising or arranging flowers in their churches. Though they had gone abroad to transform and ‘liberate’ foreign women, they themselves were transformed by their encounters and experiences.³⁹ These women subsequently became a major force in shifting expectations of Christian femininities, particularly through the burgeoning movement for women’s ordination. White female missionaries’ and philanthropists’ work also had a racial dimension. These women were able to extend the boundaries of ‘proper’ feminine activity and to conduct ministries not available to women at home, even while retaining the assumption of racial superiority. Nonconformist women active in the WCTU were prominent among activists for the rights of indigenous women and children in the early twentieth century.⁴⁰ For example, Mary Bennett (Churches of Christ) worked as a teacher on the United Aborigines Missions in Western Australia in the 1930s and became an activist for the rights of Aboriginal women. Bennett applied the Christian feminism of the temperance movement to Aboriginal women, expecting their transformation to ‘modern society’ to occur through conversion, Christian marriage, and political development.⁴¹ Yet these were middle-class white norms, rather than universal realities; the assumption remained that other ³⁶ Margaret Bendroth, ‘Women and Missions: Conflict and Changing Roles in the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, 1870–1935’, American Presbyterians 65.1 (1987), p. 51. Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-theCentury China (New Haven, 1989), p. 79. ³⁷ Prevost, The Communion of Women, p. 2. ³⁸ Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, 2010), pp. 28–45. ³⁹ Susan Haskell Kahn, ‘From Redeemers to Partners: American Women Missionaries and the “Woman Question” in India, 1919–1939’, in Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Connie Anne Shemo, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960 (Durham, 2010), p. 159. ⁴⁰ Fiona Paisley, Loving Protection?: Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights, 1919–1939 (Melbourne, 2000), p. 5; Alison Holland, ‘To Eliminate Colour Prejudice: The WCTU and Decolonisation in Australia’, Journal of Religious History 32.2 (2008), pp. 256–76; Grimshaw, ‘Gender, Citizenship and Race in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Australia’. ⁴¹ Paisley, Loving Protection?, p. 67; Alison Holland, Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights (Crawley, 2015), p. 120.

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ways of being a woman were necessarily inferior and even degrading.⁴² In teaching women of colour domestic science or home management on missions, white women imagined they were modelling true Christian womanhood to other women, while in reality, they were modelling a white, middle-class, domestic femininity. In Australia, this assumption of racial superiority manifested most famously (and perhaps most devastatingly) in the ‘Stolen Generation’. Churches cooperated with governments in the removal of Aboriginal children from their parents, supposedly for the children’s own good. The name ‘Retta Dixon’, for instance, became better known as an institution where Aboriginal children were abused rather than as the name of a selfless and influential Baptist missionary.⁴³ The assumption that Aboriginal mothering was inferior to that of white women reinforced broader social categories defining legitimacy and ‘family’. Children of mixed racial descent, for instance, were considered ‘orphans’, so female missionaries took responsibility for their care (as in Canada) under a range of state and Federal laws. Likewise, the acceptance by white missionaries of racial hierarchies which cast indigenous peoples as ‘child races’, shaped their assumption that white women alone could truly be motherly. There was little understanding of the extended family structures of Aboriginal people, and black women were considered too infantile to conform to Christian feminine roles.⁴⁴ Some missionaries rejected this view. Bennett, for example, continued to advocate for the value of Aboriginal family life through the 1930s.⁴⁵ It is also important to note that many missionary women had a deep affection and concern for the children in their care. This affection was sometimes reciprocated; the Aboriginal people who grew up in the Croker Island mission, for example, remember Methodist missionary Margaret Sommerville especially fondly. Nonetheless, the experience of the ‘Stolen Generation’ demonstrates the harmful assumptions about femininity which informed women’s missionary work. Anne Pattel-Gray, Aboriginal leader in the Uniting Church (a union of Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists in Australia), therefore criticized white Christian feminists for overlooking the concerns and perspectives of Aboriginal women.⁴⁶ In turn, Pattel-Gray ⁴² Robert, Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers, p. 7. ⁴³ Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Report of Case Study no. 17, ‘The response of the Australian Indigenous Ministries, the Australian and Northern Territory governments and the Northern Territory police force and prosecuting authorities to allegations of child sexual abuse which occurred at the Retta Dixon Home’, http://www. childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/getattachment/d256585f-f32b-457a-a215-22ef61f1e69a/Reportof-Case-Study-No-17, accessed 15/9/2015. ⁴⁴ Laura Rademaker, ‘ “I Had More Children than Most People”: Single Women’s Missionary Maternalism in Arnhem Land, 1908–1945’, Lilith 17 (2012), pp. 12–13. ⁴⁵ Holland, Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights, p. 8. ⁴⁶ Anne Pattel-Gray, ‘The Hard Truth: White Secrets, Black Realities’, Australian Feminist Studies 14.30 (1999), p. 265.

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rejected ‘feminism’ and instead promoted an ‘Aboriginal Womanist Movement’ based on Aboriginal law, culture, and identity.⁴⁷ Positioning all women as ‘sisters’, based as it was in white middle-class understandings of sisterhood and femininity, often failed to bridge deep racial divisions. White women of the YWCA in the United States (overwhelmingly Protestant, nonconformist evangelicals) used the rhetoric of universal ‘Christian sisterhood’ to legitimize their social activism beyond the home sphere.⁴⁸ Despite their supposed ‘sisterhood’, black branches of the YWCA were segregated from white. Womanist theologian, Jaqueline Grant, criticized this ‘sisterhood’ rhetoric coming from white women as merely ‘the conciliatory rhetoric of an advantaged class’.⁴⁹ Nevertheless, this rhetoric also presented an opportunity for black women. Black women of the YWCA could leverage the sisterhood discourse to expose the hypocrisy of their white ‘sisters’: the language of sisterhood was used both to oppress people of colour, but was also a means for them to expose injustices they faced.⁵⁰ In the Majority World, people of colour who converted to Christianity expressed their new identities in ways that co-opted and recreated missionaries’ gender norms. These expressions depended on the political and cultural contexts in which that recreation took place. In India, for example, engagement with nonconformist missionaries from Britain and the USA spurred a dramatic reconfiguration of gender. Appropriate roles for women in family and society narrowed as women’s behaviour became, for Indians, a symbolic marker of the social and spiritual transformation of Christian conversion. Indian Christians formulated new understandings of respectable femininity by melding Indian discourses of ‘protected women’ with missionary discourses of ‘separate spheres’. While releasing many from child marriage and operating against sati, these discourses also combined to intensify the moral surveillance of women and limit their opportunities beyond the home sphere.⁵¹ In contrast, Korean women, who encountered a similar Dissenting missionary ethos at the turn of the century, created their own distinct femininities. Though Methodist and Presbyterian women missionaries sought to overturn hierarchical Confucian gender relations—teaching instead that women and men are equal under God—they nonetheless envisaged patriarchal relationships in church and home as well as ‘separate spheres’ for men and women.⁵² ⁴⁷ O’Brien, God’s Willing Workers, p. 12. ⁴⁸ Nancy Marie Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906–46 (Urbana, 2007), pp. 2, 19. ⁴⁹ Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus, p. 196. ⁵⁰ Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906–46, p. 2. ⁵¹ Eliza Kent, Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (Oxford, 2004), pp. 3–4. ⁵² Hyaeweol Choi, Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways (Berkeley, 2009), pp. 2–3.

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Just as the missionary women leveraged the missionary movement to create roles for themselves beyond feminine domesticity, Korean women co-opted the missionaries’ efforts to mould them into Christian mothers and invented instead a new Korean Christian womanhood.⁵³ A generation of Christian Korean women, educated in mission schools, believers in their equality with men before God, began to claim roles for themselves beyond motherhood. They were professional, political and challenged earlier Protestant ideals of feminine domesticity and piety.⁵⁴ Yet these ‘New Women’ did not reject dissenting Protestantism itself; in Korea, Christianity became an integral part of the idea of modern womanhood by the 1920s.⁵⁵ ‘New women’ were emerging in the 1920s all over the global North and South and were cause for concern for those who held to traditional gender norms. Protestant women’s groups such as the WCTU were often apprehensive about ‘modern girls’. Protestant critics of modernity, envisioning themselves as society’s moral guardians, loudly condemned Hollywood films as well as the ‘flapper’ lifestyle. The United States had its own distinct religious reaction to the flappers: the girl evangelist. Thousands of girls, some as young as six, preached revival to large congregations. They were considered unconventional, exotic, and, in the era of the ‘child star’, had an air of Hollywood glamour.⁵⁶ Whereas the flapper was raucous and flirtatious, the girl evangelist was pious and chaste. For example, Mary Agnes—a 14-year-old evangelist—denounced the flappers’ powder, jewellery, and stockings in her ‘campaign against the devil’.⁵⁷ Nevertheless, like the flappers, these girls too carved out new spaces for women in the face of 1920s modernity. Meanwhile, the earlier missionary emphasis on ‘woman’s work for woman’ gave way to an internationalism focusing on world friendship. Women’s missionary work became increasingly professionalized, such that the rhetoric of ‘sisterhood’ was no longer fitting. These women were skilled professionals: after all, not just anyone could be a missionary.⁵⁸ Nonconformist women activists responded to the ambient internationalism by emphasizing selfdetermination and the rights of all peoples as an alternative to war. The WCTU, for example, emphasized that it was not just as child-bearers that women had a special obligation to preserve life; they also used images of Christ as ‘Prince of Peace’ to underpin their anti-war activism.⁵⁹ At the World ⁵³ Choi, Gender and Mission Encounters, p. 19. ⁵⁴ Choi, Gender and Mission Encounters, p. 179. ⁵⁵ Choi, Gender and Mission Encounters, p. 5. ⁵⁶ Thomas Robinson and Lanette Ruff, Out of the Mouths of Babes: Girl Evangelists in the Flapper Era (Oxford, 2011), pp. 6–7. ⁵⁷ Robinson and Ruff, Out of the Mouths of Babes, p. 53. ⁵⁸ Bendroth, ‘Women and Missions’, p. 52. ⁵⁹ Susan Zeiger, ‘Finding a Cure for War: Women’s Politics and the Peace Movement in the 1920s’, Journal of Social History 24.1 (1990), p. 72.

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Student Christian Federation Peking conference in 1922, delegates (mostly women) pushed to make pacifism its official policy. When Mohini Maya Das from the YWCA of India, Burma, and Ceylon rose to speak, she confronted white Christians for their ignorance of the value of Asian cultures.⁶⁰ Yet Michi Kawai, secretary of the Japanese YWCA, commented afterwards that at Peking she ‘saw how the Spirit of Jesus can transform any narrow patriotism into a bigger internationalism’. A new focus on international partnerships and appreciation of cultural diversity was beginning to challenge racial hierarchies.⁶¹ Whereas earlier white missionaries emphasized the neediness of their ‘heathen sisters’ in their work for women, white missionary women turned to partnerships with women of colour and a greater respect for non-Western cultures in the interwar years.⁶² As missionary women encountered capable women of other faiths and worked in partnership with them, their views of these religions changed. White women missionaries discovered that their ‘oppressed’ ‘heathen sisters’ of India actually found Hinduism to be a source of strength and partnered with them as women’s professional opportunities expanded.⁶³ More radically still, significant numbers of Nonconformist women began to rethink the mission project altogether. Novelist and Presbyterian missionary to China, Pearl Buck, argued in 1933 that Protestants should abandon evangelistic foreign missions in favour of a humanitarian approach. She was enormously influential, her Nobel Prize citation pointing to her role in paving ‘the way to a human sympathy passing over widely separated racial boundaries and for the studies of human ideals which are a great and living art of portraiture’.⁶⁴ American Presbyterian women overwhelmingly supported Buck for her stance.⁶⁵ This is hardly surprising given that women, who for so long had been excluded from preaching the Gospel overtly, had come to dominate its proclamation through education and healthcare. It was natural that they should understand their mission in terms of humanitarianism, an emphasis which also rode on the wings of rising medical and bureaucratic professionalism.⁶⁶

⁶⁰ Renate Howe, ‘The Australian Student Christian Movement and Women’s Activism in the Asia-Pacific Region, 1890s–1920s’, Australian Feminist Studies 16.36 (2001), p. 313. ⁶¹ Kawai, ‘My Impressions of the Peking Conference’, p. 101, quoted in Howe, ‘The Australian Student Christian Movement’, p. 322. ⁶² Robert, Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers, p. 8; Kahn, ‘From Redeemers to Partners’, in Reeves-Ellington et al., eds., Competing Kingdoms, p. 142. ⁶³ Kahn, ‘From Redeemers to Partners’, in Reeves-Ellington et al., eds., Competing Kingdoms, p. 158. ⁶⁴ Per Hallström, ‘Award Ceremony Speech, Presentation Speech by the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, on December 10, 1938’, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ literature/laureates/1938/press.html, accessed 21/8/2015. ⁶⁵ Bendroth, ‘Women and Missions’, p. 57; Margaret Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender: 1875 to the Present (New Haven, 1996), p. 59. ⁶⁶ Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, p. 60.

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In response, elements of dissenting Protestantism increasingly hardened against what it called ‘feminized’ religion, promoting instead a so-called ‘muscular Christianity’.⁶⁷ Women’s heavy involvement in social activism in the early twentieth century—as the ‘backbone of the social gospel movement’—as well as their numerical dominance in nonconformist churches fomented fear that dissenting churches were too ‘feminized’.⁶⁸ ‘Muscular Christians’ (a name drawn from assumptions about the formative role of the ‘playing fields of Eton’ for imperial progress) pitted their so-called masculine values against ‘modern’ or ‘liberal’ Christianities, which they considered weak and effeminate. They focused on ‘manly’ virtues for men: courage, boldness, and self-control.⁶⁹ For them, femininity was not a mark of morality but inferiority, and so men took over the previously feminine role of moral guardianship in the public sphere.⁷⁰ The rise of fundamentalism across nonconformist denominations also provoked a new cautiousness about women’s ministry, although, as Timothy Larsen has pointed out, opportunities for women to minister and preach in fundamentalist circles remained (notable examples being McPherson and Christabel Pankhurst of suffragist fame).⁷¹ Nonetheless, conservatives claimed that the success of women’s missionary organizations made men, ‘ashamed of themselves’.⁷² Whether this was actually the case, or whether conservatives simply pointed to women’s work in hope of shaming male churchgoers into action, women’s work became morally questionable in some fundamentalist contexts. While fundamentalists portrayed churches as too ‘feminized’, women’s ministry and missions bore the brunt of attempts to masculinize them.⁷³ Without the ethos ‘women’s work for women’ to undergird them, many of the organizations previously run by white women were dissolved into denominational bodies (in some cases forcibly) on the grounds of efficiency and equality.⁷⁴ This rendered much of women’s work in churches and missions invisible and placed women, once again, under the authority of male leaders. Frustrated at their loss of influence, the dissolution of the women’s missionary boards in the Presbyterian Church in the United States was an important catalyst for women to agitate for the opening of the offices of ‘elder’, ‘evangelist’, and ‘minister’ to women.⁷⁵ ⁶⁷ Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, ‘Fundamentalism and Femininity: Points of Encounter Between Religious Conservatives and Women, 1919–1935’, Church History 61.2 (1992), pp. 221–33. ⁶⁸ Bendroth and Brereton, Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism, p. xii. ⁶⁹ Bendroth, ‘Fundamentalism and Femininity’, pp. 239–30. ⁷⁰ Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, p. 9. ⁷¹ Timothy Larsen, Christabel Pankhurst: Fundamentalism and Feminism in Coalition (Rochester, 2002), p. 124. ⁷² Bendroth, ‘Women and Missions’, p. 53. ⁷³ Bendroth, ‘Women and Missions’, p. 50. ⁷⁴ Robert, Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers, p. 9. ⁷⁵ Bendroth, ‘Women and Missions’, p. 49.

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Q UESTIONS OF RACE AN D IN TERN ATIONA L MISSIONS On the mission field itself, though many white missionaries showed deepening respect for indigenous traditions, often white nonconformist missionaries continued to conceive of themselves as a superior race and culture. Theodore Webb, a Methodist Missionary to the Yolngu Aboriginal people of North Australia in the 1930s and 1940s was exceptional for his passion for Yolngu culture. He learned to speak Yolngu languages and worked hard to correct misconceptions about Aboriginal cultures.⁷⁶ Missionaries, he argued, must work to communicate the Gospel in terms ‘of the aboriginal’s [sic] own conceptions’.⁷⁷ Yet his concern for cultural accommodation was also based on racial assumptions. To him, such contextualization was necessary because the ‘stagnant’ Aboriginal mind was ‘crammed with a mass of beliefs’ and characterized by an ‘absence of any mental questing or exploration’.⁷⁸ The missionary, therefore, must teach the Gospel using Aboriginal concepts to bring about an ‘evolution rather than revolution’ of the ‘upward movement of this race’.⁷⁹ Though Webb displayed a far greater respect for Aboriginal people than his contemporaries and did much to aid the Yolngu people, for him cultural accommodation and notions of racial and cultural evolution remained intertwined. Similar tensions could be found in other settler societies. In South Africa, for example, Dissenting missionaries were among the strongest critics of the burgeoning apartheid doctrine, but their practices did not always challenge racial inequalities. The education of a black elite in nonconformist mission schools produced a generation with the intellectual and social resources to effectively lead the anti-apartheid movement (and to displace their former teachers). As Richard Elphick observed, missionaries unwittingly sowed seeds for a movement that would overturn apartheid by proclaiming the love of God to all people.⁸⁰ Albert Lutli, for example, referred to his formative ‘Christian upbringing’ as he attended a Congregationalist mission school and later a Methodist teacher training institution.⁸¹ Nelson Mandela was also educated by Methodist missionaries. The Methodist Church refused to segregate its churches along racial lines, claiming this would divide the Body of Christ.⁸² Ironically, this stance against segregation had the effect of excluding black ⁷⁶ Howard Morphy, ‘Mutual Conversion? The Methodist Church and the Yolgnu, with Particular Reference to Yirrkala’, Humanities Research 7.1 (2005), p. 44. ⁷⁷ T. T. Webb and Methodist Church of Australasia. Dept. of Overseas Missions, Spears to Spades (Melbourne, 1944), p. 72. ⁷⁸ Webb et al., Spears to Spades, p. 53. ⁷⁹ Webb et al., Spears to Spades, pp. 56, 72. ⁸⁰ Richard Elphick, The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa (Charlottesville, 2012), pp. 7–8. ⁸¹ Elphick, The Equality of Believers, pp. 121–2. ⁸² Elphick, The Equality of Believers, p. 269.

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people from leadership in churches with established white leadership. These churches, though apparently desegregated, were not immune from oppressive racial hierarchies. As noted by Carter in Chapter 6 of this volume, one result was a proliferation of black indigenous churches. Mid-twentieth-century nonconformist missionaries became caught in a contradiction; their work defended and empowered indigenous peoples while simultaneously operating within and even buttressing systems that enforced racial hierarchies. Such was the contradiction that, amidst the decolonization and civil rights movements of the mid-twentieth century, questions of race threatened to undermine the moral authority of nonconformist churches. White nonconformists were troubled by the changing racial politics of foreign missions, changes which threatened the very viability of foreign mission work. Africans were increasingly rejecting both white missionaries’ continued control over their churches and their slowness to cede local autonomy, identifying this (as the flows of ideas from revolutions in the Old and New Worlds began to percolate along lines of global influence) as an example of racial prejudice and oppression. White Baptist missionaries, even in the 1950s, continued to insist that passing control to Africans should be done only gradually due to what they called the ‘African mentality’.⁸³ White American missionaries in the Congo, therefore, simultaneously rejected racism at home and abroad but also supported and enabled the expansion of American power over the Congolese.⁸⁴ Through the 1960s, nationalist politicians in the Congo increasingly called for the Africanization of the churches. In 1961, Congolese Baptists finally constituted three regional churches under indigenous direction. Missionaries could continue to come, but only with the endorsement of local churches. From the 1960s, the global mission project faced deep challenges due to its association with colonization and racism and the shifting global landscape of Christianity. Many Christians in the global North redirected mission funds to local social programmes.⁸⁵ By the 1970s, some African churches were calling for a moratorium on Western missions. Once liberated from colonial governments, Africans insisted they would also be liberated from colonial missions. By the end of the century, white liberal churches tended to be wary of evangelistic overseas missions, fearing they could never be extricated from racist, colonial assumptions of earlier eras. They focused instead on social justice. More conservative evangelical churches continued to support evangelistic projects to other people groups on the grounds that the Gospel is for all nations, but also changed tack. Their changes were pragmatic rather than ⁸³ Bill Leonard, Baptist Ways: A History (Valley Forge, 2009), p. 341. ⁸⁴ Melani McAlister, ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: American Missionaries, Racism, and Decolonization in the Congo’, OAH Magazine of History 26.4 (2012), p. 34. ⁸⁵ Jenkins, The Next Christendom, p. 42.

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political. With fewer ‘uncontacted’ people groups and the rise of prominent Majority World missions administrators, the evangelical mission strategy shifted to church planting and training over cross-cultural missions. The way was cleared in 1961 when the increasingly ‘hemiplegic’ International Missionary Council merged with the World Council of Churches, signalling (at least for evangelicals) the end of mainstream church missions. This implied a much higher indigenous involvement, with Minority World churches focusing on training. This was a move towards David Cho’s 1974 call for a global rather than national mission strategy and a ‘two-way’ (everywhere to everywhere) approach rather than unidirectional (West to global South) approach.⁸⁶ By the mid-twentieth century, ‘dissent’ among Africans had also taken the form of a growing number of Independent African Churches, many of which were explicit nationalist challenges to white rule. These Independent Churches were founded by local people, not foreign missionaries, and were not connected to foreign denominational structures. Even though the Gospel was often brought by missionaries complicit with colonization, local peoples found in Christianity a message of liberation which spoke to their local experiences of oppression. Africans harnessed this message to form their own African churches.⁸⁷ Andrew Walls (whose work is unpacked elsewhere in this volume) notes that expansions of Christianity always entailed local people remaking and reinterpreting Christianity for themselves.⁸⁸ Missionaries always depended on local mediators and translators to carry their gospel into new cultures. Local converts had always read their own experience and traditions into the missionaries’ gospel and texts, with unpredictable outcomes.⁸⁹ Expansion was through indigenization. For example, Baptist missionary, John Chilembwe, led an armed revolt against British imperialists in Nyasaland (Malawi) in 1915. He presented his movement in terms of nationalism, social justice, and Christianity and, among other things, aimed to establish a National African Church.⁹⁰ The influence of the Chilembwe rising spread across into Zambia and Zimbabwe, playing an important part in stirring up African independence movements.⁹¹ Similarly, Simon Kimbangu of the Belgian Congo joined the Baptist Missionary Society at school and worked as a teacher in a Baptist

⁸⁶ Cho, ‘Innovation in Protestant Missions’, p. 1. ⁸⁷ Brian Stanley, ‘Conversion to Christianity: The Colonisation of the Mind?’, in Christopher Partridge and Helen Reid, eds., Finding and Losing Faith: Studies in Conversion (Milton Keynes, 2006), pp. 166–7. ⁸⁸ Andrew Finlay Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (Maryknoll, 2002). ⁸⁹ Stanley, ‘Conversion to Christianity: The Colonisation of the Mind?’, in Partridge and Reid, eds., Finding and Losing Faith, p. 169. ⁹⁰ Jenkins, The Next Christendom, p. 49. ⁹¹ Bengt Sundkler and Christopher Steed, A History of the Church in Africa (Cambridge, 2000), p. 481.

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mission school.⁹² He began a preaching and healing ministry in 1921. Belgian authorities imprisoned him after five months until his death in 1951. Kimbangu preached a message of racial liberation: ‘The Kingdom is Ours. We have it! They, the Whites, no longer have it.’ His movement gave the regional independence movement a Christian underpinning. His church, the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ on Earth of the Prophet Simon Kimbangu grew quickly following his death: by the end of the century, it had millions of adherents as one of the largest Independent Churches in Africa.⁹³ Often the reinterpretation of missionaries’ Christianity involved the fusion of the charismatic potential in dissenting traditions with indigenous spiritualities. Indigenous societies responded to the universal claims of Christianity in ways which assert the ongoing value of their particular, local identities.⁹⁴ Aboriginal people in the East Kimberley region—first evangelized by the evangelical United Aborigines Mission—converted universal Christian stories into particular stories about local landscape and kinship systems.⁹⁵ In North Australia, the Yolngu people decided for themselves which aspects of the white missionaries’ faith and culture they would accept. The Yolngu Uniting Church Minister, Djiniyini Gondarra, taught that missionaries had erred when they denounced Aboriginal beliefs and culture. In 1979, the Yolngu community of Galiwin’ku (previously a Methodist mission) became the centre of a charismatic revival which spread southwards through Aboriginal communities.⁹⁶ This is not to suggest that Aboriginal revivalism emerged in isolation from global charismatic movements, but that for Aboriginal people the revival represented God’s affirmation and purification of their Aboriginality. The rise of independent churches in former mission contexts dramatically altered the shape of dissenting Protestantism. By the close of the century, about 20 per cent of the world’s Christians (386 million people) were ‘independent’, that is, not associated with traditional denominations.⁹⁷ Although these churches had fewer adherents (at least in census terms) than Anglicanism or Catholicism, their size challenged the ongoing significance of denominational ties, particularly beyond the Western church. This was particularly the case in Africa, but (as with the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in ⁹² Sundkler and Steed, A History of the Church in Africa, p. 781. ⁹³ Jenkins, The Next Christendom, pp. 49–50. Andrew Finlay Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, 1996). Sundkler and Steed, A History of the Church in Africa, pp. 780–1. ⁹⁴ Fiona Magowan, ‘Globalisation and Indigenous Christianity: Translocal Sentiments in Australian Aboriginal Christian Songs’, Identities 14.4 (2007), p. 459. ⁹⁵ Heather McDonald, Blood, Bones and Spirit: Aboriginal Christianity in an East Kimberley Town (Melbourne, 2001), p. 64. ⁹⁶ John Blacket, Fire in the Outback: The Unknown Story of the Australia-Wide Aboriginal Revival Movement That Began in Elcho Island in 1979 (Miranda, 1997), p. 100. ⁹⁷ D. Barrett, G. Kurian, and T. Johnson, eds., World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, 2nd edn (New York, 2001), vol. 1, p. 10.

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Brazil or the Bakht Singh movement in India) was also the case elsewhere.⁹⁸ In fact, the label of ‘Independent’—originally a colonial term for Christian movements not supervised by white missionaries—made little sense in postcolonial contexts.⁹⁹ This was a new form of (d)issent, defined less by theological or class differences (as with the old nonconformity) but by experiences of colonization and newfound racial identities. The fact that often the ‘establishment’ against which such new movements defined their ‘dissent’ were missions established by the Old Dissent was the cause of considerable cognitive dissonance for missionaries from the West.

LIBERATION MOVEMENTS I N THE GLOBAL NORTH In the United States, the black churches also mobilized to assert their equality with whites. In the Southern states of the USA in the mid-1950s, two thirds of all church members, both black and white, were Baptists. Despite their supposed ‘spiritual fellowship’, Southern Baptists were (as Emerson and Smith noted in 2001) segregated by race at church, just as in their society. Black churches were crucial to the American civil rights movement. The conviction that ‘God was on their side’ was a core driver, as were the convictions of leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr; this was a fundamentally a religious movement with social impact.¹⁰⁰ White evangelicals, however, were more ambivalent and tended to view civil rights and desegregation as secular rather than religious issues. ‘Politics’, it was widely felt, were not (yet) an appropriate part of a Christian agenda. Whereas Martin Luther King had a dream, Billy Graham responded that the dream was impossible in a sinful world, commenting that ‘only when Christ comes again will little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children’.¹⁰¹ When the Supreme Court made its ruling on Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) supported the decision along with its foreign and Home Mission Boards. Nonetheless, many leading pastors and a significant proportion of the SBC constituency resisted desegregation. Baptists

⁹⁸ Jenkins, The Next Christendom, p. 57; Roger E. Hedlund, Quest for Identity: India’s Churches of Indigenous Origin: The ‘Little Tradition’ in Indian Christianity (Delhi, 2000), p. 135. ⁹⁹ Birgit Meyer, ‘Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to PentecostalCharismatic Churches’, Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004), p. 451. ¹⁰⁰ Mark Noll, God and Race in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton, 2010), p. 107. Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford, 2000), p. 45. ¹⁰¹ Emerson and Smith, Divided by Faith, pp. 46–7.

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in the South held a mixed stance on desegregation for the next decade at least.¹⁰² In 1995, the SBC finally passed a Resolution on Racial Reconciliation, which included an apology to African Americans for its historic position condoning slavery and the failure of many Southern Baptists to support their civil rights.¹⁰³ Though at core a pacifist civil disobedience movement, the civil rights movement spurred a more radical black theology. Parts of the black Church denounced Black Power as dangerous and inflammatory (notably, Martin Luther King, Jr rejected its appeal to violence), but others sought to harness its energy. In 1966, a committee formed by the National Council of Churches along with ministers from various denominations formed the National Committee of Negro Churchmen (NCNC). The NCNC claimed that the greatest threat to the USA was its failure to live according to God’s justice and righteousness. The black Church, it believed, would be crucial to the national liberation according to these Christian ideals.¹⁰⁴ Black theologians argued that God’s preferential option for the poor and oppressed made the suffering of African Americans unacceptable. ‘God is Black’, argued James Cone, and anyone who would be a Christian must also become black, that is, they must work to end oppression and injustice.¹⁰⁵ The moral and social upheaval of the 1960s also involved a new openness about sex and a shifting of values on issues of gender. Indeed, the ‘rights’ language of the civil rights movement drew on and in turn influenced the language and the tactics for the women’s liberation movement. Callum Brown has argued that when second-wave feminism attacked the ideology of domestic femininity (prevalent until the 1950s) it also challenged evangelical constructions of feminine piety. More women found their identity in work, sexual relationships, and recreational opportunities over earlier evangelical constructions of femininity as domestic and pious.¹⁰⁶ Agitation for the full equality of women in nonconformist churches had been rumbling for some time. The Congregationalists, Salvation Army, and Quakers had permitted women to exercise leadership since the nineteenth century. As mentioned above, women had also found opportunities through revivalist and Pentecostal movements to exercise the Spirit’s gift of leadership or preaching. The International Association of Women Ministers was founded ¹⁰² Michael Williams and Walter Shurden, ‘Baptists and the Turn toward Racial Inclusion: 1955’, in Michael Williams and Walter Shurden, eds., Turning Points in Baptist History: A Festschrift in Honor of Harry Leon McBeth (Macon, 2008), p. 262. ¹⁰³ Southern Baptist Convention, ‘Resolution on Racial Reconciliation on the 150th Anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention’, Atlanta, 1995, http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/899/ resolution-on-racial-reconciliation-on-the-150th-anniversary-of-the-southern-baptist-convention, accessed 15/9/2015. ¹⁰⁴ Anthony Pinn, The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Maryknoll, 2002), p. 15. ¹⁰⁵ Pinn, The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era, p. 21. ¹⁰⁶ Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London, 2009), p. 179.

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in 1922 and made up largely of Methodist Episcopalians. Much of its leadership had also been active in the WCTU.¹⁰⁷ Presbyterians in the USA had debated the issue of the full equality of ‘women in ministry’ following the dissolution of women’s missionary organizations in the 1920s.¹⁰⁸ In Australia, the Congregationalists ordained their first woman, Winifred Kiek, in 1927. Although liberal nonconformists had been grappling with these issues for decades, evangelicals in the USA were unprepared either for feminism within their own ranks or for a theologically conservative women’s ordination movement.¹⁰⁹ But in the 1960s, women’s claims—which originated in the social reformism of evangelical women back in the 1870s and 1880s—began to involve evangelical churches as well. Evangelical magazines, such as Eternity and Christianity Today, began to publish articles concerning the inequality of women in churches and society. Questions of consistency such as ‘why can women lead as evangelists but not as teachers?’ became more pressing and concerning. Southern Baptist Convention churches ordained a woman— Addie Davis—for the first time in 1964. In 1974, Letha Scanzonia and Nancy Hardesty published a Christian feminist manifesto, All We’re Meant to be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation, named Eternity’s ‘book of the year’. Evangelical feminists argued against essential gender differences and for greater access to employment and education for women, based on their conception of women’s creation in the image of God.¹¹⁰ The growth of evangelical and secular feminism left many black women questioning whether the civil rights movement was really committed to the liberation of the oppressed. Black women were often relegated to supporting roles in the struggle for civil rights: though they were called the ‘backbone’ of the movement, many felt they were kept in the background, behind an allmale leadership.¹¹¹ This mirrored the situation of women in the black Church in the USA, where they were also permitted to be the ‘backbone’. They were, like Rosa Parks, symbols of ‘defiance’, but rarely allowed to lead. By the end of the century, women made up between 60 and 70 per cent of the black Church and undertook the majority of fundraising and mission work, yet were largely excluded from leadership across mainline black denominations.¹¹² There were also discrepancies between black and white churches: whereas white ¹⁰⁷ Mark Chaves, ‘The Women That Publish the Tidings: The International Association of Women Ministers’, in Bendroth and Brereton, eds., Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism, p. 260. ¹⁰⁸ Bendroth, ‘Women and Missions’, p. 49. ¹⁰⁹ Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, p. 11. ¹¹⁰ Sally Gallagher, ‘The Marginalization of Evangelical Feminism’, Sociology of Religion 65.3 (2004), pp. 223–4. ¹¹¹ Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, 1990), p. 301. ¹¹² Pinn, The Black Church, p. 116. Lincoln and Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience, p. 275.

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Pentecostals ordained women, black Pentecostals did not.¹¹³ Women did have opportunities to exercise soft power, however, as ‘mothers of the church’, a role which became increasingly important in the alienated settings of urban migration.¹¹⁴ The honorific title ‘Church mother’ was unique to black churches. This was an older ‘wise woman’, often the wife of a church’s founder who had a special responsibility for the church’s spiritual direction. Pastors would often consult the Church mother before making major decisions and she carried authority to speak on issues such as the appropriate conduct of young people.¹¹⁵ Black women used their maternal femininity to exercise authority, albeit as a ‘soft’ power which at the same time did not challenge the broader definition of ‘maternal work’, construing women as mothers above all. This limited maternal role was not sufficient for a new generation of black women following the civil rights movement. Jaquelyn Grant, theologian and minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was among the first womanist theologians to critique the black Church’s silence on patriarchy. She brought together discourses of Black Power and feminism, arguing in 1979 that all liberations were inextricably linked: If the liberation of women is not proclaimed, the church’s proclamation cannot be about divine liberation. If the church does not share in the liberation struggle of black women, its liberation struggle is not authentic. If women are oppressed, the church cannot possibly be a ‘visible manifestation that the gospel is a reality’—for the gospel cannot be real in that context.¹¹⁶

Grant advocated a multidimensional understanding of liberation, based on the experiences of African American women. If theology were to be truly liberating, she argued, it must consider the intersections of gender, class, and race.¹¹⁷

COMPLEMENTARIANISM AND E VANGELICALISM The rise of evangelical feminism generated both scholarly reflection and an intense populist backlash. Amid political developments—including the US Supreme Court ruling on Roe vs. Wade (1973) and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)—the new ‘New Religious Right’ swelled in numbers. Ironically, the same nonconformist denominations that, only a few decades earlier, had pioneered the broadening of public roles available to women, resisted the ERA ¹¹³ Lincoln and Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience, p. 79. ¹¹⁴ Colleen Birchett, Biblical Strategies for a Community in Crisis: What African Americans can do (Chicago, 1992), p. 95. ¹¹⁵ Pinn, The Black Church, p. 119. ¹¹⁶ Pinn, The Black Church, p. 131. ¹¹⁷ Lincoln and Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience, p. 303.

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as government meddling in the family.¹¹⁸ For such communities, these changes were a fundamental challenge to corporate spirituality and community identity. In a social milieu that increasingly insisted on individual rights along with the political polarization of questions of gender, the conservative and feminist branches within dissenting Protestantism found few opportunities (and were less inclined) to negotiate compromises. Some conservative segments of dissenting Protestantism revived the tradition of ‘muscular Christianity’ and absolutized boundaries between masculine and feminine, public and domestic (reminiscent of earlier ideologies of separate spheres) based on essentialist and hierarchical conceptions of gender.¹¹⁹ For these people, individualist claims to rights were wrongly usurping biblical authority by self-interested interpretations. Books published in the 1970s by evangelical authors such as Elisabeth Elliot, Darien Cooper, Tim LaHaye, and Marabel Morgan made the case for gender hierarchy based in physiological and psychological differences between the sexes.¹²⁰ Focus on the Family was established to promote conservative gender teaching in 1977. In 1985, Mary Pride’s publication of The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality sparked the ‘Quiverfull’ movement, which advocated motherhood as women’s highest calling, large families and ‘traditional’ gender roles.¹²¹ In 1987, a coalition of conservatives associated with the Southern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church of America signed the ‘Danvers Statement’ outlining the ‘complementarian’ theology of gender; that is that though men and women are ‘equal’ before God they have distinct God-given roles in society, family, and church.¹²² The complementarian vision was one of male ‘headship’: a benign patriarchy within a hierarchically ordered world. In the same year, this group established the ‘Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’. Its feminist counterpart, Christians for Biblical Equality was founded in 1988.¹²³ In the 1990s, some dissenting Protestants reinvented Christian patriarchy for the era of the ‘Sensitive New Age Guy’. The ‘Promise Keepers’ movement was established in 1990 as a response to perceived social and familial disintegration. Reminiscent of evangelical social activism in the latter nineteenth century and the Methodist revivalist tradition, its first rally attracted 4,200 men, but it quickly grew to over a million attendees.¹²⁴ It re-presented

¹¹⁸ Noll, God and Race in American Politics, p. 159. ¹¹⁹ Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, ‘Servanthood or Soft Patriarchy? A Christian Feminist Looks at the Promise Keepers Movement’, Journal of Men’s Studies 5.3 (1997). Gallagher, ‘The Marginalization of Evangelical Feminism’, p. 215. ¹²⁰ Gallagher, ‘The Marginalization of Evangelical Feminism’, p. 225. ¹²¹ Kathryn Joyce, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (Boston, 2009), p. 11. ¹²² The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, ‘The Danvers Statement’, http:// cbmw.org/uncategorized/the-danvers-statement/, accessed 15/9/2015. ¹²³ Gallagher, ‘The Marginalization of Evangelical Feminism’, pp. 226–7. ¹²⁴ Van Leeuwen, ‘Servanthood or Soft Patriarchy?’

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otherwise ‘feminine’ activities (praying, singing, expressions of faith, and piety) as acceptable masculine behaviour. The movement was overwhelmingly made up of white men: the Promise Keepers’ vision of Christian masculinity was closely tied to concerns about white American culture.¹²⁵ That said, the Promise Keepers did make deliberate efforts to employ people of colour and to promote racial reconciliation, reflecting white evangelicals’ changed views on racial integration by the 1990s.¹²⁶ In October 1997, as many as 800,000 men gathered in Washington DC to pray, sing and, most famously, share tearful embraces.¹²⁷ Its concern to re-masculinize Christianity stemmed from women’s ongoing numerical dominance in nonconformist Churches as well as from a perceived ‘crisis of masculinity’ in the face of shifting masculine social roles. It offered men prestige as the solution to church, social, and cultural renewal, if only men would ‘take responsibility’.¹²⁸ Along with other complementarians, it concluded that women’s leadership was often necessary, but only because men had become derelict in their obligations. In Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, for example, Tom Evans told men to ‘reclaim’ their manhood: ‘I am not suggesting that you ask for your role back, I’m urging you to take it back.’¹²⁹ Many evangelical feminists considered this a thinly disguised call to take back power from women. Complementarians held their idealized gender roles in tension with the economic imperatives of late consumerist societies: in particular, the need for a dual income for middle-class families.¹³⁰ Despite their convictions about the role of men as providers, conservative, complementarian evangelical women usually pursued paid work outside the home.¹³¹ In many complementarian families, despite their rhetoric of male ‘headship’, couples in fact shared responsibilities and decision-making.¹³² Similarly, although women in the Women’s Missionary Union (an auxiliary of the Southern Baptist Convention) described their roles as ‘helpers’ in terms of traditional gender roles; they also maintained their financial and governmental independence from the SBC through the 1990s. This allowed them to offer alternative perspectives to the SBC.¹³³ Conservative

¹²⁵ Billy Hawkins, ‘Reading a Promise Keepers Event: The Intersection of Race and Religion’, in Dane Claussen, ed., The Promise Keepers: Essays on Masculinity and Christianity (Jefferson, 2000), p. 183. ¹²⁶ Emerson and Smith, Divided by Faith, p. 65. ¹²⁷ John Bartkowski, The Promise Keepers: Servants, Soldiers, and Godly Men (London, 2004), p. 2. ¹²⁸ Michael J. Chrasta, ‘The Religious Roots of the Promise Keepers’, in Claussen, ed., The Promise Keepers, 26. ¹²⁹ Bartkowski, The Promise Keepers, p. 11. ¹³⁰ Sally Gallagher and Christian Smith, ‘Symbolic Traditionalism and Pragmatic Egalitarianism: Contemporary Evangelicals, Families, and Gender’, Gender & Society 13.2 (1999), p. 214. ¹³¹ Gallagher and Smith, ‘Symbolic Traditionalism’, p. 224. ¹³² Gallagher and Smith, ‘Symbolic Traditionalism’, p. 221. ¹³³ T. Laine Scales, All That Fits a Woman: Training Southern Baptist Women for Charity and Mission, 1907–1926 (Macon, 2000), p. 263.

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nonconformist women found subtle yet innovative ways to pursue independence and leadership in the home and in church within the limits of their complementarian convictions.

THE S HIFT TO THE GLOBAL S OUTH By the close of the century, the decline of denominational affiliation along with success of independent churches and of Pentecostal movements around the world rendered the paradigm of ‘conformity or nonconformity’ archaic. At the same time, differing gender norms within white nonconformist churches in the global North had for many become more significant than denominational ties. For many evangelicals assent to the doctrine of ‘male headship’ became an important point of distinctiveness from the broader culture of their society (although in practice the functioning of their families often differed little from their secular counterparts).¹³⁴ By the 1990s, adherence to complementarianism eclipsed even biblical inerrancy as the shibboleth of conservative evangelical orthodoxy.¹³⁵ Notions of acceptable masculine and feminine behaviour became (with some exceptions) the visible marker of a liberal–conservative divide among white nonconformist churches. Likewise, conflicts over denominational approaches to race (overt and hidden) were driving other evangelicals to the left or even out of their traditional Christian affiliations. As issues of internal self-definition, particularly on gender, increasingly exercised dissenters in the West, churches in the global South became powerhouses of nonconformist expansion and mission. The racial dynamics of the missionary movement turned upside down. By the year 2000, more Brazilians were engaged in foreign missionary work than people from Britain and Canada, thousands of Christian missionaries from Asia and Africa were working in ‘post-Christian’ Britain, France, German, Italy, and even the United States.¹³⁶ As Hutchinson notes in Chapter 14 in this volume, Cho’s ‘two-way’ inversion of traditional mission had begun.¹³⁷ As has been explored more extensively elsewhere in this volume, patterns of migration following decolonization and the globalized world meant that the largest churches in England and France had congregations that were mainly black or diasporic; half of London church attenders were African or Afro-Caribbean, while its ¹³⁴ Gallagher and Smith, ‘Symbolic Traditionalism’, p. 211. ¹³⁵ Pope-Levison, ‘Separate Spheres and Complementarianism in American Christianity’, in Pope-Levison and Levison, eds., Sex, Gender, and Christianity, p. 65. ¹³⁶ Mark Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (Downers Grove, 2009), p. 10. ¹³⁷ Kalu, African Pentecostalism, p. 20.

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biggest churches were African or Australian in origin, or heavily influenced by South American models.¹³⁸ Despite the scale of this reversal, white churches in the global North were slow to grasp the implications of the changing demographics of their churches and to recognize the leadership and direction of churches in the South. Many within the liberal wing of dissenting Protestantism, those who guided the postcolonial refashioning of ecumenical Christianity, might have expected Christians from the Majority World to become similarly liberal and activist according to a Western narrative of progress. They did not. Whereas white Christians in the North feared the (further) collapse of Dissenting Protestantism in the West if churches did not conform their teachings on gender and sexuality to more liberal social orthodoxies, churches in the Majority World generally held to conservative gender teachings and grew quickly.¹³⁹ For example, African Independent Churches, though they allowed female prophets, still placed considerable restrictions on women by enforcing Levitical prohibitions and gender norms based on indigenous African traditions.¹⁴⁰ In many African churches, the family ethics taught differed little from those of the white conservative Promise Keepers.¹⁴¹ Yet Majority World Christians were not conservative in any simplistic way. They read their experiences and traditions into Scripture and found new ways to understand the biblical narrative. Whereas white liberals of the global North prided themselves on inclusion of non-white, non-Western perspectives, white evangelicals often dragged their feet with regard to theological innovation. Rather than welcoming these innovations as potential correctives to the biases of their own interpretations, however, such interpretations have often been met with suspicion.¹⁴² In their concern to safeguard doctrinal orthodoxy, white dissenting evangelicals have been hesitant to learn from the insights of non-white Christians and to accept different interpretations of Christianity.¹⁴³ Yet when it came to gender, the teachings and gender performances of Majority World churches actually had more in common with the conservatives than the liberals who claimed to embrace them. Instead of conforming to either camp, Majority World Christians created their own Christianities and, in doing so, exposed religious divisions (particularly on issues of gender) as a largely white phenomenon, stemming from a North Atlantic culture and heritage. Their ‘dissent’ was against the racial rather than gender norms of white Christianity. Similarly, in the North ¹³⁸ Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity, p. 21. ¹³⁹ Jenkins, The Next Christendom, pp. 7–9. ¹⁴⁰ Kalu, African Pentecostalism, p. 148. ¹⁴¹ Kalu, African Pentecostalism, pp. 161–2. ¹⁴² Stanley, ‘Conversion to Christianity: The Colonisation of the Mind?’, in Partridge and Reid, eds., Finding and Losing Faith, p. 169. ¹⁴³ Stanley, ‘Conversion to Christianity: The Colonisation of the Mind?’, in Partridge and Reid, eds., Finding and Losing Faith, p. 162.

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American black Churches, a 1980s survey found that most ministers were conservative in their views on salvation and Christian morals, but liberal, even radical, in their conceptions of how Christian faith should transform the existing social order. They claimed their teaching was guided by ideas of black consciousness or black power and inspired by the civil rights movement.¹⁴⁴ These dynamics of race and gender exposed the flashpoints of the liberal–conservative divide as the residue, not only of competing theological or hermeneutical approaches, but of white churches’ responses to decolonization and the (often white) women’s liberation movement. Global dissenting Protestantism, however, had become more diverse, flexible, and locally attuned than ever before.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Bartkowski, John, The Promise Keepers: Servants, Soldiers, and Godly Men (London, 2004). Bendroth, Margaret and Virginia Lieson Brereton, eds., Women and TwentiethCentury Protestantism (Urbana, 2002). Brown, Callum, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London, 2009). Choi, Hyaeweol, Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways (Berkeley, 2009). Elphick, Richard, The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa (Charlottesville, 2012). Gallagher, Sally, ‘The Marginalization of Evangelical Feminism’, Sociology of Religion 65.3 (2004), pp. 215–37. Groot, Joanna and Sue Morgan, ‘Beyond the “Religious Turn”? Past, Present and Future Perspectives in Gender History’, Gender & History 25.3 (2013), pp. 395–422. Hedlund, Roger E., Quest for Identity: India’s Churches of Indigenous Origin: The ‘Little Tradition’ in Indian Christianity (Delhi, 2000). Holland, Alison, Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights (Crawley, 2015). Joyce, Kathryn, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (Boston, 2009). Kalu, Ogbu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford, 2008). Kent, Eliza, Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (Oxford, 2004). Larsen, Timothy, Christabel Pankhurst: Fundamentalism and Feminism in Coalition (Rochester, 2002). McDonald, Heather, Blood, Bones and Spirit: Aboriginal Christianity in an East Kimberley Town (Melbourne, 2001).

¹⁴⁴ Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, p. 497.

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Morphy, Howard, ‘Mutual Conversion? The Methodist Church and the Yolgnu, with Particular Reference to Yirrkala’, Humanities Research 7.1 (2005), pp. 41–53. Newman, Joe, Race and the Assemblies of God Church: The Journey from Azusa Street to the ‘Miracle of Memphis’ (Youngstown, 2007). Noll, Mark, God and Race in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton, 2010). O’Brien, Anne, God’s Willing Workers: Women and Religion in Australia (Kensington, 2005). Partridge, Christopher and Helen Reid, eds., Finding and Losing Faith: Studies in Conversion (Milton Keynes, 2006). Pinn, Anthony, The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Maryknoll, 2002). Pope-Levison, Priscilla and John Levison, eds., Sex, Gender, and Christianity (Eugene, 2012). Rademaker, Laura, ‘ “I Had More Children than Most People”: Single Women’s Missionary Maternalism in Arnhem Land, 1908–1945’, Lilith 17 (2012), pp. 7–21. Reeves-Ellington, Barbara, Connie Anne Shemo, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960 (Durham, 2010). Robert, Dana Lee, Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, 2002). Robert, Dana Lee, ‘Shifting Southward: Global Christianity since 1945’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 24.2 (2000), pp. 50–8. Robertson, Nancy Marie, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906–46 (Urbana, 2007). Robinson, Thomas and Lanette Ruff, Out of the Mouths of Babes: Girl Evangelists in the Flapper Era (Oxford, 2011). Sutton, Matthew Avery, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, 2009). Tyrrell, Ian, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, 2010).

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13 Mission, Evangelism, and Translation From the West to Elsewhere Atola Longkumer

I N T R O D U C TI O N In his seminal history of Christianity in India, Robert Frykenberg references a Naga Christian declaring: Europeans do not have a monopoly on Christianity . . . Christianity came to Europe from Asia and some Indians were Christians 500 years before the Europeans. When Europeans became Christians, they made it a European indigenous religion. They changed their names and founded festivals in relation to their cultures. Now, I, like many Nagas, am a Christian, but I am not a European. I have a relationship with my God. Now my God can speak to me in dreams, just as happened to my Angami ancestors. I don’t have to be like Anglicans or Catholics and go through all those rituals. I don’t need them. What I am talking about is Naga Christianity—an indigenous Naga Christianity.¹

This description illustrates the transformation of Christian mission over the last century, marked pre-eminently by pronounced turns towards indigeneity and the charismatic. If the nineteenth century was ‘the great century of missions’,²

¹ Statement from a Naga Christian, quoted in Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present (New York, 2008), p. 443. The Naga are an indigenous people inhabiting the Indo-Burma region in South East Asia, most of them living in the Indian northeastern states of Nagaland and Manipur, who converted to Christianity largely in the twentieth century as a result of American Baptist mission. Frykenberg provides a detailed narrative of the mission work and the response of the Naga in the same book. For an ethnographic history of the Naga, see Julian Jacobs, The Nagas: Hill Peoples of Northeast India. Society, Culture and the Colonial Encounter (London, 1999). ² Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, Vol. 6 (New York, 1970).

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the twentieth century can be described as ‘the great century of indigenous Christianities’,³ in that the last century saw tremendous growth of Christianity and Christian mission sourced and sustained from the erstwhile ‘mission fields’ and ‘the heathen lands’⁴ such as India and South Korea, Nigeria, and Brazil.⁵ As noted by Brown (in Chapter 1 in this volume), the latter half of the twentieth century saw a significant demographic shift in the population of adherents of Christianity,⁶ resulting in the greatest proportion of Christians now living in the Majority World.⁷ With this demographic shift, Christianity has changed its framing contours, concerns, colours, and questions.⁸ A parallel phenomenon is the waning membership in the historical churches in the global North, with more people identifying themselves as of ‘no religion’.⁹ The rise of Christianity as a world religion in the late modern era shares an indelible historical connection with the missionary push of Dissenting Protestant Christianity. The dissenting traditions in Protestant Christianity organized significant mission societies and contributed to the establishment and growth of Christianity as a world religion.¹⁰ In fact, a larger population of ³ See, for instance, the rise of indigenous Christianities in the context of Asia in Paul Joshua Bhakiaraj, ‘Forms of Asian Indigenous Christianities’, in Felix Wilfred, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Christianity in Asia (New York, 2014), pp. 171–81. ⁴ These terms are employed to retain the historical usage of the mission era, without necessarily adhering to the demeaning connotations they implied during the Western mission and colonial era. ⁵ See the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, http://www.gordonconwell.edu/ockenga/research/Resources-and-Downloads.cfm, accessed 25/1/2016. ⁶ Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, 1996); Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York, 2000); Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity?: The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, 2003); Todd M. Johnson and Kenneth R. Ross, eds., Atlas of Global Christianity, 1910–2010 (Edinburgh, 2009); and C. H. Kim and Kirsteen Kim, Christianity as a World Religion (London, 2008). ⁷ ‘Majority World’ is a relatively recent term, used in lieu of earlier terms such as the ‘Third World’, ‘developing nations’, or ‘global South’ to denote the regions of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania, which share certain historical experiences (such as Western imperialism) and where the majority of the world’s population lives. ⁸ See Dana L. Robert, Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (Malden, 2009); Mark A. Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (Downers Grove, 2009), p. 20. ⁹ See, for instance, the Pew Research report regarding the increase of the religious ‘nones’ in the US: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/11/religious-nones-are-not-onlygrowing-theyre-becoming-more-secular/, accessed 7/6/2017; Linda Woodhead and Rebecca Catto, eds., Religion and Change in Modern Britain (Abingdon, 2012). A related book presents the state of Christianity and the need for evangelism in Europe: see Gerrit Noort, Kyriaki Avtzi, and Stefan Paas, eds., Sharing Good News: Handbook on Evangelism in Europe (Geneva, 2017). ¹⁰ See William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago, 1987); Dana L. Robert, ‘From Missions to Mission to Beyond Missions: The Historiography of American Protestant Foreign Mission since World War II’, in Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart, eds., New Directions in American Religious History (Oxford and New York, 1997); Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society (Edinburgh, 1992); Klaus

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Christian communities in the twentieth century traces their origins to dissenting mission, evangelism, and translation of the Bible than now exists in their old heartlands. This fed into a dynamic diversification of global Christianity, considered in this chapter by highlighting the glocalization of Christianity in the cultures it encountered. The chapter therefore begins with the broad brush strokes of Christian mission in the twentieth century, highlighting the emergence of native¹¹ education, translation, native elites, and nationalism. A review of twentieth-century history of Christian mission would not be complete without addressing the nature of charismatic Christianity, its engagement with expansive American Christianity, and the unprecedented change contingent on the expansive globalization and revolution of technology. An assessment of Christianity in the twentieth century thus needs to include important themes such as: the demographic shift of Christianity, the rise of religio-cultural fundamentalism, women’s empowerment, the global movement of peoples, rising socio-economic inequality, and conflicts of many types. These factors persist and continue to engage Christian mission and its fundamental task of transforming cultures and people.

T H E M E S I N T W E N T I E T H - C EN T U R Y MI S S I O N If the books published between 1975 and 2000 indicate anything about the zeitgeist of the twentieth century, they point to a century marked not by the broad optimism of the high imperial age, but by gloom and discontent.¹² Incessant conflict, wanton destruction of the environment, and extreme inequality marked the century. For Christians around the world, the twentieth century drew to a close presenting a complex canvas, marked with growth and decline, as well as diversity in both its demographic composition and theology.¹³ From a mission-history perspective the twentieth century began with the confident proclamation (by the Student Volunteer Movement) of ‘The Koschorke, Frieder Ludwig, and Mariano Delgado, eds., A History of Christianity in Asia, Africa and Latin America (Grand Rapids, 2007); Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History. ¹¹ In the parlance of Christian mission of the modern missionary movement, the term ‘native’ commonly referred to the indigenous population. The term is used here to retain the historical context, without subscribing to the often demeaning connotations of the term. ¹² Eric Hobsbaum, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (New York, 1994); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York, 1997). These critical publications were followed closely by Joseph Stiglitz’s powerful verdict against globalization, on the basis that it served the cause of the powerful and not the vulnerable in any society in which it spread its wings. See Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalisation and its Discontents (New York, 2003). ¹³ See Johnson and Ross, eds., Atlas of Global Christianity.

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evangelisation of the world in this generation’,¹⁴ reflecting a widespread enthusiasm among Christian missionaries ‘from the west to the rest’ of the world. Ironically, the slogan was arguably achieved, if one measures the growth and geographical spread of Christianity in the Majority World. By the end of the century, it had become (in Jenkins’ words) the ‘Next Christendom’. In 1908, Johannes Warneck’s Die Lebenskrafte des Evangeliums was published, appearing the next year under the English title The Living Christ and Dying Heathenism. Here was another proclamation of optimism as to the ability of Christian mission to overcome the ‘heathenism’ of nations. Given the fact that today, Christianity is, with 2.1 billion adherents,¹⁵ the world’s largest religion in almost all four corners of the globe, that optimism seems to have been well-founded. Remarkably, the same century saw (at its midpoint) a widespread call for a moratorium on Christian missions, particularly to the Majority World from the West. As Brian Stanley notes, it was in 1971 during a mission festival organized at Milwaukee, USA, that ‘a Kenyan Presbyterian with an evangelical background in the East African Revival movement, the Rev. John Gatu’, first issued the call.¹⁶ A moratorium on missionaries from the West was needed, he argued, to enable Majority World churches to discover their ‘selfhood’, and liberate themselves from the bondage of Western dependency. Gatu’s call gained global traction at the World Council of Churches Commission on World Mission and Evangelism Bangkok conference in January 1973 (organized around the theme ‘Salvation Today’).¹⁷ A moratorium would mark a shift in the organization and nature of Christian mission. As Emilio Castro, who served both as the director of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, and general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), summed up aptly, ‘the missionary era has ended and the era for world mission has just begun’.¹⁸ Such global Christian witness required shared structural organization, which took shape with the formation (among the ¹⁴ John R. Mott, The Evangelization of the World in this Generation (New York, 1901); see also Gerald H. Anderson, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Christian Mission (New York, 1998), p. 487. ¹⁵ ‘Global Christianity – A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population’, The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, www.pewforum.org/2011/12/19/ global-christianity-exec/, accessed 7/6/2017. ¹⁶ Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, 1990), p. 27; Robert Reese, ‘John Gatu and the Moratorium on Missionaries’, Missiology: An International Review 42.3 (2014), pp. 245–56. ¹⁷ Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, p. 27; other mission historians also lend their voices to the need to localize leadership and theology in the global South. For instance, Orlando E. Costas laments that, ‘To a certain extent it boils down to this: Can an unevangelised world, caught up in a process of political, economic and cultural awakening, be effectively evangelised by a church that is not indigenous?’, in The Church and its Mission: A Shattering Critique from the Third World (Wheaton, 1974), pp. 162–3. ¹⁸ Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, p. 28.

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Protestant mainstream) of national church councils and the WCC in 1948 at Amsterdam.¹⁹ This new internationalism (which paralleled events in the political sphere, with the formation of the League of Nations and later the United Nations) played a part in the divisions within Protestant traditions which have sometimes been unhelpfully compressed under the rubric of the ‘fundamentalist-modernist controversy’. Another key contributor to these trends was the celebration, in 1910, of the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, the legacy of which continues to impact global Christianity even as its core vision for ecclesiastical unity for Christian witness remains a challenge.²⁰ Such developments questioned the traditional goal of Christian mission, that of ‘overcoming heathenism’. As William E. Hocking at Harvard noted in his controversial Rethinking Missions (1932), the state of the twentieth century required a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of missionary goals and methods.²¹ What was needed, noted Hocking, was ‘world understanding on the spiritual level’.²² This aspiration of his ‘Layman’s Inquiry’ (funded by Rockefeller, staffed by non-clergy, and drawing conclusions from a global survey tool rather than theological presuppositions), hardly described what the twentieth century delivered. It was, however, a good benchmark against which to measure liberal, Western disappointments with the course of this difficult and complex century. Within these broad markers of the twentieth century, the categorization of Christian mission by Timothy Yates is helpful. Yates categorized Christian mission in the twentieth century under seven major themes and perspectives: mission as expansion, 1900–10; mission as the church of a people (volkskirche), 1910–20; mission appraised, 1920–40; mission as presence and dialogue, 1950–60; mission as proclamation, dialogue, and liberation, 1960–70; mission as proclamation and church growth, 1970–80; and mission as pluralism and enlightenment, 1980–90.²³ After his last decade, it may be helpful to add ‘mission and World Christianity, 1990–2000’, wherein concerns from cultures of the different communities were brought to bear on Christianity that had long enjoyed a Western garb and expression. Yates also comments

¹⁹ Nicholas Lossky, ed., Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva, 2002); Ruth Rouse, ed., A History of the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva, 1993). ²⁰ Brian Stanley, The World Mission Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids, 2009); David A. Kerr and Kenneth R. Ross, eds., Edinburgh 2010: Mission Then and Now (Oxford, 2009); Daryl Balia and Kirsteen Kim, eds., Edinburgh 2010: Witnessing to Christ Today (Oxford, 2010). ²¹ William E. Hocking, Rethinking Missions: A Layman’s Inquiry after One Hundred Years (New York, 1932). As the title suggests, Rethinking Mission was a candid evaluation of Christian mission in relation to the cultures of nations, drawing from the data made available in the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry, a project funded by J. D. Rockefeller, a Baptist layman and friend of John R. Mott. See Hutchison, Errand to the World, pp. 158–60; Timothy Yates, Christian Mission in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1994), p. 70. ²² Hutchison, Errand to the World, pp. 158–9. ²³ Yates, Christian Mission in the Twentieth Century.

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that the twentieth century ‘may well be viewed by historians as the American century’, with mission statesmen like John R. Mott, stirring the vision of Christian mission for evangelization of the whole world in their generation.²⁴ Given the global ripple of charismatic Christianity which (as Grant Wacker has argued) erupted from America, twentieth-century Christian mission (particularly from the dissenting traditions perspectives) may be seen as sustained by trends, scholarship, and human resources from the global North while, by the 1970s, it was beginning to seek organizational forms which realized indigenous flows from the grass roots.²⁵

NATIVE EDUCATION AND NATIONALISM 1928 was an important year for Naga Christians in the north-east region of India. The Naga Club was established by a group of young men, most of whom were second-generation Naga Christians educated in mission schools and colleges. The formation of the Naga Club bears enormous significance in the history of this people’s modern identity.²⁶ As noted in the opening discussion, the Naga are an indigenous people, incorporated into the modern nation state of India by the British in the nineteenth century. American Baptist missions, though not participants in the British project, followed close on their heels. British administration (in ‘the Naga Hills’) and American Baptist evangelization brought tremendous changes to the people. Conversion to Christianity and formation of the Naga Baptist Association consolidated the tribes into a collective identity. Furthermore, modern education equipped them to articulate and assert their indigenous identity as free from that of the modern nation state of India.²⁷ The formation of the Naga Club is yet another illustration of ²⁴ Yates, Christian Mission in the Twentieth Century, p. 8. ²⁵ Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, 2001). The influence of American evangelical mission in world Christianity, creating resemblances in the hallmark areas of evangelicals (such as personal conversion and volunteerism) is persuasively discussed by Mark Noll in his The New Shape of World Christianity; see also Kirsteen Kim, The Holy Spirit in the World: A Global Conversation (Maryknoll, 2007). ²⁶ Marcus Franke, War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas (London, 2009), p. 39; Tezenlo Thong, Colonization, Proselytization, and Identity: The Nagas and Westernization in Northeast India (London, 2016). ²⁷ Naga self-determination is an ongoing movement that began with resistance to the British annexation of the region in the early nineteenth century and continued after India’s independence in 1947. Under different leadership, Naga self-determination has seen prolonged conflicts with India and intra-tribal clashes. At present, a ceasefire agreement with the Indian government has enabled negotiations, but not without suspicion and mutual accusations between the different groups leading the Naga self-determination movement. The influence and selfunderstanding of Naga Christianity will probably be tested in what it brings to bear on the Naga self-determination movement.

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an unanticipated outcome of Christian mission and its strategy of education as an instrument for evangelization. Education to read the Word of God resulted in the unanticipated result of educated ‘natives’ asserting their identity and voicing a desire for self-governance. As Brian Stanley has noted, ‘missions made their own direct contributions to the growth of nationalism, primarily through the medium of education’.²⁸ Western Christian mission education often intentionally set out to evangelize and to ‘civilize’ indigenous peoples after their own likeness in manners and thinking. Following the Venn (and the later Roland Allen) conceptions of mission, modern education carried with it both a pragmatic necessity and a theological rationale. Underlying the strategy of education for evangelization was the purpose of establishing a ‘self-governing church’, and so ‘educated indigenous leadership was a prerequisite of progress towards autonomy’.²⁹ Missions were caught in a paradox whereby they produced educated natives who then fed into the consequent uprising of nationalist movements in China and Kenya, which acted in many cases to expel Western missionaries. This pattern of ‘unexpected consequences’ happened wherever the dissenting emphasis on individual conscience and education interacted with modernization(s). While the first wave of the anti-Christian movement in China was confined largely in the universities and petered out by the end of 1922, the second wave, beginning in late 1923 was more significant, provoking enormous changes. As Stanley notes, ‘opposition to imperialism now became the central motif of the Chinese Nationalist movement, and the two parties singled out for special attack the “cultural imperialism” of the numerous Christian schools and colleges, which allegedly “denationalized” Chinese youth and made them the “running dogs” of the imperialist powers.’³⁰ These anti-Christian movements served as a watershed both for mission activities and for Chinese self-government later in the century. Though their responses varied, Christian missionary executives were awoken to the perils of over-identification with Western power in their evangelization. Further, the nationalist sentiment

²⁸ Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, p. 133. For a particular example of Christian mission’s contribution to national identity, see Frieder Ludwig, Church and State in Tanzania: Aspects of a Changing Relationship 1961–1994 (Leiden, 1999), pp. 18, 29–40. Translation of the Bible into vernacular and the spread of mass literacy also contributed to the formation of national identity: for more discussion, see Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1999); Klaus Koschorke, Adrian Hermann, E. Phuti Mogase, and Ciprian Burlacioiu, eds., Discourses of Indigenous-Christian Elites in Colonial Societies in Asia and Africa around 1900: A Documentary Sourcebook from Selected Journals (Wiesbaden, 2016). ²⁹ Hutchison, Errand to the World, p. 78. For an excellent historical narrative and analysis of the policy of growing indigenous leaders among the converts, see Paul William Harris, Nothing but Christ: Rufus Anderson and the Ideology of Protestant Foreign Missions (Oxford, 1999). ³⁰ Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, p. 143. For more illustrations of the multilayered complexity of Christian mission in relation to British Empire and the local context and culture, see Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford, 2008).

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among the Chinese elites (ironically, given the faith commitments of Sun Yat-Sen and Chiang Kai-shek) was channelled as an anti-religious programme adopted by the Communist regime after 1949.³¹ In Kenya, among the Kikuyu, anti-mission stirrings were associated with cultural practices under pressure to change as a result of conversion to Christianity. Mission societies—the Church of Scotland Mission, and the Africa Inland Mission—outlawed the practice of female circumcision (clitoridectomy) among its church members from the early 1920s. The decision split churches at the grass roots: there were both vehement opponents and supporters. Stanley identifies the circumcision controversy of 1929–31 as one of the initial signs in Kenya of the anti-mission movement, and the beginnings of an assertive native voice.³² The National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA) provides another example of the interaction between Christian mission and native empowerment towards nationalism. The NCBWA was one of the first significant political organizations in the different British colonies, organized by the mission-educated ‘intelligentsia’—clergymen, lawyers, doctors, journalists, and a sprinkling of traders. In March 1920 in Accra, Ghana, the congress was inaugurated to serve as a pan-African organization to challenge colonial rule.³³ Stanley’s assertion, then, that ‘Missionary education produced many of the leaders of the nationalist revolutions’³⁴ is aptly illustrated by the history of the nation states which wrested their freedom from the colonial powers in the mid-twentieth century. In the process of nationalism ‘many of the products of mission secondary schools or Christian institutions of higher education . . . became the articulators of nationalist protest in a way that some of their missionary mentors had failed to anticipate’.³⁵ In some places, mission education policy not only sowed the seeds of nationalist movements, but also contributed to the reawakening of religio-cultural consciousness through the late nineteenth century. In India, this was to take on the form of full-blown cultural fundamentalism.

³¹ Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, p. 144; see also Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (New York, 2008); Daniel H. Bays, Christianity in China: From Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford, 1996). For an excellent study on the role of a native Christian trained in the Anglican tradition—Bishop K. H. Ting—in reconstructing Christianity in the aftermath of the cultural revolution, see Philip L. Wickeri, Reconstructing Christianity in China: K.H. Ting and the Chinese Church (Maryknoll, 2008). ³² Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, p. 152. ³³ J. F. A. Ajayi, ‘A New Christian Politics: The Mission-Educated Elite in West African Politics’, in Dana L. Robert, ed., Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914 (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2008), p. 242. ³⁴ Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, p. 134. The impact of the two world wars on Britain’s global pre-eminence is stressed by Stanley, and subsequent nationalist movements in the lands ruled by Britain resulting in the independence of these nation states in the mid-twentieth century. ³⁵ Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, p. 134.

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CHRISTIAN M ISSION AND THE RI SE OF RELIGIO-CULTURAL FUNDAMENTALISM In her book The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Freedom and India’s Future, Martha Nussbaum presents an engaging analysis of religious extremism in India.³⁶ Anchored in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, when over two thousand Muslims were massacred by Hindu religious fanatics, Nussbaum presents an interpretation of the rise of Hindu Right, particularly the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its political arm—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). One of the agendas of the Hindu Right is the ‘restoration’ of a homogeneous nation sharing one religion (Hinduism), contrary to the reality of modern India as a quintessentially diverse society, and ‘Hinduism’ itself as largely the product of British orientalism. Paradoxically, the rise and active operations of right-wing religious movements (such as the RSS) arguably can be related to Christian mission. Nationalism and religio-cultural fundamentalism are two sides of the same coin, in that both are reactions to the forces of Christian mission and colonial rule. In India, each fed on the other, their shared objectives including the creation of homogeneous identities with overt intolerance of diversity and multiple religio-cultural traditions. Such ideology is evident in the anticonversion legal bills passed by some Indian states under BJP rule.³⁷ The religious violence witnessed against Christian mission in the country—the murder of the Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two young boys in 1999, the violence against mostly adivasi (original inhabitants in Sanskrit, akin to tribal or indigenous people) Christians in Orissa in 2007, the rape and murder of a Catholic nun in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh in 2008—all these illustrate the forces of religio-cultural fundamentalism that has subtle ties with nationalism.³⁸ Put simply, the genesis of a nation state defined by a shared religio-cultural identity is a modern construct, owing much to the rise of Western ways of knowing (such as anthropology, Darwinism, and to historical debates over ethnogenesis). It found a definitive statement in the settlements around the First World War (particularly Woodrow Wilson’s ‘14 Points’, which promoted ethnically charged ‘recognizable lines of nationality’).³⁹ As noted above, the ³⁶ Martha Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future (Cambridge and London, 2007). ³⁷ Sebastian C. H. Kim, In Search of Identity: Debates on Religious Conversion in India (New Delhi, 2003). ³⁸ Recent restrictions on the sale and slaughter of cows and violence against members of communities involved in the beef business are more examples of the assertion of religious rights in India. See http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/muslim-man-killed-for-eat ing-beef-in-uttar-pradesh/article7706825.ece, accessed 8/6/2017. ³⁹ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York, 1983).

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religion known as ‘Hinduism’ is itself a very modern term, ironically linked with the agents of the West (both orientalists and Christian missionaries).⁴⁰ The role of Christian missions in importing ‘religion’ as a category (as it existed in the enlightenment framework of the Judeo-Christian West) into the complex religiosity of India is convincingly demonstrated by rigorous contemporary scholarship. In his work on the role of missionaries’ conceptions of Hindu religiosity, for instance, Geoff Oddie notes ‘the evolution and construction of various Hindu notions of “Hinduism” by Hindu reformers, and the reification of ideas of “religion” in the politico-cultural “Hinduism” of today’.⁴¹ In his diary entry for June 1800, William Ward (one of the ‘Serampore Trio’) noted that one of the Serampore converts was writing a substantial piece against the ‘the whole of the Hindoo System’.⁴² Oddie observes: it was partly through their introduction of new terminology and development of language that the missionaries began to exert pressure on and to influence Hindu views of themselves. The adoption and use of English by Bengali and other ‘Hindus’ in the early nineteenth century and the influence of key English terms and concepts on the vernaculars were ways in which missionary assumptions and views of the world slowly influenced the attitudes of various classes in India.⁴³

On the one hand, Christian mission work in learning the languages of the natives and descriptions of the religious practices contributed to the knowledge repository of the lands and cultures they encountered. On the other hand, these language lexicons, primers, dictionaries, and ethnographic details contributed to the reification of the religio-cultural practices of the people themselves, often creating a monolithic portrayal of contexts that were far from homogeneous. As Brett Nongbri has pointed out, even the most ‘indigenizing’ Western scholars changed what they observed simply by the observation of it. His telling portrayal of the ‘colonization’ of religion in the modern secular West is evocative of the cross-cultural colonizations which Christians themselves undertook in the nineteenth century.⁴⁴ These homogeneous representations ⁴⁰ Among many studies, see Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’ (London and New York, 1999), p. 98; Geoffrey Oddie, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793–1900 (New Delhi, 2006); Sharada Sugirtharajah, Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective (London, 2003). On the role of Christian mission in locating and constructive native religions in Africa, see David Chidester, Savage System: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in South Africa (Charlottesville, 1996); Frieder Lugwig and Afe Adogame, eds., European Traditions in the Study of Religion in Africa (Wiesbaden, 2004). ⁴¹ Geoffrey A. Oddie, ‘Construction of “Hinduism”: The Impact of the Protestant Missionary Movement on Hindu Self-Understanding’, in Robert Eric Frykenberg, ed., Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500 (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2003), p. 156. ⁴² Oddie, ‘Construction’, in Frykenberg, ed., Christians and Missionaries in India, p. 156. ⁴³ Oddie, ‘Construction’, in Frykenberg, ed., Christians and Missionaries in India, p. 162. ⁴⁴ Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, 2013).

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of ‘religions’ can be sourced to the encounter between indigenous peoples and the agents of the West: colonial administrators and missionaries alike were employed as agents of convenience by vested interest groups to pursue a fundamentalistic agenda which reordered the way the world was known. In attempting to counter this form of cultural co-option, indigenizing movements (both Christian and other) often reacted against—and so towards—artificial and modernizing categories. The phenomenon of the rise of religio-cultural fundamentalism has been a global reality analysed often in the context of globalization, growing inequalities, and contestations for scarce resources.⁴⁵ Dissenting Christian mission has often found itself on both sides of ‘fundamentalist’ conflicts in the twentieth century, both as targets of fundamentalist/indigenizing forces in countries where Christianity is a minority, and (either as a reaction to this or an exported element of debates in the West) as a part of the propagation of a particular kind of Christian message. In the post-Second World War period in particular, American conservative evangelical mission agencies saw their chief global enemies as liberalism, ecumenism, totalitarianism, and the new global erastianism emerging with bureaucratic global agencies such as the WCC. The formation of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association in 1945 (by the 1990s the largest missionary federation in the world) provided effective coordination of efforts against these perceived trends, actions which continued to affect Christian missions around the globe through to the end of the twentieth century.

M I S S I O N A N D CO N T EXTU AL THE OLOG Y The indigenization of Christianity in the Majority World, and Western attempts to deal with the legacy of their own involvements, led to the emergence of more highly contextualized theologies. As nations attained independence from the European colonial powers in the mid-twentieth century, the Christians of these nations were called to participate in nation building, including the rearticulation of the significance of the Christian message for lived contexts. As already discussed, Christian mission activities of evangelism, translation, and education had, by the mid-twentieth century, undoubtedly produced vibrant Christian communities in various parts of the world. However, the theological traditions and expressions available remained dominated

⁴⁵ Hector Avalos, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence (New York, 2005); Malise Ruthven, Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007).

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by the ones ‘forged in the West and bequeathed to [indigenous peoples] by missionaries’.⁴⁶ There was a need to ‘develop a theology rooted in their own context’ that both embraced local cultural traditions and made meaning of the transforming encounter with the gospel. In the same vein, Brian Stanley attributes the rise of the ‘Third World Theologies’ that emerged from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the late 1960s to the ‘self-conscious reaction against the hegemony of the Western intellectual tradition in theology’.⁴⁷ Among the early leaders in this contextual theology movement was Shoki Coe, a Taiwanese Presbyterian theologian educated in Britain, who (as director of the World Council of Churches’ Theological Education Fund) introduced in 1972 the terms ‘contextuality’ and ‘contextualization’ to describe a theology that is rooted and sourced from the contexts of the global South. Contextuality, for Coe, . . . is that critical assessment of what makes the context really significant in the light of the Missio Dei. It is the missiological discernment of the signs of the times, seeing where God is at work and calling us to participate in it . . . Authentic contextuality leads to contextualization . . . This dialectic between contextuality and contextualisation indicate[s] a new of way of theologizing. It involves not only words but actions.⁴⁸

In one sense, this was merely a recognition of the indigenizations of Christianity which had been ongoing since the early part of the century—for example, the African and Indian Initiated Churches. On the other hand, in the 1970s, the reflexive impacts of globalization were such that the centres of missiological thought in the West were now unable to ignore the Majority World voice. Catholic thinkers such as Raimon Pannikar (1918–2010) were already working in Europe on the cross-cultural ramifications of Catholic globalization. Among D/dissenting traditions, graduate students from Asia, Africa, and South America were no longer exceptional sights on the campuses of Princeton, Cambridge, or Edinburgh, and indeed the first generation were now emerging into leadership positions in institutions around the world. For instance, Bolaji Idowu (from 1972 leader of the Methodist Church in Nigeria) was (like his contemporary, John Mbiti), Cambridge-trained and by the mid1960s producing tools for the contextualization of Yoruba theology.⁴⁹ Some, such as Kosuke Koyama (1929–2009), developed international careers, in

⁴⁶ Wilbert R. Shenk, ‘Contextual Theology: The Last Frontier’, in Lamin Sanneh and Joel A. Carpenter, eds., The Changing Face of Christianity: Africa, the West, and the World (New York, 2005), pp. 191–212. ⁴⁷ Stanley, The Bible and the Flag, p. 23. ⁴⁸ Shoki Coe, ‘Contextualizing Theology’, in Gerald Anderson and Thomas F. Stransky, eds., Mission Trends No. 3: Third World Theologies (Grand Rapids, 1976), pp. 21–2. ⁴⁹ E. Bolaji Idowu, Towards an Indigenous Church (Oxford, 1965); E. Bolaji Idowu, African Traditional Religion: A Definition (Maryknoll, 1973).

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Koyama’s case in Thailand, Singapore, New Zealand, and the USA. His 1974 book, Water Buffalo Theology, was ‘one of the first books truly to do theology out of the setting of Asian villages’.⁵⁰ Coe’s distinction between indigenization and contextualization triggered a substantial reorientation of Christian thought, described by some as a paradigm shift.⁵¹ As Yeo notes in Chapter 4 of this volume, contextual theology emerged in direct relation to the cultural traditions and socio-economic challenges of particular peoples, as these emerged from different socio-economic and cultural conditions. An early and influential form of contextual theology was Liberation theology, specifically developed in the Latin American context to deal with the after-effects of Spanish colonialism, engagement with post-Second World War capitalism, and the persistence of poverty. It influenced other contextual theologies such as African, Minjung, Dalit, and Tribal.⁵² The impact of the late twentiethcentury call for theology that incorporates socio-economic and religio-cultural environs is evident in the mission documents produced by global bodies of Christianity, such as the WCC and the Lausanne Movement. As Kim notes, each of these starts with the presumption of encultured means for key terms (such as ‘the gospel’), and proceeds on the assumption of local agency.⁵³ (In both cases, a key role was played by people such as Jack Dain⁵⁴

⁵⁰ Douglas Martin, ‘Kosuke Koyama, 79, an Ecumenical Theologian, Dies’, New York Times 31 March 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/world/asia/01koyama.html, accessed 10/4/2017. ⁵¹ Shenk, ‘Contextual Theology: The Last Frontier’, in Sanneh and Carpenter, eds., The Changing Face of Christianity, p. 193; see also Douglas J. Elwood, ed., Asian Christian Theology: Emerging Themes (Philadelphia, 1980). ⁵² These are large categories and it is important to note the complexities inherent in such labels; these terms are at best rubric terms to encapsulate the localized theology with all the multiple layers of contexts and realities. See Mercy Oduyoye, Introducing African Women Theology (Sheffield, 2001); John Parratt, Reinventing Christianity: African Theology Today (Grand Rapids, 1995); Elias Kifon Bongmba, ed., The Routledge Companion to Christianity in Africa (New York, 2016); Jung Young Lee, ed., An Emerging Theology in World Perspective: Commentary on Korean Minjung Theology (Mystic, 1988); Volker Kuster, A Protestant Theology of Passion: Korean Minjung Theology Revisited (Leiden, 2010); James Massey, Dalits in India: Religion as a Source of Bondage or Liberation with Special Reference to Christians (New Delhi, 1995); A. P. Nirmal, ed., A Reader in Dalit Theology (Madras, 1990); M. E. Prabhakar, Towards a Dalit Theology (Madras, 1989); K. Thanzauva, Theology of Community: Tribal Theology in the Making (Aizawl, 2004); Wati Longchar, Returning to Mother Earth: Theology, Christian Witness and Theological Education: An Indigenous Perspective (Tainen and Kolkota, 2012). ⁵³ Jooseop Keum, ‘Together Towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes’, https://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/publications/together-towards-life-mission-and-evan gelism-in-changing-landscapes; ‘Lausanne Cape Town Commitment’, https://www.lausanne. org/content/ctc/ctcommitment, accessed 17/3/2017. Both statements were produced with representatives of global Christianity. See also Kirsteen Kim, ‘Doing Theology for the Church’s Mission: The Appropriation of Culture’, in Jason S. Sexton and Paul Weston, eds., The End of Theology: Shaping Theology for the Sake of Mission (Minneapolis, 2016), pp. 73ff. ⁵⁴ Hugh W. Chilton, ‘Evangelicals and the End of Christian Australia: Nation and Religion in the Public Square, 1959–1979’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2014.

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and David Du Plessis,⁵⁵ who had access to both Western authority figures and to Majority World leaders.)

INDI GENOUS CH RISTI ANI TY/ WO RLD CHRISTI ANI TY Assessing the changing patterns of Christianity a decade ago, Lamin Sanneh states that ‘Christianity has not ceased to be a Western religion, but its future as a world religion is now being decided and shaped by the hands and in the minds of its non-Western adherents, who share little of the West’s cultural assumptions.’⁵⁶ Indeed, Christianity has become global both in its demographic distribution and in its characteristic expressions. An important development in Christianity in the twentieth century has been in the category of ‘indigenous’ Christianity, also termed as ‘World Christianity’, especially in academic settings of North America, which has enthusiastically engaged in the emerging area of studies as a way of renewing old curricula beholden to national and imperial frames. The identification and development of indigenous Christianity is not unrelated to the explosion of Christianity in the global South, making Christianity a world religion, embraced and practised by diverse cultures around the globe. It is, of course, not just happening in the Majority World. As secularization presses on Christian communities in the global North, there are also expressions of re-indigenization there too. Larry Eskridge’s penetrating study of the Jesus People and the youth revivals of the 1950s, for example, demonstrate the shift in cultural milieux required by subculture formation in the West.⁵⁷ Likewise, as can be seen in the work of Peter Rollins and the emerging church network in Northern Ireland, re-indigenization of Christianity can follow in the wake of disaster or trauma.⁵⁸ The diversity of the socio-cultural milieux lends to shifts in the expression of Christianity and of the meaning-making of Christianity relative to the contextual challenges of the communities.⁵⁹ Indigenous Christianity, however, is not limited to theological articulations that posture themselves as counter to Western theology, but incorporates dialectical conversations between Christian mission and local expressions of Christianity, as well ⁵⁵ Joshua R. Ziefle, ‘Presbyterians or Pentecost? The Strange Case of John Mackay and David du Plessis’, Journal of Presbyterian History 91.1 (April 2013), pp. 18–28. ⁵⁶ Lamin Sanneh, ‘Introduction: The Changing Face of Christianity: The Cultural Impetus of a World Religion’, in Sanneh and Carpenter, eds., The Changing Face of Christianity, p. 4. ⁵⁷ Larry Eskridge, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (New York, 2013). ⁵⁸ Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church (London, 2006). ⁵⁹ See William Kenny Longgan and Tim Meadowcroft, eds., Living in the Family of Jesus: Critical Contextualisation in Melanesia and Beyond (Auckland, 2016).

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as the cultural osmosis which occurs through re-expressing in particular languages (which embody visions of the cosmos) and historic cultural practices. Indeed, as Asian and African theologians have progressed beyond the reactive ‘liberation’ stage, it has become an orthodoxy to note that mere dialectics is an inadequate, even enslaving form of discourse. As the Catholic scholar, Aloysius Pieris, noted in 1988, the Marxist assumptions entrenched in radical liberation theology of the 1960s were as modernist as their hegemonic opponents.⁶⁰ All theology is contextual, requiring theologians to progress beyond the ‘billiard ball physics’ of the nineteenth-century debates.⁶¹ Indigenous (d)issent seeks to include the conscious proclamation of the gospel, the response of the people and the lived practice of Christianity as conditioned by the environs it encounters. Indigenous Christianity incorporates historiographical as well as theological articulations of Christianity in global South contexts. The parameters of indigenous Christianity are aptly summed up by Dale Irvin, who (though he uses the term ‘World Christianity’, seems to imply the ‘grass-roots’ processes of indigenized movements): . . . an emerging field that investigates and seeks to understand Christian communities, faith, and practice as they are found on six continents, expressed in diverse ecclesial traditions, and informed by the multitude of historical and cultural experiences in a world that for good and ill is rapidly globalizing. It is concerned with both the diversity of local or indigenous expressions of Christian life and faith throughout the world, and the variety of ways these interact with one another critically and constructively across time and space. It is particularly concerned with under-represented and marginalized communities of faith, resulting in a greater degree of attention being paid to Asian, African, and Latin American experiences; the experiences of marginalized communities within the North Atlantic world; and the experiences of women throughout the world.⁶²

To be sure, the phenomenon of indigenous Christianity is not to be reduced to a merely triumphalist accounting of Christian populations in the global South: it rather involves the attempt to engage critically and constructively the embrace of Christianity by communities. Scholars working out of an indigenous Christian framework seek to document, describe, and interpret the particular expression of Christianity within a liberating general framework, as described by Sanneh: The variety of forms and styles, the complex linguistic idioms and aesthetic traditions, and the differences in music and worship patterns show world

⁶⁰ See the three books by Aloysius Pieris: An Asian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, 1988); Love Meets Wisdom (Maryknoll, 1988); and God’s Reign for God’s Poor: A Return to the Jesus Formula (Gonavila, 1998). ⁶¹ Simon Shui-Man Kwan, Postcolonial Resistance and Asian Theology (London, 2013), p. 51. ⁶² Dale T. Irvin, ‘World Christianity: An Introduction’, Journal of World Christianity 1.1 (2008), pp. 1–26; Jonathan Y. Tan and Anh Q. Tran, eds., World Christianity: Perspectives and Insights (Maryknoll, 2016).

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Christianity to be hostage to no one cultural expression and restricted to no one geographical center. More languages and idioms are used in reading the Christian scriptures and in Christian liturgy, devotion, worship, and prayer than in any other religion.⁶³

WOMEN AND MISSION As indigenous Christianity attends to experiences of Christianity among the under-represented and marginalized in the cultures of the global South, the experiences and participation of women come into focus as a crucial aspect of Christian mission in the twentieth century. Dana Robert articulates the complex web of barriers women faced as Christian missionaries.⁶⁴ Christian mission has served both as a platform for participation and empowerment of women across cultures and countries. If women from the erstwhile mission countries had obstacles (be they theological or pragmatic in nature) in serving as mission agents, native women in the erstwhile mission fields experienced both empowerment as well as limitations when moving among converted communities.⁶⁵ The twentieth century saw women’s aspirations come to fruition even in Christian mission. Some of the milestones pertaining to women in mission in the twentieth century are represented by the large numbers of women missionaries; the organization of women’s mission societies; involvement in theological education; and the numbers who were ordained denominationally. The emergence of a robust feminist theology in all its diversity is evident in the platform women have forged in articulating the need for empowerment. Women’s mission societies (Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and others) were formed and supported women missionaries engaged in different parts of the world in education, medical, and Zenana mission, and in the training of bible women.⁶⁶ Such organizations have continued to be influential among the NGO ‘third sector’ in arguing for women’s rights around the world. ⁶³ Sanneh, ‘Introduction: The Changing Face of Christianity’, in Sanneh and Carpenter, eds., The Changing Face of Christianity, p. 5. ⁶⁴ Dana Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Macon, 1996); see also Dana L. Robert, ed., Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, 2002). Women and their converted status also become sites of contest and discourse in the Christianizing process, as brilliantly presented by Eliza Kent in her Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (New York, 2004). ⁶⁵ Christine Lienemann-Perrin, Atola Longkumer, and Afrie Songco Joye, eds., Putting Names with Faces: Women’s Impact in Mission History (Nashville, 2012). ⁶⁶ Patricia Hill, The World Their Household: The American Women’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor, 1985).

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In the late nineteenth century, Baptist missionaries from America introduced modern education along with Christianity to the indigenous Naga of the Indo-Myanmar region. Right from the beginning of mission work, Naga women were both educated and employed in modern professions such as nursing and primary school teaching, and also as Bible women. Women converts were sent by the Baptist missionaries to neighbouring villages as evangelists and teachers. Narola Imchen and Aphuno Chase Roy, the first female ‘Doctor of Theology’ graduates among the Nagas, have presented persuasive arguments, based on historical records, of active women’s participation and involvement in the evangelization of neighbouring villages and the mission schools.⁶⁷ Maina Chawla Singh demonstrates that missionary women did not constitute a homogeneous group, because ‘as early beneficiaries of the social transformation that gave North American women access to higher education, most were committed to female education’.⁶⁸ This commitment was most vividly carried out by women missionaries like Clara Swain (1856–1910), Isabella Thoburn (1840–1901), Anna Kugler (1856–1930), and Ida Scudder (1870–1960), who spent the most productive years of their lives in the lands of their adoption.⁶⁹ Women and mission share a complex relationship: while Christian mission was instrumental in empowering women, missions also replicated the gender roles prevalent in the sending boards and countries. In other words, mission empowered women only within the parameters set by a Christianity that was male-centric. Davies and Conway aptly sum up the general trend among sending agencies in the following way: At the beginning of the [twentieth] century, the Church was largely dominated by male leadership, although a large percentage (often the majority) of which church members were women. Ordained ministry was almost universally confined to men. There were very few female academic theologians teaching in the universities . . . by the end of the century many churches had welcomed women into ministry including, in some cases episcopal ministry. Women have been prominent in theology, both in writing and teaching, and have offered perspectives and approaches that have been unique to women. Denominational and ecumenical organizations have been increasingly conscious of the need to ensure equal participation of women and men in the life, worship and mission of the churches, as well as in their decision making bodies. In many contexts, theological and liturgical language has been adapted and changed in order to be more inclusive.⁷⁰

⁶⁷ Narola Imchen, Women in Church and Society: The Story of Ao Naga Women (Jorhat, 2001); Aphuno Chase Roy, American Baptist Women Missionaries in Northeast India 1836–1950 (Guwahati, 2011). ⁶⁸ Maina Chawla Singh, Gender, Religion, and the ‘Heathen Lands’: American Missionary Women in South Asia, 1860–1940s (New York, 2000), p. 10. ⁶⁹ Singh, Gender, Religion, p. 11. ⁷⁰ Noel Davies and Martin Conway, World Christianity in the 20th Century (London, 2008), p. 254.

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This shift influenced indigenizing settings at different rates, depending on resistance to change among sending agencies, and articulation of gender roles in the culture of indigenous churches. As Julie Ma notes: ‘The foremost challenge for women is found in the establishment of their identity in a given social setting. Cultural practices are hard to die, and how women are viewed and treated in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America still remains a formidable challenge.’⁷¹ Ma points to Susan Tang and Teo Kwee Keng in Malaysia, whose work of decades has left a large legacy of converts, churchplants, and trained successors. In Africa, Mercy Amba Oduyoye has become a leader among women academics concerned with restructuring gendered approaches to theology, participating in such forums as the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians.⁷² Such case studies could be multiplied largely around the Majority World. While enormous progress has been achieved in the participation of women in Christianity across a spectrum of traditions, the challenge for unrestrained empowerment and participation of women is ongoing, and indeed (given the prominent role played by women) may be thought of as a significant driver of ‘(d)issent’ in the global South.

PENTECOSTAL CHRISTIANITY IN T H E TW E N T I E TH C E NTU RY One of the most significant developments in Christianity in the twentieth century is the phenomenon of Pentecostalism, which has left few regions ‘untouched’.⁷³ With its origins tracing to the eighteenth-century evangelical awakenings in Europe and North America, Pentecostal Christianity has also been one of the most active evangelizing mission activities in the twentieth century, in a way the vertex of the Protestant dissenting traditions. Over the twentieth century, Pentecostal Christianity became in many regions almost mainline, in some countries forming a majority of enrolled Christian members. The defining characteristic of Pentecostal Christianity is the centrality of the Holy Spirit on both a personal experiential level and in a collective expression of Christianity.

⁷¹ Julie Ma, ‘The Role of Christian Women in the Global South’, Transformation 31.3 (2014), p. 194. ⁷² Rachel Nya Gondwe Fiedler and Johannes W. Hofmeyr, ‘The Conception of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians: Is it African or Western?’, Acta Theologica 31.1 (June 2011), pp. 39–57. ⁷³ Davies and Conway, World Christianity, p. 72; Karla Poewe, ed., Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture (Columbia, 1994); Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge, 2004).

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Although there were stirrings akin to the Pentecostal Christianity that emerged in religious movements in Europe (such as German Pietism, and evangelical awakenings such as the Reveil, that emphasized personal salvation), the ‘iconic’ origins of Pentecostal Christianity in the twentieth century arguably lie on the Western fringe of the United States. William J. Seymour, a black preacher, is a central figure in the history of Pentecostal Christianity. As Andy Lord notes (in Chapter 7 in this volume), Seymour ministered to a mixed-race congregation on Azusa Street, Los Angeles, which from 1906, ‘began to experience the Holy Spirit and to display spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues, healing and ecstatic worship’.⁷⁴ The ecstatic experience of the group ministered by Seymour was manifesting what Seymour himself had observed and was influenced by preachers like Charles Fox Parham. Grant Wacker lists four distinct characteristics of American Pentecostal Christianity, which have also been defining features in its global manifestation: salvation through faith in Jesus Christ; Holy Ghost Baptism; life transforming experience after conversion; and a missional call to witness and service.⁷⁵ In his analysis of American Pentecostalism, Wacker explains that the persistence of the movement rests on ‘its ability to hold two seemingly incompatible impulses in productive tensions’—the primitive and the pragmatic.⁷⁶ The inherent longing (bordering on mysticism) to touch God makes up the primitive aspect, while the willingness to accommodate the limitations of daily life through the working of the Holy Spirit makes up the pragmatic impulse. The phenomenon of Pentecostalism and its success in impacting communities across a broad range of socio-economic and regional categories continues to intrigue and engage both academic and global Christianity. Pentecostal Christianity has also posed a challenge to historic Churches, often resulting in mutual derision. In the late twentieth century, however, efforts for bilateral dialogues emerged between Pentecostals and churches associated with the ecumenical movement.⁷⁷ Recent developments in Christianity point to mutual understanding and transformation leading to collaboration in major global Christian events, such as the centenary celebration of the World Mission Conference Edinburgh 2010, and the preparation of the new mission document of the World Council of Churches. From a Christian mission perspective, Pentecostalism has brought a renewed appreciation of the role of the Holy Spirit in renewing Churches and it has also enabled Christian mission to respond to the multiple challenges of the modern world. And there with the formation of the Global Christian Forum, which

⁷⁴ Davies and Conway, World Christianity, p. 75. ⁷⁵ Wacker, Heaven Below, p. 10. ⁷⁶ Wacker, Heaven Below, p. 10. ⁷⁷ Cited in Davies and Conway, World Christianity, fn. 43, p. 90; H. Hunter, ‘Two Movements of the Holy Spirit in the 20th Century? A Closer Look at Global Pentecostalism and Ecumenism?’, www.epcra.ch/1999-hamburg?file=files/documents/hunter_1999.pdf, accessed March 2017.

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brings the many strands of church traditions into fellowship, Christianity may indeed be moving towards wider fellowship not just in a range of diverse demographics but even ecclesiastical common witness.⁷⁸

MISSION, EVAN GELISM, AND TRANSLATION CONTINUE Dissenting Christianity is today a world religion with adherents in all parts of the globe. The adherents are composed of diverse cultures and languages, spread across a wide spectrum of socio-economic contexts and political persuasions. Despite frequent criticism—not least the entanglement of Christian mission with imperial powers—there is no doubt that the modern missionary movement given impetus by a Protestant dissenting tradition from the West initiated colossal and definitive transformations in both the West⁷⁹ and in the Majority World. The twentieth century witnessed two dramatic phenomena for Christians, one the decline in the traditional heartland and the other a significant growth in the presumed periphery of Western Christendom. Countries like Nigeria, Brazil, China, South Korea, the Philippines, and India have Christians of every tradition and are making significant contributions to mission and evangelism.⁸⁰ To look at the number of adherents and the measure of global participation will be misleading, however, if they are not understood in juxtaposition to the challenges of migration, globalization, the rise of right-wing religio-nationalism, growing poverty amidst growing wealth, and environmental degradation. These issues remain divisive to the Church both regionally and internationally.⁸¹ The slogan of the Methodist twentiethcentury mission statesman, John R. Mott—‘the evangelisation of the world in this generation’—continues to resonate today, albeit within an enlarged meaning of the term ‘evangelization’. Rather than representing a narrow vision of securing converts to the Christian religion, evangelization has moved towards

⁷⁸ Davis and Conway, World Christianity, p. 87; ‘Edinburgh 2010 Common Call’, in Kirsteen Kim and Andrew Anderson, eds., Edinburgh 2010: Mission Today and Tomorrow (Oxford, 2011), p. 2. ⁷⁹ See David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton, 2017). ⁸⁰ Oseias da Silva, ‘Reverse Mission in the Western Context’, Holiness: The Journal of Wesley House Cambridge 1.2 (2014), pp. 231–44. ⁸¹ C. Rene Padilla, ‘Globalisation and Christian Mission’, Journal of Latin American Theology 9.2 (2014), pp. 17–41; Jooseop Keum, ‘Beyond Dichotomy: Towards a Convergence between the Ecumenical and Evangelical Understanding of Mission in Changing Landscapes’, in Margunn Serigstad Dahle, Lars Dahle, and Knud Jørgensen, eds., The Lausanne Movement: A Range of Perspectives (Oxford, 2014), pp. 383–98.

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encompassing a holistic flourishing of the whole endeavour.⁸² A Christian mission that transforms cultures and engenders holistic relationships within creation is undergirded by a ‘prophetic dialogue’⁸³ that incorporates wisdom of the cultures with the evangelion that inspired the thousands to participate in the modern missionary movement which in turn made Christianity into a world religion. Christianity proclaims a new way of life reconciled with God and one’s neighbour, as demonstrated in the life and work of Jesus Christ. This new way of life is characterized by an enlarged table fellowship, a universalizing metaphor and practice which removes boundaries in ways meaningful both for the first followers, and which continues to transform individuals and communities who espouse this new way of life.⁸⁴ Christianity makes meaning for its adherents precisely because of its translatability across diverse cultures, an incarnationality through which God reaches out to humanity. Andrew F. Walls, the doyen of mission histories and encounters, reading the signs of the times, proposes that the future beckons towards an immense ‘theological creativity’ as Christianity takes root beyond the West and intermingles with diverse cultures.⁸⁵ Christianity is about crossing borders, translation, and an almost impervious desire for the good life of all creation. In the words of Kim and Anderson, Recalling Christ, the host at the banquet, and committed to that unity for which he lived and prayed, we are called to ongoing co-operation, to deal with controversial issues and to work towards a common vision. We are challenged to welcome one another in our diversity, affirm our membership through baptism in the One Body of Christ, and recognise our need for mutuality, partnership, collaboration and networking in mission, so that the world might believe.⁸⁶

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY da Silva, Oseias, ‘Reverse Mission in the Western Context’, Holiness: The Journal of Wesley House Cambridge 1.2 (2014), 231–44. Dahle, Margunn S., Lars Dahle, and Knud Jørgensen, eds., The Lausanne Movement: A Range of Perspectives (Oxford, 2014).

⁸² Keum, ‘Together Towards Life’; ‘Lausanne Cape Town Commitment’; for the Evangelii Gaudium, see http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papafrancesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html, accessed March 2017. ⁸³ Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder, Prophetic Dialogue: Reflections on Christian Mission Today (Maryknoll, 2011). ⁸⁴ James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, 2003), p. 605. ⁸⁵ Andrew F. Walls, ‘Christianity Across Twenty Centuries’, in Johnson and Ross, eds., Atlas of Global Christianity, pp. 48–9. ⁸⁶ ‘Edinburgh 2010 Common Call’, in Kim and Anderson, eds., Edinburgh 2010: Mission Today and Tomorrow, p. 2.

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Davies, Noel and Martin, Conway, World Christianity in the 20th Century (London, 2008). Franke, Marcus, War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas (London, 2009). Frykenberg, Robert Eric, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present (New York, 2008). Imchen, Narola, Women in Church and Society: The Story of Ao Naga Women (Jorhat, 2001). Johnson, Todd M. and Kenneth R. Ross, eds., Atlas of Global Christianity 1910–2010 (Edinburgh, 2009). Kent, Eliza, Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (New York, 2004). Kerr, David A. and Kenneth R. Ross, eds., Edinburgh 2010: Mission Then and Now (Oxford, 2009). Koschorke, Klaus, Adrian Hermann, E. Phuti Mogase, and Ciprian Burlacioiu, eds., Discourses of Indigenous-Christian Elites in Colonial Societies in Asia and Africa around 1900: A Documentary Sourcebook from Selected Journals (Wiesbaden, 2016). Kwan, Simon Shui-Man, Postcolonial Resistance and Asian Theology (London, 2013). Lienemann-Perrin, Christine, Atola Longkumer, and Afrie Songco Joye, eds., Putting Names with Faces: Women’s Impact in Mission History (Nashville, 2012). Longchar, Wati, Returning to Mother Earth: Theology, Christian Witness and Theological Education: An Indigenous Perspective (Tainen and Kolkota, 2012). Longgan, William K. and Tim Meadowcroft, eds., Living in the Family of Jesus: Critical Contextualisation in Melanesia and Beyond (Auckland, 2016). Lugwig, Frieder and Afe Adogame, eds., European Traditions in the Study of Religion in Africa (Wiesbaden, 2004). Nussbaum, Martha, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future (Cambridge and London, 2007). Oddie, Geoffrey, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793–1900 (New Delhi, 2006). Reese, Robert, ‘John Gatu and the Moratorium on Missionaries’, Missiology: An International Review 42.3 (2014), pp. 245–56. Robert, Dana L., Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (Malden, 2009). Robert, Dana L., ed., Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, 2002). Rollins, Peter, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church (London, 2006). Roy, Aphuno Chase, American Baptist Women Missionaries in Northeast India 1836–1950 (Guwahati, 2011). Sexton, Jason S. and Paul Weston, eds., The End of Theology: Shaping Theology for the Sake of Mission (Minneapolis, 2016). Singh, Maina Chawla, Gender, Religion, and the ‘Heathen Lands’: American Missionary Women in South Asia, 1860–1940s (New York, 2000). Stanley, Brian, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, 1990).

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Sugirtharajah, Sharada, Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective (London, 2003). Tan, Jonathan Y. and Anh Q. Tran, eds., World Christianity: Perspectives and Insights (Maryknoll, 2016). Thong, Tezenlo, Colonization, Proselytization, and Identity: The Nagas and Westernization in Northeast India (London, 2016). Wickeri, Philip L., Reconstructing Christianity in China: K.H. Ting and the Chinese Church (Maryknoll, 2008).

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14 From Reverse to Inverse to Omni-Nodal Dissenting Protestant Mission Mark P. Hutchinson

I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. (Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1867)

In 1928, North China was boiling—again. It had long been the scene of imperial adventurism on the part of European powers, and was now (after the Portsmouth Treaty of 1905) under the domination of Japan. The latter’s Kwantung Army maintained its influence by murdering and assassinating in ways barely covered up with its own government in Tokyo. Many Westerners saw the explosion (in June 1928) of a railway car carrying dominant warlord Zhang Zoulin back from Beijing as just another example of Japanese imperialism. Buried in the middle of the turmoil was a little noted event. To celebrate the coronation of Emperor Hirohito, an athletics meet was hosted by the South Manchuria Railway Company in Darien. Among the competitors were members of the French, German, and Japanese Olympic track teams, ‘fresh from [the] Amsterdam’ games. Among the locals, a missionary teacher from the Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College ‘travelled by boat for three days’ to attend the meet, ‘leaving a taxi idling next to the track so that he could catch the return boat’. After the race, he nearly missed that boat, when he had to stand to attention for first the British anthem and then the French: by the time he arrived at the harbour the departing boat was 15 metres away but [he] simply threw over his suitcase and leapt aboard.¹

¹ ‘A Liddell faith goes a long way’, The Scotsman 3 August 2008, http://www.scotsman.com/ sport/a-liddell-faith-goes-a-long-way-1-1435504#ixzz3lkVDlJdO, accessed 15/9/2015.

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The missionary teacher was Eric Liddell, a brilliant athlete who had represented Scotland at rugby, was a first grade cricketer, and set the Olympic record at the 1924 games by running 9.7 seconds over 100 yards.² At Darien, Liddell won the 200 and 400 yard events ‘easily’, and then went back to teaching at TACC and overseeing the London Missionary Society (LMS) base at Siao Chang in south Hebei province. It was, in a sense, a second disappearance of the self which, following Liddell’s tumultuous departure from Edinburgh for China in 1925, maintained the mystique of the Christian sportsman. In a century of media-driven celebrity, he was ironically written into the chronicles of the modern age as one who conquered by turning his back on fame. There was, however, a third disappearance. Liddell seemed to be iconic of the changes which swept across the world through the twentieth century. Caught up in the Manchurian crises which would (after Mukden) contribute to the outbreak of the Second World War, the continual instability provided rich ground for the corruption of Chinese Republicanism, and a new antiJapanese front which provided international covering for the growth of regional communist-nationalism (including in China, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia). The newly dominant USA, having inspired with its Wilsonian rhetoric and its revolutionary example the liberationist sentiments of many of these movements, would spend a good part of the rest of the century fighting the bastard children of its Second World War foreign policy. It was only a few months before the end of that war that Eric Liddell died from a brain tumour in a Japanese camp at Weifang (21 February 1945). Within four years, all foreign missionaries had been expelled from the country.³ Left behind were the thousands of converts, and missionary graves such as that of Eric Liddell, marked by a simple wooden cross with a fading name marked in boot black. It seemed a disappointing end to a century which had been defined at its opening by a proliferation of grand missionary plans. The World Missions Conference in Edinburgh, in 1910, was only one (and not the first) of many examples of this sort of confidence. As Todd Johnson has shown, those whose networks were foundational to the Student Volunteers Movement (D. L. Moody and A. T. Pierson among them) gave rise to publications such as ‘An Appeal to Disciples Everywhere’ (1885).⁴ The innate universalism of the Christian gospel, combined with late imperialism and Western technological progressivism, was heady stuff. As with many such movements, however, it ² Julian Wilson, Complete Surrender: Biography of Eric Liddell, Olympic Gold Medallist and Missionary (Milton Keynes, 2012), p. 98. ³ A. J. Miller, ‘Pioneers in Exile: The China Inland Mission and Missionary Mobility in China and Southeast Asia, 1943–1989’, PhD dissertation, University of Kentucky, 2015, pp. 10ff. ⁴ T. M. Johnson, ‘It Can be Done: The Impact of Modernity and Postmodernity on the Global Mission Plans of Churches and Agencies’, in J. M. Bonk, ed., Between Past and Future: Evangelical Mission Entering the Twenty-First Century (Pasadena, 2003), p. 37.

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depended on a contextually particular (and therefore fragile) convergence of factors, the conditions for which soon departed under the pressure of war, depression, and postcolonialism. The inherent strains between Anglo-American expansionism and those from outside the Anglosphere, became apparent at the Ninth Continental Missions Conference in Bremen (May 1897), when veteran German missiologist Gustav Warneck attacked John Mott’s famous ‘watchword’ (‘The evangelization of the world in this generation’) as ‘mancentred’ and facile. He pointed to the importance of indigenization as opposed to civilization, and the problems of exporting Western culture, a ‘growing and heedless Anglo-American . . . domination’.⁵ This tension, as yet theoretical, would take on flesh as the century progressed. Some estimate of the turbulence involved in dissenting missions may be divined by comparing the concentrations and concerns of participants in two such great ‘global plans’, each at opposite ends of the century. The most obvious marker is the location of the two conferences: ‘The World Missionary Conference 1910, To Consider Missionary Problems in relation to the NonChristian World’ (usually referred to as ‘Edinburgh 1910’) was in Scotland. It was a choice of location which represented the extraordinary (even disproportionate) influence which the Scots had had on world missions during the nineteenth century. More so, it acted as a nice metaphor for the geographical ‘global North Western’ centre for Protestant missions as a whole, and its dependence on rational technique, for which the Scottish Enlightenment had made Edinburgh famous. The 1989 ‘Global Consultation on World Evangelization’ held in Manila, however, represented the shift of centre in world missions. The West, almost a century later, was a much more secular place, and no longer the centre of the ‘Christian countries’ against which the problems of the ‘Non-Christian world’ could be clearly articulated. Singapore (where the Lausanne International office was based) and Manila in 1989, like Edinburgh in 1910, one might suggest, were global mercantile capitals which mediated the flows of new global economies, the one (Singapore) of its capital, the other (Manila) of the largest Christian overseas foreign worker population in the world. Most importantly, however, Singapore/Manila were close to the centres of massive growth in Christianity in the global South, which were relativizing the importance of the old ‘Christendom’. In 1910, Manila or Singapore were places where a ‘field conference’ might be held for a network of missionary practitioners, rather than the missionary administrators based in New York, London, or Berlin. It was across just such a network of localized conferences that revivalist teachers and preachers such as Frederick Brotherton Meyer (who in 1909 travelled from England, to Turkey, to ‘Singapore ⁵ R. Frykenberg and A. Low, Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-cultural Communication Since 1500, with Special Reference to Caste, Conversion, and Colonialism (Grand Rapids, 2003), p. 246.

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and Hongkong, and through China and Japan for missionary conferences’)⁶ and Reuben A. Torrey (in 1902) would travel, strengthening the fundamentalist networks which would, ultimately, fracture the global missionary consensus even then assembling at Edinburgh.⁷ By 1989, by way of contrast, Singapore was the centre of its own indigenized missionary networks, and an essential neutral port close to growth centres in less tractable places, such as China, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. It had been, until construction turmoil wracked the Asian city state, the International Office of the Lausanne movement under the leadership of Thomas Wang. A short distance away, Manila was in the midst of a massive upsurge in charismatic Christianity.⁸ None of this went neatly according to the plans of those who had met at Edinburgh in 1910: the world was no longer a neatly plannable place. The second major observation is that no one saw the Manila conference as the basis for a more embracing, organizational ecumenism. Edinburgh itself was the last unchallenged attempt to leverage missionary comity relationships into a common, visibly organizational, global Protestant Christianity. Through the 1910s and 1920s, as has been more than adequately shown in the historiography both of evangelicalism, and the more recent material on the rise of Pentecostalism, the modernist–fundamentalist debates divided the seed-beds on which Mott and his colleagues had been able to rely (the Convention movement, Protestant mainline denominations, churches, and the universities and Colleges). There would (in the twentieth century at least) be no more Cambridge or St Andrews ‘Sevens’: the tie between national duty, class, and global mission frayed as evangelical/millennial groups opted out of the emerging and liberalizing ecumenical networks formalized through the International Missionary Council, the Life and Work, and Faith and Order conferences. These were not ‘sundered’ in the normal sense implied by Western historiography: Majority World actors continued to connect to both networks, the evangelical version of which (at least until the 1960s) was too weak in any case to appeal in an exclusive manner. Moreover, the problems tackled by the better-equipped Western mainline theological networks would come back to bother the neo-evangelicals in the 1970s, and become definitive in the 2000s. Events, such as the expulsion of Western missionaries from China in 1949, and the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya (1952–7), were signs of a broader insistence on self-determination which Western liberals welcomed but wanted to ‘tutor’, and which Western evangelicals feared, but by which they were ultimately changed.

⁶ The Week 8 January 1909, p. 9. ⁷ The Argus 3 January 1902, p. 5. ⁸ G. Maltese and Sarah Eßel, ‘The Demise of Pentecostalism in the Philippines: Naming and Claiming the Impossible Object and the Politics of Empowerment in Pentecostal Studies’, in A. Yong and V. Synan, eds., Global Renewal Christianity: Spirit Empowered Movements Past, Present and Future, Vol. 4: Asia and Oceania (Lake Mary, 2015), p. 255.

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The general drift of the century was thus away from dissenting missions as the preserve of Western bureaucracies, towards becoming a mechanism of local/global negotiations for advancing communities of cultural and spiritual praxis. In part, as Appadurai, Beyer, and others have noted, national/transnational politics as a language of exchange became increasingly vexed even as cultural and economic exchanges seemed to flow ever more freely. For Appadurai, electronic media (particularly typical of the period from 1920 onwards) create a break with the past by offering ‘new resources and new disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds’, particularly in the unprecedented fields of mass migration, which create ‘a new order of instability in the production of modern subjectivities’.⁹ The old top-down passports—whiteness, tertiary education, the membership of political networks and elites—were thus decreasingly of value, even as grass-roots organizational ability facilitated by cultural innovation and diasporic flows, found ways into the cracks of the emerging social and economic order. This, as Robertson has proposed, was a necessary response to the secularizing and generalizing tendencies of the emerging global order. Religion, for top-down globalizers as for modernizers, was (and indeed remains) constituted as a ‘problem’ to be solved or eradicated. Because religions are identity-focused and localizing, globalization (it was proposed) is impeded by the division of East and West, North and South, along religious and legal/cultural lines. The great world religions, such as Christianity and Islam, contributed to globalization because of their inherent universalism, missionary zeal, and tendency to ‘hitch a ride’ with expansive imperialisms. That time, however, was over by the end of the Second World War, and the emergence of polarizing superpowers (Robertson suggests) eventually meant increasing individualism and abstraction in publicly acceptable cultures, increasing antagonism between religious particularism and globalizing ‘tolerance’, and the tendency of the emerging world system to erase religious difference.¹⁰ The post-1950s world was thus a place where dissenting missions struggled to find effective ways of working. This sense of a crisis of form can be found everywhere in the language of organized Dissenting missions, both domestic and international. As Samuel Rowen noted to the National Association of Evangelicals’ Evangelical Committee on Latin America, reformed Dissenters in particular (with their emphasis on the fallenness of human culture) struggled

⁹ Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (New Delhi, 1996), p. 3. Beyer notes that religions are similar to group cultures, but are also societal subsystems, indeed ‘a differentiated instrumental subsystem of modern global society’: Peter Beyer, Religion and Globalization (Thousand Oaks, 1994), p. 67. ¹⁰ Roland Robertson, ‘Global Connectivity and Global Consciousness’, American Behavioral Scientist 55.10 (2011), p. 1341; Malcolm Waters, Globalization (Hove and New York, 2001), p. 162.

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to ‘come to grips with the problems of culture and change’.¹¹ Peter Wagner, at Fuller Theological Seminary, protested that the tendency of the churches to try and control their indigenizing missions was producing an arteriosclerotic ‘Babylonian Captivity’ of the Christian mission around the world, marked by falling numbers of full-time missionaries and decreasing effectiveness.¹² On several occasions, missionaries (such as those working in India with the Baptist General Conference in 1967 and 1973) were expelled for ‘antinational’ activities.¹³ In other places, such as in Taiwan, the modernization of nation states had increasingly rendered social mission approaches decreasingly effective. The Taiwan Baptist Convention in the same period reported ‘declining growth rates in the congregations and declining numbers of students in the seminary’.¹⁴ Missionary executives drew up organizational flow charts plotting the pathway to indigenization, and called for missions to be able to explain to their missionaries ‘why they are where they are, and what they should be doing there’.¹⁵ Majority World leaders pointed to the moribund nature of the fruit of Edinburgh 1910: ‘hemoplegic . . . its significance practically extinct’ declared David Cho, in calling for innovation.¹⁶ By 1966, the traditions which dominated missionary sending at the end of the nineteenth century were sending less than 20 per cent of all North American missionaries. Thirty years later (1996) that number had dropped to less than 5 per cent.¹⁷ The same leaders were encouraged, however, by a rapid expansion of ‘the newly growing Third World mission agencies’.¹⁸ At the All Asia Mission Consultation in Seoul, 1973, Chandu Ray (the Anglican Bishop of Karachi) pointed to the ‘fourth world’ as the logical duty not of the West, but of the Asian denominations themselves. ‘This vision will be fulfilled only as Asians develop their own kinds of missionaries and evangelists who focus on The Fourth World [sic].’¹⁹ Ray’s challenge calls us to remember that theorists such as Robertson, Giddens framed their thought in the long aftermath of the Second World

¹¹ Samuel A. Rowen, ‘The Church and the Indigenous Peoples of Latin America’, 1974.02.11ii.01 ECLA 1974, EFMA Papers, CN 165, Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton, USA. ¹² Peter Wagner, The Babylonian Captivity of the Christian Mission (Pasadena, 1973). ¹³ ‘Curbs on visas for foreign missionaries’, 25 August 1967, EFMA Papers, CN 165, Billy Graham Center Archives. ¹⁴ Murray A. Rubinstein, The Protestant Community on Modern Taiwan: Mission, Seminary, and Church (Armonk, 1991), p. 67. ¹⁵ Wilfred A. Bellamy, ‘Who are you? What are you for?’, EFMA Mission Executives Conference, 30 September 1974, EFMA Papers, CN 165, Billy Graham Center Archives. ¹⁶ David Cho, ‘Innovation of Missions Structures’, EFMA Mission Executives Conference, 30 September 1974, EFMA Papers, CN 165, Billy Graham Center Archives. ¹⁷ Rodney Stark, One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton, 2003), p. 101. ¹⁸ Cho, ‘Innovation of Missions Structures’. ¹⁹ Church Growth Bulletin, 9.6 (July 1973), p. 343.

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and Cold Wars.²⁰ The ‘religion’ they majored in was guided by Max Weber’s understandings of European secularization, by William James’ experimental positivism. Religious identity, however, is adaptable, given to translation, re-indigenization, to finding places in the substructures of global systems. Even in those countries which countered modernization by closing their cultures to change, eventually found the lure of better living standards difficult to oppose. The result was that—even in places such as Saudi Arabia or Iran or China—Christianity leached in through the movement of guest workers or technical experts. In Iran, opposition to Islamic theocracy, for instance, has taken many forms, from rising youth drug and alcohol abuse, to conversion to Christianity (and Baha’ism).²¹ In China, likewise, the withdrawal of missionaries forced a rapid indigenization of the faith, often without help from the standard publishing, training, and assistance mechanisms seen elsewhere. By 2014, there were perhaps 29 million members of China’s official Christian churches, and three to five times as many again (for perhaps a combined total of 100 million) in house church networks.²² Countries like Taiwan, Singapore, and Indonesia experienced remarkable grass roots-driven revivals, charismatic flows which later merged with those happening in the youth cultures and mainstream churches of the Minority World. A reflex impact of stronger, more homogeneous and controlled public cultures, it seems, is that private spiritual disciplines of more various types become all the more desirable. Dissenting Christianity, in particular, learned to move from its imperial to a ‘radical’ disenfranchised ‘universal’ mode, revalorizing (as Hartch notes of the development of Totonac Christianity in Mexico) ‘formerly despised cultures’.²³ These new Majority World Christians have spilled out into other communities within their own countries, and beyond their own countries, to establish a new type of Christian missionary activity. No longer was Christianity moving from ‘the West to the rest’, but increasingly along autonomous pathways. Much of the discussion as to the rise of this form of autochthonous mission has been referred to as ‘reverse mission’, implying a bipolar pathway along which some form of imperial faith had come, but which was now ‘reversed’ by the former recipients seeking to re-evangelize the ‘metropolis’. ²⁰ For all his critique of Wallerstein, Anderson, and others who, from a Marxist perspective, treat religion as a mere reflex of capitalism and so undermine culture, as Garrett notes, Robertson also misunderstands ‘religion’ because of that term’s procrustean qualities. William R. Garrett, ‘Thinking Religion in the Global Circumstance: A Critique of Roland Robertson’s Globalization Theory’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 31.3 (September 1992), p. 300. ²¹ Misagh Parsa, Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed (Cambridge and London, 2016), pp. 19–21. ²² Fenggang Yang, Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule (New York and Oxford, 2011); Rodney Stark and Xiuhua Wan, A Star in the East: The Rise of Christianity in China (New York, 2015). ²³ Todd Hartch, The Rebirth of Latin American Christianity (New York and Oxford, 2014), p. 170.

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It is true that this sort of language is common among African and Latin American missionaries to Europe and the USA.²⁴ But even this sort of relationship has many inflections. Byrnes (through a Catholic lens) uses the term inventively as he opens his book with ‘three cases [in which] members of closeknit religious communities expressed solidarity with their religious brothers and sisters who live outside the United States, and they engaged in political mobilization and political activism for the purpose of changing US foreign policies that were antithetical to the interests of those brothers and sisters.’²⁵ It is a reminder that, in a globalizing world, white people too are now diasporic. Forgotten among the interest scholars have with, say, African churches seeking to re-evangelize Europe,²⁶ are the tens of thousands of young, white Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans working for global justice, praying in prayer groups which later grow into megachurches in London, or planting churches in the USA. These too are technically forms of ‘reverse mission’, but they are forgotten in the tendency to ‘write-out’ white actors from contemporary history, and in ‘moral action’ pre-commitments of the academy. There are reasons, however, to suggest that the term itself is problematic. ‘Reverse Mission’ carries a lingering imperialism not just out of the history of missions, but in the perspectives of the scholars who use the term ‘reverse mission’. The discourse seems largely shaped by questions about the secularism of, and the future of religion in the West, rather than the forces driving the rise of new missionary forms. As Krause notes, the rush to transnational forms of scholarship in the 2000s could not erase a base dislike among many Western scholars of Christianity, however it may be practised. As a consequence, ‘studies on religious networks tend to reproduce bounded units of analysis, and cosmopolitan approaches often remain rather normative, envisioning an ideal outcome of cosmopolitan practices’.²⁷ Then there are the tribal and geographical foci, reinforced by the ‘problems’ which make one or another choice of topic ‘relevant’ (and so advantageous) in the context of a particular scholar. British scholars, for example, are traditionally focused on Africa (where reverse mission seems an adequate framework because scholars based at the core of former empire are observing their own setting). But Korean missionaries, for example, don’t just go back to the former sending countries—the USA is a strong recipient of Korean trained pastors and church ²⁴ See Harvey C. Kwiyani, Sent Forth: African Missionary Work in the West (Maryknoll, 2014); Afe Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora: New Currents and Emerging Trends in World Christianity (Edinburgh, 2013). ²⁵ T. A. Byrnes, Reverse Mission: Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of US Foreign Policy (Washington, 2011), p. 2. ²⁶ See Richard Burgess, ‘Bringing Back the Gospel: Reverse Mission among Nigerian Pentecostals in Britain’, Journal of Religion in Europe 4.3 (2011), pp. 429–49. ²⁷ Kristine Krause, ‘Cosmopolitan Charismatics? Transnational Ways of Belonging and Cosmopolitan Moments in the Religious Practice of New Mission Churches’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 34.3 (March 2011), p. 420.

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planters, but one can also find, for example, Yoido’s ‘Full Gospel’ churches in New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific, and Korean Presbyterian missionaries in the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and (briefly, in a passing cause célèbre of the 2000s) in Afghanistan.²⁸ Chinese missionaries with the People’s Republic of China, blocked from following the expansion of the Chinese economy by state involvement, have likewise developed an alternative ideology of mission which follows not the pathways established by the Western colonialists of the nineteenth century, but the Silk Road(s) of millennia past. The ‘Back to Jerusalem’ movement is only one (albeit a particularly powerful one) of these forms, built over historical and biblical reconceptualizations of global flows.²⁹ It has not escaped notice that Iran, and the traditional heartlands of now beleaguered Middle Eastern Christianity, sit across variants of the Silk Road, with consequences for the encounter between rising China and revanchist Islamism. Finally, the millions of mobile global citizens who now form a fluid workforce between the great financial centres of the world—many of them with multiple passports, languages, intercultural families and more— are not simply retracing the footsteps of colonizers. They send their children to school in Spain, they work in Dubai, and they own property in Sydney. These flows, as Appadurai hints, indicate that the Christian mission of the twenty-first century is no longer conceivable only in terms of ‘reverse mission’. Nor is it merely (as secular scholars would have it) religious opposition to modernization and globalization (as if these were purely conceivable in de-religionized terms). The reaction against globalization by, for instance, Hindu nationalists, after all, is partly due to the suspicion that Christianity is a hidden ‘Easter egg’ (or, as Briggs notes with interest from a feminist perspective, the ‘dowry’)³⁰ in the globalization matrix. Increasingly, therefore, Christian missionization needs to be thought of in both its formal and its informal, its organizational and its grass-roots forms, emerging out of localities as well as being informed by broader cultural, economic, and political flows. This is particularly the case for the ‘free church’ traditions, where ecclesiology cooperates with spirit movements to form direct connections with local communities elsewhere in the world. Such connections are facilitated by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), tax-deductibility for churches in large areas of the West, and the commitment at the state level for ‘international aid’. An unassuming local church in Victoria, Australia, ²⁸ Jennifer Veale, ‘Korean Missionaries Under Fire’, Time Magazine 27 July 2007, http:// content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1647646,00.html, accessed 12.10.2017. ²⁹ Paul Hattaway, Brother Yun, Peter Xu Yongze, and Enoch Wang, Back to Jerusalem: Three Chinese House Church Leaders Share their Vision to Complete the Great Commission (Downers Grove, 2003). ³⁰ Sheila Briggs, ‘Globalization, Transnational Feminisms, and the Future of Biblical Critique’, in Kathleen O. Wicker, Althea S. Miller, and M. W. Dube Shomanah, eds., Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives (New York, 2005), p. 79.

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finds itself central to the health system of an Eastern European nation, because they concentrated on primary healthcare. Another in England trains Christian pastors in war-torn Syria. An African migrant, himself a former refugee, organizes food aid in New York for victims of mud-slides in Sierra Leone.³¹ These are not ‘reverse mission’ activities per se, but are certainly missional and organized from point to point often without any mediating institutions. What is the extent of this sort of informal Christian missionary activity? In 2011, Johnson proposed a growth (between 2000 and 2010) of some 90,000 missionaries in a total Christian missionary force of about 300,000. Of that, European contributions were declining, North American and Korean contributions were slowing, and the largest growth was to be found from Chinese (more than 20,000) and Indian (42,000) sources.³² The larger proportion of North American growth was among short-term missions, while Indian missionaries were intensely involved in cross-cultural ministry in highly plural India itself. Indigenous church planting movements in the two most populous countries on earth—India and China—has produced some remarkable stories of expansion, with movements of thousands of churches and millions of members. The ‘Asian exceptionalism’ of South Korea, however, has slowed— in part because of the general slowing of growth among the churches, in part because of cultural insensitivity, and in part because of the overwhelming emphasis in Korean missions (which now fields c.9,000 missionaries, about half of which are in Asia) for the tougher, first contact, types of missions which sometimes have deleterious effects on the participants.³³ Nevertheless, their impact on China in particular has been significant, in particular through largescale investment in Jilin, over the border from North Korea (where they have attempted to avoid regional power politics, not always successfully, by keeping a low profile),³⁴ and in establishing training and support institutions, particularly underground seminaries, for the house church movement in Beijing.³⁵

MISSIONAL E XPERIENTIALISM The century-long denominational missions crisis was driven by such concerns as the relative costs of funding Western as opposed to non-Western, non-formal ³¹ These are all real-life cases, but for obvious reasons are anonymized here. ³² Patrick J. St G. Johnstone, The Future of the Global Church: History, Trends and Possibilities (Downers Grove, 2011), p. 228. ³³ William David Taylor, ‘Missionary Attrition in Korea’, in his Too Valuable to Lose: Exploring the Causes and Cures of Missionary Attrition (Pasadena, 1997), p. 133. ³⁴ Bryan Harris, ‘China expels dozens of South Korean missionaries’, Financial Times 11 February 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/4b0c7178-ef46-11e6-930f-061b01e23655. ³⁵ Jie Kang, House Church Christianity in China: From Rural Preachers to City Pastors (Basingstoke and New York, 2016), p. 117.

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missionaries, and fears about Western cultural ‘dumping’ on increasingly independent national churches. Denominations and their agencies, per se, are fundamentally dependent on church-based affiliations, and so have weakened relative to the rising strength of independent megachurches and informal (less ‘church-branded’) networks. They are also ‘pragmatic’ organizations, and so open to arguments about economic efficiency. This was the case in the establishment of national evangelical missions federations in the post-World War Two period,³⁶ and would again be a key element in determining missions strategy through the 1960s. At the same time, rising individualism, global mobility associated with work and tourism, experientialism and the ability (through social media, etc.) to become directly aware of what is happening elsewhere, has fuelled the rise of personal and small group short-term missions (STMs). From 1996 to 2005, one estimate was that this sort of activity was increasing by 27 per cent per year in North America, in part as a form of antisecularist youth mobilization riding (ironically) on the public conscientization of Western youth to ‘experience for themselves’, or ‘think locally, act globally’. They were part of a broader confidence in global citizenship, a postmillennial pressing out into the world by JFK’s Peace Corps generation to build relationships, and so hopefully peace and prosperity. Unlike evangelicals of the 1920s (where the international was a zone of threat) and the 1950s (where it was a necessary part of the broader campaign against totalitarianism and ‘evil’), after the youth revivals of the 1960s, global experientialism came to be seen as ‘good’. By 2006, up to 1.6 million North Americans alone were participating in STMs, often through local churches, schools, tour agencies, NGOs, and like voluntarist networks.³⁷ This is without counting the parallel rise of this activity among charismatic churches in the UK and the former British Commonwealth/Empire. The youth generation were ‘singing the [world] electric’, making relationships which placed demands upon them, a demand (perhaps not quite in Whitman’s sense) to ‘discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul’.³⁸ Whitman’s metaphor is particularly apt in the convergence of tourism and the cult of the body which has been seen in the rise of international sporting events.³⁹ Major sporting or cultural events, such as the Olympics, mobilize vast crowds of spectators and participants into and out of what are often otherwise controlled spaces, so opening up opportunities for evangelism. At the Beijing ³⁶ Mark Hutchinson, ‘Developing Post-War Evangelical “Statecraft”: Clyde W. Taylor and the Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies, 1942–1955’. Trajectories: Boundaries and Diversity in Evangelicalism Symposium, 5–6 September 2017, Australian College of Theology, Sydney, Australia. ³⁷ Scott Moreau, ‘Short Term Missions in the Context of Missions’, in Robert J. Priest, ed., Effective Engagement in Short Term Missions: Doing it Right (Pasadena, 2008). ³⁸ Whitman, Leaves of Grass. ³⁹ John Horne and Gerry Whannel, Understanding the Olympics (London and New York, 2016), p. 143.

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Olympics, this became an item of broader press interest, as leaders such as Franklin Graham used the occasion both to point to state restrictions and to what were considered impulsive and thoughtless actions on the part of external bodies.⁴⁰ The careless talk of missionaries threatening to flout Chinese law during the games led to a general expulsion of Christian foreigners in a campaign entitled Typhoon No. 5.⁴¹ The popularity of sports (such as soccer) also evens out the field of action for citizens of the Majority World. The holding of the World Cup in Brazil in 2014 released a wave of evangelism by Brazilian churches and parachurch agencies.⁴² It will no doubt do the same when controlled countries such as Russia and Qatar (where penalties for proselytism would, in any Western country, be seen as brutal) entertain such events as a mechanism for building their global brand in the postUSSR world. None of this was ‘reverse mission’ but rather the result of the globalization of culture and the creation of alternative modes of influence which are not purely limited to the West. Naturally (and of some concern to both missions leaders and to those in receiving countries), STMs are heavily dependent on disposable income, or other facilitating forms of social capital (diplomatic status, for example, or qualification with an advanced degree). As such, they are dominated by First-World travellers, who have been accused of ‘spiritual tourism’, or of giving rise to undesirable trends in the transfer of international funds to doubtful local industries (such as the ‘orphanage’ industry in some countries in South East Asia).⁴³ One Australian-based inquiry discovered that half the universities in the country and 15 per cent of all schools promoted this sort of activity as service learning. In the USA, international secondary student numbers more than tripled from 2004 to 2016, to over 80,000 per year, to which needs to be added the nearly 400,000 foreign students a year choosing to study at US universities. Clearly, the networks and scope available for dissenting STMs to expand is considerable, in ways manufactured for them by the global consensus that transnational experience is a ‘good thing’.⁴⁴ ⁴⁰ Monroe Price, ‘Evangelism and the Olympics’, Huffington Post 12 June 2008, https://www. huffingtonpost.com/monroe-price/evangelism-and-the-olympi_b_105185.html, accessed 9.4.2018. ⁴¹ Patrick Fung, ‘China and Beyond: Issues, Trends and Opportunities’, in Kang San Tan, Jonathan Ingleby, Simon Cozens, et al., eds., Understanding Asian Mission Movements: Proceedings of the Asian Mission Consultations held at Redcliffe College, Gloucester, 2008–2010 (Gloucester, 2011). ⁴² S. Zylstra, ‘Brazilian Evangelists See World Cup Opportunity’, Christianity Today 9 July 2014, http://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2014/july/brazilian-evangelists-hit-up-world-cupsoccer.html. ⁴³ L. Murdoch, ‘Overseas orphanages under scrutiny as Australians told to withdraw support’, Sydney Morning Herald 16 August 2017, https://www.smh.com.au/world/overseas-orphanagesunder-scrutiny-as-australians-told-to-withdraw-support-20170816-gxxkqr.html. ⁴⁴ ‘Globally Mobile Youth: Trends in International Secondary Students in the United States, 2013–2016’, Institute of International Education 2017; another IIE report suggested that by 2011 over 100,000 American students were studying abroad in approximately 5,000 different venues.

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This sort of impulse ‘from everywhere to everywhere’ has been captured by mission agencies of a new type. In its first fifty years, Youth With A Mission (YWAM), for example, managed to mobilize, train, and send some four million workers abroad, mostly on short-term assignments. Its founder, Loren Cunningham, focused on innovation and the opportunities available in globalizing settings. The YWAM ‘Discipleship Training Course’, supported by bases spread around the world, was specifically oriented towards capturing and channelling the energy of the Youth Revivals of the 1960s. On the basis of only a few weeks training, young believers were ‘released’ into evangelism which could take them into their region, or around the world. In 1974, Cunningham moved the international headquarters to Hawaii, so as to be closer to the emerging Asian nations. Hawaii became central to the work of people such as Dean Sherman, and had a significant impact on the spread of the Charismatic Movement in the mainstream churches in the Asia-Pacific region. It also supported the central institutions of what became the University of the Nations, Kona, and inventive missions approaches such as medical ‘mercy ships’ which tapped the energies of Christian doctors and professionals and took them to often difficult to reach places. The mantra was to obey Jesus and just ‘Go’, and many thousands of young people did so—most for a short period, before they settled back into jobs or more organized churches and missions, though quite a number stayed with the YWAM cause for decades. Again, big events and sporting ‘festivals’ provided opportunities which young people followed from country to country. The Pacific Games Outreach in Canberra, Australia, for instance, started in November 1977 ‘with a week of vital teaching, fellowship and prayer’, under the title ‘Gideon’s Army’ (an Old Testament reference to a small group of 300 under an anointed leader who put tens of thousands to flight). Tony Fitzgerald, an Australian who was working as YWAM’s Outreach Director in the UK from 1975, formed teams, and ran training opportunities under YWAM founder, Loren Cunningham, and YWAM European Director Don Stephens (who coordinated the first games outreach at the Munich Olympics). In an act of strikingly casual globalism, this outreach was followed with an opportunity for students to join follow-up campaigns in New Zealand, the Philippines, Samoa, New Hebrides, and/or New Guinea.⁴⁵ Over time, YWAM became something of an international circuit of its own, with members moving from base to base in low-cost lifestyles resembling the mendicant orders of the early Middle Ages. And like these orders, there were real tensions between mobilized parachurch agencies and the more settled church-based works. How productive it has been will thus in part be in the eye (or at least the ecclesiology) of the beholder: there is no doubt, however, that

⁴⁵ ‘The Lord has given them into our hand’, Vision Magazine 22 (July–August 1977), p. 17.

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such network-based systems fundamentally shifted the way that dissenting movements approached missions. Popular mobilization across globalized networks became—in the footsteps of the Student Volunteer Movement—a central element of Protestant missionary planning and effort, particularly as the rise of secure social media-based communications made sustaining dispersed but ideologically coherent networks more feasible.

MISSIONS IN AND THROUGH NON-MISSIONAL AG EN CIES Rapidly developing economies need access to skills and technology. They therefore interact with the West either through global agencies (such as the World Bank), through corporations, or by headhunting foreign talent or sending their own people abroad for training. An academic from a Muslim country goes abroad on study leave to a Western country and finds himself reading the Bible with a colleague in a major technical university. A Chinese student goes abroad to study and brings back more than their national government counted on (as the journal Foreign Policy notes, thousands of students ‘Leave China, Study in America, Find Jesus’.⁴⁶ Among the 304,000 Chinese students who studied in the USA in 2015 alone, the writer calculates the conversions are in the ‘thousands’ per year). Even as regional Chinese governments were closing down foreign NGOs of a Christian stamp in China,⁴⁷ its own people were bringing back an indigenized form of the faith taught to them by other Chinese Christians resident in the USA, Britain, Australia, and the like. Graduates from the state and sovereign wealth fundsupported programmes at the world’s top one hundred universities (most of which are in the West) ‘have gone home [to China] to teach Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) materials in bible classes in public universities, something no Western missionary could do’.⁴⁸ Likewise, though more continuously with events in Korea itself, movements such as University Bible Fellowship (UBF) have used the outflow of Korean students to launch active

⁴⁶ Han Zhang, ‘Leave China, Study in America, Find Jesus: Why a Growing Number of Chinese Students at U.S. Universities are Coming Home with Christian Beliefs’, Foreign Policy 11 February 2016, http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/11/leave-china-study-in-america-findjesus-chinese-christian-converts-at-american-universities/, accessed 12.10.2017. ⁴⁷ James Griffiths and Steven Jiang, ‘China tightens its grip on foreign NGOs’, CNN 29 April 2016, https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/28/asia/china-foreign-ngo-law/index.html. ⁴⁸ S. E. Zylstra, ‘Campus Ministries Race to Keep Up With Record Number of International Students’, The Gospel Coalition 2 February 2017, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/ campus-ministries-race-to-keep-up-with-record-number-international-students, accessed 12.10.2017.

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(even aggressive) forms of evangelism among students in the USA. ‘They hold full-time jobs rather than receive support, and missionaries use their off hours, holidays, and vacations to evangelize on college campuses. Their training is military-like, requiring a “soldier spirit”.’⁴⁹ While the discourse is often about re-evangelizing the backslidden West, the subjects for their activity are (despite the best intentions and even insistence of UBF to target the future leaders of the USA) usually students of their own culture. This has, in the literature, been seen as a failure (e.g. among African expatriate churches) of reverse mission,⁵⁰ but perhaps what is happening is another form of mission altogether, one relating to global diasporas in the recognition that dislocation from place opens up new opportunities within, as well as between, language groups.⁵¹ As Moll notes, the small relative numbers and the slide into church rather than mission status, can hide the broader effect. Such movements essentially export different streams of spirituality, changing tastes and forms of adaptability within the broader body of Protestantism. Many Chinese churches have a focus on prayer, while some African churches can (in some instances) re-export what Steve Brouwer and others have referred to as the ‘American gospel’ of prosperity.⁵² (Whether it is in fact a ‘primarily American’ gospel, or a broader reappropriation of the material consequences of spirituality, is a point of some debate.) Korean spirituality re-exports to Western churches a focus on the Bible which has been much weakened in some places. Koreans form the largest body of foreign students in many Western centres for the study of the Bible, including in Germany, in the USA, and at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. As one 2016 Jerusalem Post article noted under the title ‘Lovers of Zion’, the significant floating population of Korean students is a transnational reality driven by an indigenized take on the Old Testament: JIHYE ROY, also from Seoul, came to Israel for the first time in 2013 to volunteer in a South Korean charity, where she taught painting to Ethiopian-Israeli children from single-parent families. After splitting the intervening period between Tanzania (where she caught malaria), Korea and Australia, Roy came back this winter to learn Hebrew from scratch. In October, after nine months of ulpan, she will begin a master’s in theory of art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design— an artistic endeavor, but also tinged with religious duty. ‘My family believes every Jew has to come back to this country according to the Bible, and we believe that

⁴⁹ Rob Moll, ‘“Korean Evangelicals on Steroids”: Meet the band of intensely devoted Asian missionaries working around the clock to re-Christianize America’, Christianity Today 25 June 2015, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/june-web-only/korean-evangelicals-on-steroids.html. ⁵⁰ B. A. Adedibu, ‘Reverse Mission or Migrant Sanctuaries? Migration, Symbolic Mapping, and Missionary Challenges of Britain’s Black Majority Churches’, Pneuma 35.3 (2013), p. 423. ⁵¹ Rebecca Kim, The Spirit Moves West: Korean Missionaries in America (New York and Oxford, 2015). ⁵² Steve Brouwer, Paul Gifford, and Susan D. Rose, eds., Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (Abingdon and New York, 1996), p. 2.

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Jews are a covenant holder,’ she says. ‘Because we are waiting for Jesus coming again, right? And in the Bible, like, for Jesus to come back again to this world, there are some preconditions, so actually I don’t have that much knowledge about that, I just know that every Jew has to come back . . . at the end of the world, to Jerusalem. It has to be achieved, and if they have to achieve it . . . then we want to help them out. Because I think, [as] every Christian who loves God, we owe them.’⁵³

The major global cities which host such university student populations are highly plural and mobile. As journalist Han Zhang notes, in such places one can find Brazilians and Africans evangelizing Chinese and Pakistani students, as well as the standard picture of the local Anglo Church or parachurch ministry reaching out to ‘foreign’ students. Conversion rates differ—Indian students, for example, have already experienced a plural environment and are more conservative than Chinese students. As a consequence, they convert less than, say, the many ‘disenfranchised Muslims’ who have experienced disappointment in their theocratic places of origin. Universities—which in the USA have drawn much tighter secular lines around campus ministry by first world evangelical groups—are more puzzled when their prized, fee-paying foreign students prefer a Christian to a rationalist response to the puzzles of modern life. Such waves of university-based conversion are now in their third and fourth generations, and are self-replicating ministries based in the West but often run by non-Westerners. Many leaders of indigenous movements in the Majority World, such as Bakht Singh, and some among the ‘First 100’ Chinese students to study abroad, were converts in the 1900s and 1920s who had widespread impacts on Christianity in their home countries.⁵⁴ T. E. Koshy’s International Friendship Evangelism, at Syracuse University, New York, or the Hope International network of churches (founded in Bangkok by a Thai converted during his period as a Colombo Plan student in Australia) are other examples of self-replicating, non-Western networks based in the West. Indigenous churches, such as the African Church of Pentecost, or the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (a prosperity-preaching Brazilian church with works all over the world) work extensively with student populations in the West, as do the traditional missionary training and sending institutions, many of which otherwise face an uncertain future in the Western countries of their origins as funding bases collapse with the disappearance of their originating support base.⁵⁵ ⁵³ Jacob Atkins, ‘Lovers of Zion: The growing phenomenon of Koreans in Israel’, Jerusalem Post 26 November 2016, http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Lovers-of-Zion-Koreans-in-Israel470975, accessed 12.10.2017. ⁵⁴ B. E. Nuthalapati, ‘Bakht Singh and the Indigenous Churches of India’, unpublished PhD thesis, Fuller Theological Seminary, 2010; T. E. La Fargue, China’s First Hundred: Educational Mission Students in the United States, 1872–1881 (Seattle, 1987). ⁵⁵ ‘Global Challenges to Evangelical Co-Operation in the Twentieth Century’, Scripture Union NSW ‘Interdenominationalism’ initiative, August–September 2005.

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MISSION THRO UGH MIGRATION —D I A S P O R I C RHIZOMES This has not been a lesson lost in movements based in the Majority World. Nor was it for nothing that the second Lausanne World Congress was held in Manila. The Philippines is one of only two majority Christian nations in Asia, and was already (by 1989) the base for many American and European Protestant missions. It had both an Anglo and an Iberian past, something which brought together what David Martin has suggested were the two great contending forms of European missional Christianity elsewhere in the world.⁵⁶ Particularly after the collapse of Vietnam, it was (before the reopening of China) the West’s greatest hope for an indigenous sending population in Asia. It was, however, largely insistently Catholic. Three things acted to change this. At Lausanne II, global evangelicalism formally ‘got a social conscience’.⁵⁷ The work that Latin Americans such as Pablo Deiros, and the Indian indigenous missions, had long been doing to include social mission in the broader missional remit of the missio Dei, was now formally recognized in the Lausanne Covenant. Secondly, Latter Rain and other charismatic influences began working at the base level to create greater acceptance of charismatic spirituality. These base missions not only created greater acceptance of classical Pentecostal missions in the country,⁵⁸ but charismaticized a large portion of Catholic laity just as demand from the Arabic oil and Asian tiger economies began to demand cheap, well-educated, and English-speaking labour. A series of economic disasters combined with endemic corruption in the Filipino political class turned an aspiration into a necessity. Filipino workers began flooding out into the world, to places such as Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and the Gulf States, seeking work so as to send remittances home. By the 2000s, remittances formed some 10 per cent of the GDP of the Philippines, and workers numbered in their millions. Filipino churches, however, had two interlinked concerns. One was the safety of their people—there were terrible stories of abuse and mistreatment of particularly Filipino women coming back from the OFW (Overseas Filipino Workers) diaspora. This caused a politicization (among other causes) of Church–state relationships with regard to the diaspora. Secondly, churches and combined Protestant missionary efforts sought to extend Filipino and Tagalog congregations in ⁵⁶ David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford, 2001), p. 74. ⁵⁷ Brian Stanley, ‘ “Lausanne 1974”: The Challenge from the Majority World to NorthernHemisphere Evangelicalism’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 64 (2013), pp. 533–51. ⁵⁸ Eli Javier, ‘The Pentecostal Legacy: A Personal Memoir’, Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies 8.2 (2005), pp. 289–310; ‘Historical Overview of Pentecostalism in Philippines’, http:// www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/historical-overview-of-pentecostalism-in-philippines/; Interview, Michael Baré, December 2002, Australasian Pentecostal Studies Centre Archives, Alphacrucis College, New South Wales, Australia.

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places where there was freedom to start churches, and to missionally mobilize those in places where they could not. David Lim’s work at the Asian Center for Development and Cross-Cultural Studies (in Manila), for example, combines not only concepts of transformative mission (developed through time with the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies and Fuller Theological Seminary) but a lifelong attempt to mobilize Filipino missionaries for service in China.⁵⁹ A similar form of corporatism also emerged in the 1980s in Latin America where, through organizations such as Cooperación Misionera Ibero Americana (Ibero American Missionary Cooperation, or COMIBAM), the churches growing in the Protestant surge there took seriously Chandhra Ray’s challenge to ‘Go’. COMIBAM was more a recognition of what was already happening than a ‘sponsor’ per se: even ‘in the early stages of the COMIBAM network in 1987, it should be noted that 1600 Latin American Missionaries had been sent out by seventy missions agencies.’⁶⁰ The three major meetings (those in Mexico 1997 and Granada 2006 were attended by over 2,000 delegates) did, however, provide space for reflective and critical analysis. By 2009, the number of Latin American transcultural workers had breached the 10,000 barrier, 16 per cent of which was in the so-called 10/40 window where most ‘difficult’ and ‘first contact’ areas were to be found.⁶¹ Many more were involved in church planting in Europe (particularly Spain and Italy) and the United States, where they acted as media for the particular emphases of the Latin American revivals (particularly by people such as Carlos Anacondia and Guillermo Maldonado, but also the voluntary poverty and communal living of groups such as Missao Horizontes).

CHRI STIAN P OPULISM A S RESI S TANCE TO IDENTICIDE The twentieth century was a period marked by the rise of religious persecution. This sort of oppression remains, Grimm and Finke suggest, pervasive in the twenty-first century, despite constitutional protections which may or may not be present.⁶² In unpicking the emergence of multinodal Christian missions, it is important to note the historic role that Christianity (among other religions) has played as a form of political resistance or, more accurately in many cases, of ‘identity maintenance’. In many parts of the world, popular ⁵⁹ David Lim, draft, ‘Leading the Shift To Tentmaker Missions: A History and Sociology of Protestant Missions from the Philippines’, tss. ⁶⁰ Edward L. Smither, Brazilian Evangelical Missions in the Arab World: History, Culture, Practice, and Theology (Eugene, 2012), p. 58. ⁶¹ Smither, Brazilian Evangelical Missions in the Arab World, p. 59. ⁶² Brian J. Grim and Roger Finke, eds., The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century (New York and Cambridge, 2010), p. 2.

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appropriation of Christianity emerged not because of the actions of missionaries but, in the presence of what Roland Robertson notes is a ‘forward bleeding’ of cultural consciousness of Christianity, as a means of opposing cultural domination by an oppressive majority tradition. This process has been noted with regard to criollo Pentecostalism by Manuel Gaxiola in Mexico and Juan Sepulveda in Chile,⁶³ by Kevin Madigan with regard to Abbruzzese Methodism,⁶⁴ by Bauman among Satnamis in India,⁶⁵ by Grayson as a factor in Korean nationalism under Japanese occupation,⁶⁶ and in many other places. It was not, as Bauman notes, simply a matter of consciously taking up a political position in opposition to some other form of oppression, but of the emergence (often under great pressure) of ‘ideal interests’, resolved by a highly indigenized and compelling vision of a better life presented by Christianity in minority settings.⁶⁷ With the marked rise in nationalist/fundamentalist responses to globalization and people movements, cases of attempted annihilation of ancient and more modern Christian identities have also increased.⁶⁸ Conversion as a grass-roots response is thus also on the rise. Conversion to Christianity as a form of opposition to ‘identicide’ is something which can readily be seen as attending dissenting Protestant expansion throughout the world in the twentieth century. As part of a suite of Christian options which embedded a defining ambiguity towards the state, dissenting Christianity has often been an option for those seeking a way not to disappear before an oppressive overclass. The conversion of Karen peoples to Baptist Christianity in Burma, for example, is a much-studied narrative of the importance of the development of indigenous ministry,⁶⁹ a process which developed rapidly in settings (dominant in many parts of the world since the Second World War) where missionaries were expelled or heavily restricted. Underrepresented in these accounts is less the effectiveness of the indigenous evangelists involved than the contextual elements in their cognate cultures ⁶³ Daniel Ramirez, ‘Pentecostalism in Latin America’, in Cecil M. Robeck Jr and Amos Yong, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 112–13. ⁶⁴ Kevin Madigan, ‘Villa San Sebastiano (1931–1939) as an Historiographical Problem’, Paper presented at SISSCO 2017 CFP: Cantieri di Storia IX, Padova, Italy, 13–15 September 2017, Memoria e ricerca (forthcoming). ⁶⁵ Chad M. Bauman, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–1947 (Grand Rapids, 2008), p. 3. ⁶⁶ James H. Grayson, Early Buddhism and Christianity in Korea: A Study in the Emplantation of Religion (Leiden, 1985), p. 139. ⁶⁷ Bauman, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, p. 17. ⁶⁸ See the case studies in Maya Shatzmiller, ed., Nationalism and Minority Identities in Islamic Societies (Kingston and Montreal, 2005); esp. P. Van Doorn-Harder, ‘Copts: Fully Egyptian, but for a Tattoo?’, pp. 22ff. ⁶⁹ J. Riley Case, ‘From the Native Ministry to the Talented Tenth: The Foreign Missionary Origins of White Support for Black Colleges’, in D. H. Bays and Grant Wacker, eds., The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History (Tuscaloosa, 2010), p. 62.

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which led people to accept their message. Kevin Madigan’s account of the mass conversion of a central Italian town to Methodism shortly after the signing of the Vatican–Fascist Concordat in 1929 is a reminder that people and groups act out of complex motivations, and ‘read’ the actions of others in local, often idiosyncratic, ways. Regional economic poverty, political and ecclesiastical identity repression (the dominance of Rome), combined with local preparatory traditions (a ‘social gospel’-oriented priest who seemed more like the Methodists than the Roman Curia) and catalytic events (the dismissal of a beloved local priest) can make of dissenting Protestantism a transforming indigeneity. As Giorgio Spini notes with regard to the emergence of a ‘Methodist diaspora’ in the Italian South, ‘The earth of the yokel of Ignazio Silone and of Fontamara, pressed hard by the burden of labor, of hunger, seemed to move: the humble had dared to take The Book in their callous[ed] hands and to seek there the Truth for themselves.’⁷⁰ A similar story evolved in rural towns such as Gissi, in Catania, and in Riesi, Sicily. Riesi had already, from 1870, entertained a Waldensian Protestant presence. By 1912, the Chiesa Valdese could claim up to half of the 18,000 inhabitants of Riesi, many of whom took on a Protestant identity as a form of protest against the ecclesial–baronial elite which dominated the ownership of land in the region. It was among this population which the americano (the colloquial name for a returned migrant from the USA) Antonio Baglio found a ready audience, opening a meeting place in Via La Mantia. The work grew so fast that Vincenzo Federico remembered hundreds and hundreds of people attending services, which ran almost every day, both in the central meeting hall and in hired premises and houses around the local area. Baglio was assisted by Giovanni D’Addeo of Canicattì and others in evangelizing the town. Riesi became, unexpectedly, a major training and sending point for a minor popular religious revolution spreading throughout the island. As Zanini and others note, it was a movement which did not go unnoticed among Catholic authorities,⁷¹ sparking a marked counter-movement of combined religious, economic, and political pressure aimed at suppressing this religious divergence, often attended by various forms of social repression and even violence.⁷² These are not unfamiliar trends in other settings. As Deng notes with regard to the Sudanese civil war, a side effect of religious conversion as a tool for identity maintenance is (an often fundamentalist) reaction from the dominant culture. The nation of South Sudan, for instance, emerged in 2011 in part because tribal peoples had long experienced coercion from the Arab/Islamic

⁷⁰ Spini, quoted in S. Gagliano and C. A. Ciampi, eds., Italia Di Mussolini e Protestanti (Turin, 2015), p. 167. ⁷¹ Paolo Zanini, ‘Twenty Years of Persecution of Pentecostalism in Italy: 1935–1955’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 20.5 (2015), pp. 686–707. ⁷² F. Toppi, Vincenzo Federico (Rome, n.d.).

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ruling class to the north, and less coercion from Christian missionaries operating in the south largely through medical and educational missions.⁷³ Of the three major efforts to convert the Dinka in Sudan, Deng notes that it was the ‘private, unorganized and largely persuasive’ attempts which were most effective.⁷⁴ In return, however, the challenge of the rising south undermined the system in the north, reinforcing fundamentalist responses including war, further forcible Islamization, and an impulse towards involvement in the emerging global jihad. Even at official levels (in ways which are sometimes absorbed into the Western secularist project aimed at faith communities), the language of ‘rice Christians’, Western manipulation and cajolery, ‘forced conversions’ and the like, is historically a common part of this fundamentalist reaction of indigenous appropriation.⁷⁵ As Beth Baron notes, the ability to select and promote images of Western abuse of Egyptian orphans was in the 1920s and 1930s a major contributor to fundamentalist anti-Western popular mobilizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood. The Port Said ‘scandal’ ‘fed into a stream of reports on conversions, or attempted conversions, touching a deep nerve among Egyptians, and creating a national uproar with international repercussions’.⁷⁶ Similar patterns are observable during periods of nation formation, or religio-national reformation: as Appileyil notes around the postIndependence period in India, and Cornelius summarizes for the construction of a sense of Hindutva up to the present in the same country.⁷⁷ Grass-roots conversion politics thus have significant impacts on the national and, where there are transnational or diasporic links, international scale. While there continue to be tensions between Catholic and Protestant missions and populations in various parts of the world, nowhere is this more of an issue than in the Islamic world, including in the diaspora. Though united by a sense of umma, the rising conflict over salafism, internal conflicts over totalitarianism and the Sunni/Shi’ia division, and festering resentment of the West, this diaspora has both expanded (through mass people movements, out of conflicts first in north Africa, then periodically the Middle East, and

⁷³ Francis M. Deng, ‘Scramble for Souls: Religious Intervention among the Dinka in Sudan’, in ʻAbd Allāh Aḥmad Naʻīm, ed., Proselytization and Communal Self-Determination in Africa (Eugene, 2009), p. 223. ⁷⁴ Deng, ‘Scramble for Souls’, in Naʻīm, ed., Proselytization and Communal SelfDetermination in Africa, p. 222. ⁷⁵ Augustine Kanjamala notes that this language goes back to the 1550s, in his The Future of Christian Mission in India: Toward a New Paradigm for the Third Millennium (Eugene, 2014), pp. 164ff. ⁷⁶ See Beth Baron, The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (Stanford, 2014), p. ix. ⁷⁷ Varghese V. Appileyil, Violence Against Christians of India in the First Decade of the Twenty-first Century (Fort Worth, 2009); Paul Cornelius, ‘Hinduism in the Twentieth Century’, in Wilbert R. Shenk and Richard J. Plantinga, eds., Christianity and Religious Plurality: Historical and Global Perspectives (Eugene, 2016).

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increasingly from parts of Asia) and diversified. This is readily apparent in the story of Nabeel Qureshi, a Pakistani Ahmadi Muslim who became a Christian apologist with Indian-born Ravi Zacharias’s ministry. Both Qureshi and Zacharias were part of that large diaspora affected by the cultural pluralism of the subcontinent. Zacharias was a nominal Anglican from mixed caste descent, who emigrated to Canada and, after a conversion experience and study at Ontario Bible College, built a world-wide apologetic ministry (with connections to the Christian and Missionary Alliance) often focused on debates with university students.⁷⁸ Qureshi for his part came from an Ahmadi family which migrated to the USA, followed by a conversion experience on an American university campus (Old Dominion), and further training at Eastern Virginia Medical School, Biola University, Duke University, and Oxford. His best-selling book Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, describes the cognitive dissonance of being both the subject of American victimization after 9/11 and Operation Desert Storm, and of becoming aware that the relatively liberal, peaceful version of Islam taught in the West was not identical with that taught in Islamic-majority countries. ‘I had to figure out how to reconcile my Islam, a religion of peace, with the Islam on television, a religion of terror.’⁷⁹ Qureshi was not alone in this. Many millions of Muslims were ‘disenfranchised’ by the events leading up to and following 11 September 2011, as they found significant fissures in their understanding of the cultural, religious, and political unities of Islam. This has been all the more so since the breaking into ‘hot war’ of the long-running Shi’a/Sunni tensions within Islam itself, leading to the atrocities of the Sunni-based ISIS and the barbarisms of Hezbollah and Hash’d al Shaabi, fuelled on either side by oil money and totalitarian Islamic states.⁸⁰ ‘The authority or power of the old structures has been eroded; new options and choices are placed before people.’⁸¹ Forced migration, cultural dissonance of a profound type, experiences of war, loss, and death: all of these are powerful psychological motivators. Not surprisingly, Qureshi’s personal accounts of ‘mourning’ and encountering Jesus in dreams⁸² have not been isolated phenomena. Many European, American, and British Commonwealth

⁷⁸ E. Plowman, ‘Meet Ravi Zacharias’, Evangelicals Now (March 1998), http://www.e-n.org. uk/1998/03/features/meet-ravi-zacharias/, accessed 12.10.2017. ⁷⁹ N. Qureshi, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity (Grand Rapids, 2014). ⁸⁰ Jack Watling, ‘The Shia Militias of Iraq’, The Atlantic 22 December 2016, https:// www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/12/shia-militias-iraq-isis/510938/; Strategic Comments 23.3 (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13567888.2017.1316086, both accessed 12.10.2017. ⁸¹ Duane Miller, Living among the Breakage Contextual Theology-Making and Ex-Muslim Christians (Eugene, 2016), p. 2. ⁸² Nabeel Qureshi, ‘Called off the Minaret’, Christianity Today 58.1 (January–February 2014), p. 96.

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countries report ‘unprecedented’ numbers of conversions by Muslims, even as their mainline congregations dwindle. In the independent Lutheran Church of the Trinity in Berlin, Pastor Gottfried Martens baptises ten or more former Muslims on most Sundays. Six hundred converts from Iran and Afghanistan make up two-thirds of this thriving parish in a city ranking among the most secular in Europe. Martens’ Sunday services often last more than two hours for it takes a long time for this large number of ex-Muslims to kneel down at the altar rail and receive the sacrament and blessing while the rest of the congregation of dark-skinned worshipers lustily chant 16thand 17th-century Lutheran hymns they have learned in Berlin.⁸³

Among the most powerful forces has been a commonly recorded instance of converts being prompted by dreams or visions.⁸⁴ These are accepted methods of transcendental encounter in both traditions, and so a bridge for the common figure of Isa/Jesus where social and political opprobrium creates walls.⁸⁵ Under intense cognitive dissonance and psychological pressure, the ‘spiritual technologies’ of migrants (many of whom are ‘doctrinally Muslim but practically animist’)⁸⁶ often take them across bridges which local community regulations would deny them. Though their decision, when taken in the West, has risks (particularly from Muslim community groups), it is relatively light compared to the capital punishment doled out to apostates in some Muslim-majority settings (both legally, as in Saudi Arabia, and illegally, through the sort of mob pressure regularly seen in Pakistan). As a consequence, many dissenting traditions around the world report growing numbers of Muslim Background Believers. In his work, Duane Miller estimates that since 1960, the number of MBBs has risen from c.200,000 to over ten million in 2015.⁸⁷ While these are significant numbers, they barely make a mark on the 1.2 billion-strong community which associates with the Muslim umma, and are readily counteracted simply from natural biological growth trends. For dissenting traditions, however, these are significant contributions in Western communities, and the way that they come into faith (often through charismatic experience) acts to change many formerly more rationalist traditions. Most importantly of all, they laicize the sense of how mission works in the new global reality.

⁸³ Uwe Siemon-Netto, ‘Where Muslim Dreams May Lead’, Quadrant Magazine (January– February 2016), https://www.oursaviormuscatine.org/sermons/2016/1/19/repost-where-muslimdreams-may-lead-by-uwe-siemon-netto-via-pastor. ⁸⁴ Tom Doyle and Greg Webster, Dreams and Visions: Is Jesus Awakening the Muslim World? (Nashville, 2012), Preface. ⁸⁵ Rick Love, Muslims, Magic and the Kingdom Of God: Church Planting among Folk Muslims (Pasadena, 2000), p. 156. ⁸⁶ Love, Muslims, Magic and the Kingdom of God, p. 2. ⁸⁷ D. A. Miller and P. Johnstone, ‘Believers in Christ from a Muslim Background: A Global Census’, Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 11 (2015), p. 10.

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CO NCLUSION These four trends—the rise of short-term missional experientialism, the co-option of non-missionary globalized settings, diasporic mission, and conversion as resistance—all emerge from contexts over which twentieth-century (D)issenting mission agencies had little control. They are contexts articulated through the ‘great change’ brought about through the rise of identity shaping new electronic media, and global migration and permanent diaspora formation on a scale never previously known. Very few of the millions of people who came into the dissenting traditions around the world through the ‘long twentieth century’ did so through planned measures. Rather, their conversions and missional efforts have depended heavily on a convergence of global political, cultural, and economic factors well beyond the control of church bureaucracies. As Appadurai and others note, one of the disquieting elements of globalization for many who work in related settings is the near omnipresence of Christianity. Human Rights, voluntary groups and NGOs, scientific method, international norms and relationships, education, many elements of trust and contract law: whenever globalization is unwrapped, its sustainability proves to be heavily reliant on Christian actions and foundations, past and present. In part, it is true, this has been because of the now fading dominance of the West, a hated imperialism all the more hated by the mobile new knowledge class which has benefited so much from its existence precisely because of its Christian content. We live in a time of the great modernist undoing of disciplines, of mind, body and spirit, in a grand experiment to try and imagine a new future. But imagine from where? The counter-logical global upsurge of grass-roots Christianity after Edinburgh 1910 demonstrates that people appropriating new futures start from where they are and go to unpredictable places. Often, those criticizing grass-roots movements which ‘go for a ride’ on some new imperialism, find themselves outflanked and compromised by the imperialisms (Fascist, Marxist, neo-Liberal, populist) on which they too have gone for a ride. History, as David Martin has noted, is both deeply ironic and serendipitous.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Adedibu, B. A., ‘Reverse Mission or Migrant Sanctuaries? Migration, Symbolic Mapping, and Missionary Challenges of Britain’s Black Majority Churches’, Pneuma 35.3 (2013), pp. 405–23. Adogame, Afe, The African Christian Diaspora: New Currents and Emerging Trends in World Christianity (Edinburgh, 2013). Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (New Delhi, 1996). Appileyil, Varghese V., Violence Against Christians of India in the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century (Fort Worth, 2009).

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Bauman, Chad M., Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–1947 (Grand Rapids, 2008). Burgess, Richard, ‘Bringing Back the Gospel: Reverse Mission among Nigerian Pentecostals in Britain’, Journal of Religion in Europe 4.3 (2011), pp. 429–49. Byrnes, T. A., Reverse Mission: Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of US Foreign Policy (Washington, 2011). Frykenberg, R. and A. Low, Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication Since 1500, with Special Reference to Caste, Conversion, and Colonialism (Grand Rapids, 2003). Gagliano, S. and C. A. Ciampi, eds., Italia Di Mussolini e Protestanti (Turin, 2015). Hartch, Todd, The Rebirth of Latin American Christianity (New York and Oxford, 2014). Hattaway, Paul, Brother Yun, Peter Xu Yongze, and Enoch Wang, Back to Jerusalem: Three Chinese House Church Leaders Share their Vision to Complete the Great Commission (Downers Grove, 2003). Kang, Jie, House Church Christianity in China: From Rural Preachers to City Pastors (Basingstoke and New York, 2016). Kim, Rebecca, The Spirit Moves West: Korean Missionaries in America (New York and Oxford, 2015). Kwiyani, Harvey C., Sent Forth: African Missionary Work in the West (Maryknoll, 2014). La Fargue, T. E., China’s First Hundred: Educational Mission Students in the United States, 1872–1881 (Seattle, 1987). Miller, Duane A., Living among the Breakage Contextual Theology-Making and Ex-Muslim Christians (Eugene, 2016). Naʻīm, ʻAbd Allāh Aḥmad, ed., Proselytization and Communal Self-Determination in Africa (Eugene, 2009). Parsa, Misagh, Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed (Cambridge and London, 2016). Robertson, Roland, ‘Global Connectivity and Global Consciousness’, American Behavioral Scientist 55.10 (2011), pp. 1336–45. Shatzmiller, Maya, ed., Nationalism and Minority Identities in Islamic Societies (Kingston and Montreal, 2005). Shenk, Wilbert R. and Richard J. Plantinga, eds., Christianity and Religious Plurality: Historical and Global Perspectives (Eugene, 2016). Smither, Edward L., Brazilian Evangelical Missions in the Arab World: History, Culture, Practice, and Theology (Eugene, 2012). Stark, Rodney and Xiuhua Wan, A Star in the East: The Rise of Christianity in China (New York, 2015). Yang, Fenggang, Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule (New York and Oxford, 2011). Zanini, Paolo, ‘Twenty Years of Persecution of Pentecostalism in Italy: 1935–1955’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 20:5 (2015), pp. 686–707. Zhang, Han, ‘Leave China, Study in America, Find Jesus: Why a Growing Number of Chinese Students at U.S. Universities are Coming Home with Christian Beliefs’, Foreign Policy 11 February 2016, http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/11/leave-chinastudy-in-america-find-jesus-chinese-christian-converts-at-american-universities/, accessed 12.10.2017.

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15 Communications, New Technologies, and Innovation J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu

PREAMBLE: RELIGION, TECHNOLOGY, AND COMMUNICATION The role of communication technologies in the global spread of dissenting Protestantism has attracted some useful academic and even pastoral attention within the last three decades. The use of technology—from the printing press for the production of gospel tracts, magazines, lithographs, and Bibles to the use of radio, television, and other forms of social media—for the dissemination of material has been one of the major features of religious change over the past five centuries. As the dominant tradition in the West, this has particularly been the case with the ‘religion of the Word’, Christianity. In the contemporary forms of dissenting Protestantism that dominate the discussion in this chapter, new communication technologies are a sign of being ‘at home’ in global society. They are deployed to enhance the quality of corporate worship experiences, to deal with pastoral care issues and to stimulate affective encounters with the Holy Spirit. The use of the media by the Protestant tradition has had the majority aim of attracting, engaging, and converting people to faith. Gordon Lynch a professor of Modern Theology with great interest in media, religion, and culture has observed that even if we admit to living in more secular times, we do not live in a de-sacralized age.¹ Religious flows inevitably share, and interpenetrate, the hopes and fears of the technological age. The intersection between religion, or more precisely Christianity, and media diffuses the faith and therefore ‘virtually’ defines and undermines secularity. In other words, modern media technology helps the communication of religion in

¹ Gordon Lynch, The Sacred in the Modern World: A Cultural Sociological Approach (Oxford, 2012), p. 2.

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ways that bypass the institutional arrangements put in place by socially entrenched churches to control doctrine, belief, and faith and how these are understood and expressed. The result is a parallel dissenting ‘disentrenched’ church which has escaped national boundaries into the global. Technological innovation thus both secularizes and resacralizes the world. The assertion by Gordon Lynch referred to above is even more true of non-Western societies where sacred and secular realities often exist in an inseparable fusion. As has been widely discussed in the literature, many Majority World peoples (like Eldin Villafañe’s Latin Americans) can be considered to be ‘Homo religiosus’. NonWestern primal communities are often replete with all kinds of stones, rocks, and trees constituted as shrines meant to mediate the presence of unseen benevolent realities.² Such ‘signing’ objects are in fact forms of media. In addition to the presence of traditional or primal religions, virtually all the world’s major religions and a multiplicity of new religious movements now exist in both Western and non-Western contexts. Virtually all deploy varieties of media technologies for the spread of their brands of spirituality. The use of media and communication technology as the means of both evangelization and ‘publicization’ of faith has become a defining element of the century.

D I S S E N T I N G P RO TES TANTI S M In keeping with its general understanding in this volume, the expression ‘dissenting Protestantism’ is used in this chapter to refer to Christian religious movements of the twentieth century that sought to bring about change in the traditional national Protestant traditions as expressed through the Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Anglican, and other non-Episcopal Catholic traditions. For the present purpose, I will concentrate on those new Christian movements broadly defined as ‘Conservative Evangelicals’. There are two main twentieth-century Conservative Evangelical Movements (CEMs) distinguished in the discussion. The first are those Christian movements which have sought to re-emphasize biblical authority under the conviction that the Reformation dictum of Sola Scriptura had lost steam within the traditional Protestant denominations. A classic example of this sort of globalized ‘Biblebelieving’ CEM would be the Scripture Union, an evangelical movement that emphasized daily quiet times with God through Bible reading and meditation. Such movements have had significant influence in postcolonial settings, often (albeit unintentionally) acting as the basis for evangelical/pentecostal revival. The second, and now the larger stream, are pentecostal/charismatic ² Dorcas Dennis, ‘Travelling with the Spirit: Pentecostal Migration Religiosity between Ghana and Australia’, PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2016, p. 46.

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movements that, like other CEMs, emphasize biblical authority but add the experience of the Holy Spirit and the manifestations of the gifts of the Spirit as normative in Christian life and worship. In a typical pentecostal/charismatic fellowship or worship setting there is speaking in tongues, prophecy, narration of testimonies, and revelations and extemporaneous expressions of spirituality given shape by a generalized belief in the power of the Holy Spirit. The rise of pentecostalism was an important development within the broader CEM tradition, and indeed has flowed over into almost all mainline Christian traditions. It has been called the most significant development within world Christianity since the Reformation.³ Pentecostalism is not a monolithic movement. There are at least two major streams: first are the classical pentecostal denominations such as the Assemblies of God that trace their roots to the 1906 Azusa Street Revival led by William J. Seymour. The second type is the neo-pentecostal movement, which is constituted by charismatic renewal movements within the historic mission denominations such as the Catholic Charismatic Movement; the trans-denominational charismatic fellowships such as the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International (FGBMFI); and the contemporary prosperity-preaching pentecostal churches. As a CEM, pentecostalism emphasizes revivalism, and (like the evangelical movement) upholds a strong mission agenda. Conservative Evangelicals are not the only users of media technology in religious mediation. The use of media in the Roman Catholic Church—Vatican Radio, Catholic newspapers, Papal Encyclicals, and the Eternal Word Television Network—is fairly well known. Whereas dissenting Protestants, for example, would use media technology to disseminate Christian ideas through conversion in fulfilment of Jesus’ ‘Great Commission’, the traditional churches have tended to use media more for the preservation or conservation of their historical religious identities. The media itself takes great interest in religion, especially in the ways in which it affects public life, and there have been some studies demonstrating modelling effects on other world religions (such as Buddhism and Muslim communities).⁴

HISTORIC AL ROOTS: THE W ORD AND WORDS Christianity is (as noted by Yeo in Chapter 4 of this volume) a translatable, transformatively incarnated ‘message’. Its ‘story’ is mediated in print (‘the Bible’), often involving graphic, multi-sensory narratives as to the human ³ Mark P. Hutchinson, ‘Australasian Charismatic Movements and the “New Reformation of the 20th Century?” ’, Australasian Pentecostal Studies 19 (2017), p. 26. ⁴ e.g. Stephen Prothero, ‘Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) and the construction of “Protestant Buddhism” ’, PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1990.

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encounter with the Creator of the Universe. The documentation of divine discourses begins in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Decalogue was written on tablets, and in the lives of the kings such as Hezekiah messages were communicated through the writing of letters. In the New Testament, the overwhelming logic within the Christianity of the early Church was to proclaim Jesus as God’s Messiah, the one foreseen and promised in the ‘text’, which thereby became a sacred ark of the redemptive promise. The resolve of the early Church to proclaim that message was inspired by the reality of the Resurrection and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. Following the martyrdom of Stephen the deacon, the apostles and other believers scattered for fear of persecution and spread Christianity through the Gentile world. The spread of the church amidst persecution and imprisonment made Christian mission difficult. In the ministry of St Paul, Christian outreach was facilitated by media, that is, communication of the gospel through the writing of letters to churches. We owe much of the New Testament material to this medium of spreading the message. Christian missionaries, working within indigenous cultures outside of their homelands, collaborated with local linguists to translate the Bible into vernaculars. Translation of the Bible, according to Lamin Sanneh, was undertaken in the early centuries because there was no idea that the sacredness of the Bible was to be sought in its incomprehensibility.⁵ As they reduced the Bible into the languages of societies beyond the West, Sanneh notes, missionaries often became ‘champions of non-Western cultures’.⁶ This is a point made repeatedly also by authors such as John Harris, whose One Blood locates the origins of indigenous rights movements in the representations of dissenting translators such as William Ridley.⁷ The invention of the printing press, as we have noted, was a watershed development that served as a major technological breakthrough in communicating the vernacular Gospel across the world and helping to spread Protestant faith. It was thus a substantial contributor to what has now come to be known as world Christianity. For example, David Morgan begins his study, The Lure of Images, with a look at print media in the history of North American Protestantism, noting that the significance of literacy and print had been celebrated in that context since the early seventeenth century.⁸ His description of the use of print media for Christian literacy and evangelization is equally ⁵ Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, 2009), p. 107. ⁶ Sanneh, Translating the Message, p. 30. ⁷ John W. Harris, One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity (Sutherland, 1990); and see D. A. Roberts, ‘ “Language to Save the Innocent”: Reverend L. Threlkeld’s Linguistic Mission’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 94.2 (December 2008), pp. 107–10. ⁸ David Morgan, The Lure of Images: A History of Religion and Visual Media in America (London and New York, 2007), p. 8.

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true of other Western contexts outside colonial America. Christian tracts served the purpose of the inculcation of Christian moral values in the lives of young people and others who read them. A lot of the tracts Morgan details came with appropriate illustrations, for as he notes, The cooperation of word and image was a lesson not lost on Evangelical publishers. . . . [Images] visualized the transparency of scripture and the authority of the text it adorned, fashioning it as the printed version of what the preacher proclaimed. Such images helped craft a transition from the oratorical tradition of preaching to the illustrated print culture of the nineteenth century, tutoring Americans to regard print as a faithful conveyance of scriptural truth and illustrations as an affirmation of the authority and reliability of the print.⁹

In early Western Protestantism, gospel tracts, magazines, and books were the equivalent of modern media. The images that accompanied the gospel tracts including lithographs helped to animate the printed word. Images, Morgan further notes ‘helped endow print with an aura that rooted the visual in the spoken, serving to authorize imagery as well as to enliven print’.¹⁰ Various gospel tract societies emerged in the Western world, established by the evangelical missionary societies. As one such organization stated in its annual report, the tracts, as authorized and reliable bearers of biblical truth, were ‘silent witnesses for Jesus’.¹¹ Gospel tracts as bearers of biblical truth, it was believed, served added purposes by making up for the paucity of clergy and also by helping to moralize society (especially young people) in Christian manners.¹² Further, we are told, such reformers as Martin Luther and John Calvin deployed gospel tracts as a means of combatting the influence or challenge of religious enthusiasts ‘who supplanted scriptural authority with the spiritual revelations that came to them’.¹³ Lamin Sanneh defines ‘world Christianity’ as the movement of Christianity as it takes form and shape in societies that previously were not Christian, societies that had no bureaucratic tradition with which to domesticate the gospel.¹⁴ World Christianity, Sanneh notes, is not one thing ‘but a variety of religious responses through more or less effective local idioms, but in any case without necessarily the European Enlightenment frame’.¹⁵ He distinguishes ‘world Christianity’ from ‘Global Christianity’, which he defines as, ‘the faithful replication of Christian forms and patterns developed in Europe’.¹⁶ The distinction could be tenuous when critically interrogated, and so what is ⁹ Morgan, Lure of Images, p. 11. ¹⁰ Morgan, Lure of Images, p. 14. ¹¹ Morgan, Lure of Images, p. 15. ¹² Morgan, Lure of Images, pp. 18, 23. ¹³ Morgan, Lure of Images, p. 31. ¹⁴ Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, 2003), p. 22. ¹⁵ Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity?, p. 22. ¹⁶ Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity?, p. 22.

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important for our purposes is the fact that print, and later electronic and digital, media helped Christianity to globalize, and also permitted indigenous believers to embellish traditional forms of the faith with their own expressions. In much the same way, ‘Gospel Music’ is now a combination of the message of the Bible and traditional understandings of the work of God in Christ as apprehended through cultural motifs. Its close association with the rise of pop music generally has been widely noted.¹⁷

PROTESTANTISM, TRANSLATION, AND THE G L O B A L I Z A T I O N OF CHRI S TIANI TY The intersection between religion and media has come a long way. When the printing press was invented in the middle of the fifteenth century, it made possible the translation of oral material onto paper for wider distribution. The Christian Church, one of the most literacy-oriented traditions in the world, seized the opportunity to disseminate the message of the gospel through the medium of the printed page. Bible Societies became the most important international organizations for translating and distributing printed Bibles and other Christian materials across the seas. Consider, for example, the use of lithographic material such as The Broad and Narrow Path, a pictorial representation of Matthew 7:13–14. The passage reads as follows: Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it. (New Revised Standard Version)

Copies of this lithograph were distributed for use in many Protestant homes. At the top of this picture was a large eye looking at the broad and narrow paths, each going towards a particular end at the close of the age. The broad path had scenes of people eating, drinking, gambling, and demonstrating carelessness towards eternal values through acts of greed and licentiousness. The images on the narrow path depicted careful living and the rejection of worldly pleasures or a life of self-denial for the sake of heaven. The message was that God was ‘all seeing’ and would judge humanity according to whether they chose the broad path of worldly living and ended up in Hell, or the ¹⁷ Echol Nix, Jr, ‘Singing the “Good News” of God: An Overview of Gospel Music’, in Stephen B. Murray and Aimée U. Light, eds., God and Popular Culture: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Entertainment Industry’s Most Influential Figure (Santa Barbara and Denver, 2015), pp. 318–19; Charles Wolfe, ‘ “Gospel Boogie”: White Southern Gospel Music in Transition, 1945–55’, Popular Music 1 (1981), pp. 73–82.

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narrow path of resistance to ‘the world, the flesh and the Devil’ that ended in eternal life. The lithograph of The Broad and Narrow Path had the same plot as another Puritan text that was distributed widely and translated into various vernaculars, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. In a study of early Protestant Christianity in Africa, Birgit Meyer discusses how Bunyan used metaphor to evoke images before the mind’s eye of his readers and the lithograph deployed direct images in a bid to communicate through print technology the message of the Bible as understood within that stream of Christianity.¹⁸ When radio came along towards the end of the nineteenth century the socalled Great Commission committed to the Church suddenly became a real possibility. The whole media landscape was revolutionized from the closing decades of the twentieth century with the invention of portable recording devices such as audio and video cassette tapes and later CDs, DVDs, and flash or USB drives. The television was seen as a transformative miracle, only to be exceeded in its impact by the Internet. These devices were not necessarily invented for religious purposes but they were received as divine opportunities, or ‘breakthroughs’, for the dissemination of the word of God. Although the use of television for disseminating dissenting Protestant ideas was until the 2000s a largely American phenomenon, it soon became a global one on two levels. First, televangelists took a global perspective and moved to ensure that their programmes were accessible in other parts of the globe. Secondly, global media ensured that the phenomenon of televangelism became popular as a means of mediating a particular message of prosperity that appealed even to non-evangelical Christians.¹⁹ The media therefore helped to globalize religious faith and the coining of the word ‘televangelism’ signalled what has now developed into an inseparable relationship between religion (or, in particular, Christianity) and media. Our understanding of the use of media by dissenting Protestants must necessarily touch on the Reformation, which made perhaps the single most important contribution to providing the laity access to the word of God through Bible translation. The emergence of Bible Societies across the world was the direct result of the need to translate, publish, and distribute the Bible throughout all nations. Their emergence—in the thousands, producing millions of gospel portions—‘produced the first mass medium in America’, and contributed to the rise of a global culture of literacy.²⁰ The celebration of the Roman Catholic Mass in Latin in Africa, for example, had left many parishes ¹⁸ Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 31–8. ¹⁹ Stewart Hoover, ‘Media and the Construction of the Religious Public Space’, in Stewart M. Hoover and Knut Lundby, eds., Rethinking Media, Religion and Culture (London and New Delhi, 1997), p. 290. ²⁰ David P. Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York and Oxford, 2004), p. 3.

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with members simply mimicking the celebrants, responding to liturgical lines in corrupted words and expressions with no meaning for them. In many African contexts, non-translation of the Catholic Mass led to the emergence of syncretic new religious movements that combined Catholic practices with amalgams of African traditional religiosity that were neither clearly Christian nor ‘fetish’. In contrast, in the translated Bible, cultures around the world could access the word of God in their own mother tongues. Lamin Sanneh, in his book Translating the Message, cites the exercise in translating the Bible into various vernaculars as a key element in the growth and renewal of Christianity as a non-Western religion.²¹

MODERN MEDIA AND RELIGION There is a thin line between the way secular media reports on religion and the way religions use media for their activities. When Christians use media, they use it to serve their religious interests, whereas religious reportage in the media does not necessarily have to cohere with the interest of any particular tradition. Other ideologies can also find their way into secular reporting, particularly where journalists are writing beyond their expertise.²² This is one reason why the media takes great interest in religious scandals: these have great commercial value for the owners of the media that report on it. One of the most significant developments of the twentieth century, besides religious diversity, is the intersection between religion and media and how the two combine in re-sacralizing the public sphere. Our focus, however, will be on how dissenting Protestants use media for their religious interest. This diversity of religious traditions influences public life in a process that has been labelled the ‘re-publicization’ of religion.²³ There seems to be no end to the (quantitative) proliferation of dissenting movements, that is, those historically younger, theologically fluid and versatile Christian churches and movements that have emerged out of existing mainline Protestant church traditions. We will look at the qualitative changes that their media uses inspire within the public sphere. The most prominent religious users of media technology in the communication of religion are the CEMs, including their various progeny, such as the pentecostal/charismatic communities. ²¹ Sanneh, Translating the Message, p. 30. ²² David M. Haskell, Through a Lens Darkly: How the News Media Perceive and Portray Evangelicals (Toronto, 2009); Christian Smith, ‘Social Science, Ideology, and American Evangelicals’, Books & Culture 12.6 (November–December, 2006), pp. 26–8. ²³ David Herbert, ‘Why Has Religion Gone Public Again? Towards a Theory of Media and Religious Re-publicization’, in Gordon Lynch, Jolyon Mitchell, and Anna Strhan, eds., Religion, Media and Culture (London and New York, 2012), p. 89.

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MEDIA TECHNOLOGY AND THE RESURGENCE OF DISSENTING PROTESTANTISM Pentecostal/charismatic Christianity is the fastest-growing stream of the faith in the world today. It was his encounter with pentecostalism that led Harvey Cox to make a virtual U-turn regarding a previous position predicting the ‘death of God’ by the end of the twentieth century. Having witnessed the growth of pentecostalism across the world in the previous century, he wrote Fire from Heaven, a book which he very perceptively subtitled, Pentecostalism and the Reshaping of Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century.²⁴ As Brown notes in Chapter 1 of this volume, the fear that modernity and globalization were going to lead to increased secularization and therefore the virtual demise of religion has not occurred in the non-Western world. In this essay, I contend that the relationship between religion and particularly the new Christian evangelical communities and media is partly responsible for the re-publicization of religion in the twenty-first century. The sort of ‘Spirit empowered’ CEMS described by Lord (in Chapter 7 in this volume) now dominate Christian media in virtually all corners of the globe. The evidence from across the world is that the media has become part of conservative evangelical and pentecostal/charismatic self-definition, an inspiration which (for various reasons relating to the concentration of wealth and technical capacity in the global North) came mainly from North America. Thus Quentin Shultze states emphatically that ‘religious television is largely the product of conversionary-minded American Protestantism’.²⁵ What initially drove Christian evangelical movements to embrace ‘communications and information technologies’ (or CITs) was the opportunity they offered for carrying the gospel of Jesus Christ to the ‘heathen’ overseas. They were originally relatively low cost, low risk ventures, which sidestepped the usual problems of expensive training, the ravages of disease, and the problems of closed borders. The use of media for internal and external evangelization has not changed, but for new conservative evangelical Christian communities or dissenting Protestants, personal charisma and the need to stay globally relevant provide added impetus for investing in media. I have not only encountered the circulation of pentecostal preaching tapes and USB-based ‘thumb drives’ around the world, but also church services and revival meetings which stream live on Internet websites, enabling people to watch or even participate in them wherever they are. The medium drove the message. From Norman Vinson Peale through to Carl Lentz today, CEMs of the late twentieth ²⁴ Harvey Cox, Fire From Heaven: Pentecostalism and the Reshaping of Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century (Reading, 1995). ²⁵ Quentin Shultze, Christianity and the Mass Media in America: Toward a Democratic Accommodation (East Lansing, 2003), p. 11.

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century embraced the broader, media-driven ‘cultures of fame’ to develop a celebrity style of Christianity for which media was well-adapted, influencing the way Christianity looks in the globalized world of today. The development in which religious symbols and discourses are more widely mobilized and distributed within the public sphere stems from the growth of public media and, related to that, the growing role of religious organizations in public life. The continued presence and power of the sacred in modern societies is facilitated in significant ways by media technology because religion is a mediated phenomenon. In the words of Stewart M. Hoover: Music, dance, images, texts, talismans, narratives, dramas, all of these and more have been ways that ‘the religious’ has been expressed, codified, circulated, critiqued, consumed, embodied, understood, taught, reconsidered, and struggled against . . . Religions have been transformed by their media, and we should have been able to see that.²⁶

These considerations are not limited to dissenting Protestantism. Examples of ‘mediations’ of divinities to make them accessible to the physical world are central to many world religions. Claims to reincarnations within the various religious traditions and the reduction of divine revelation to sacred texts (such as the Bible, the Qur’an, and the Bhagavad Gita) are part of what make them mobile. Technological advances in CITs mean that many religious traditions have now ‘gone global’, with people accessing different sources of supernatural succor through the Internet and other social media. The intersection between religion and new media directly facilitates religious communication in the world through the rise of new evangelical movements such as the global pentecostal/charismatic communities. Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism are all world religions associated historically with particular geographical regions of the globe. Their initial spread occurred through believers sharing their faith by taking their beliefs across geographical boundaries, sometimes through forced conversions (as were involved in the riconquista in Spain, with Islamic jihad, and with the often related slave trades). Others came to faith through reading of the sacred texts of these religions, texts that were made possible through translated versions of ancient material with the printing press, a major technological facilitator of the missionary agenda. My thesis is that, likewise, dissenting Protestants, led by the pentecostal/ charismatic movements of the twentieth century, have used media technology extensively in pursuit of their objectives. First, media enhances the quality of religious experience. Secondly, media makes religion look sophisticated and helps its insertion into the processes of globalization. Thirdly, media is critical in the facilitation of the missionary intentions of religious communities. ²⁶ Stewart M. Hoover, ‘Foreword’, in Jeffrey H. Mahan, Media, Religion and Culture: An Introduction (London and New York, 2014).

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Push factors, such as exclusion in the secularizing West or the difficulty of penetrating a geographical area, also motivated adaptive strategies. Daisy Marsh, for example, a Plymouth Brethren missionary who grew up in Algeria, was forced with many other missionaries to leave the country when independence was declared in 1962. She responded to the challenge by commencing radio broadcasts from France in Kabyle, a local Berber language, running them from 1973 to 1990.²⁷ Similar stories surround such agencies as the Far Eastern Broadcasting Company (founded in December 1945 to support China missions by two Bob Jones College alumni). When the Far East Broadcasting Company (FEBC) was forced to retire to the Philippines after the Communist takeover of China in 1949, it got around controls by distributing ‘large quantities of cheap, wooden portable radios preset to FEBC’s shortwave signals in rural villages’.²⁸ Media innovation of this kind would be typical of CEMs throughout the twentieth century.

MEDIA TECHNOLOG Y, DISSENTING P RO TESTANTS, A N D RE -P U B L I C IZ A TI ON OF RE LI GI ON This integral relationship between media and the dissemination of religious cultures is one of the defining marks of the high modern period. This is particularly the case with dissenting Protestants. New religious communities use media spaces to create what Jeffrey H. Mahan refers to as ‘religious selves’ or space for religious practice—a public square within which religion is discussed.²⁹ On that note, Jeffrey Hadden and Anson Shupe observed in a study of North American televangelism that The electronic communications revolution is a technological megatrend that is reshaping not just America, but our entire planet. Its marvels of instant global communications inundate us with massive quantities of new information and images in alluring new packages, challenging and even overrunning traditional values as it alters lifestyles around the world. It is transforming our allegiances.³⁰

Whether these transformations of allegiances orchestrated by media technology communication are appreciated by everyone is another matter. What goes without saying is that, in these novel and innovative forms of religious ²⁷ Abu Banaat, ‘Daisy Marsh: Missionary to the Kabyles’, St Francis Magazine 2.3 (December 2006), p. 1. ²⁸ Paul W. Rood, ‘The Far East Broadcasting Company’, in George Thomas Kurian and Mark A. Lamport, eds., Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States, vol. 5 (Lanham, 2016), p. 864. ²⁹ Mahan, Media, Religion and Culture, p. 5. ³⁰ Jeffrey K. Hadden and Anson Shupe, Televangelism: Power and Politics on God’s Frontier (New York, 1988), p. 38.

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expression, new modes of media serve as sources of meaning-making beyond conventional or institutionalized religion. There is a strong relationship between the new media age and popular religious practices. Media popularizes religion. It reshapes the terms of entry to a virtualized public sphere, forcing adaptation. Popular religion deals with how ‘concepts, symbols, and practices associated with “religion” circulate through contemporary society beyond the boundaries of traditional religious institutions’.³¹ Improvements in media technology may constitute the single most important expenditure item on the budgets of many churches and various religious communities. Across the non-Western world, pentecostal/charismatic advertisements appear on billboards, handbills are circulated at gas stations or shopping centres announcing upcoming church events, overhead street banners feature glittering images of charismatic pastors wearing bright silken ties, gold watches and rings, standing alongside their well-groomed wives, television announcements and recorded religious messages circulate across syndicated networks—and these are only a few of the ways in which the media re-publicizes faith for mass attention and consumption. Even in the secularized West, the seemingly irrelevant local clashes over public display of nativity scenes, or the playing of religious music, are indicators of religious pressure on the public sphere, and the careful secularist curation of its borders. In short, modern media play an active role in what counts as religion in contemporary societies. There are several reasons why such a development is inevitable. First, religion, as we have noted, is a mediated phenomenon and that means it entails a process in which the invisible is rendered visible. In other words the realm of invisible power is communicated through some form of revelation that eventually culminates in the divine eliciting responses of worship from those who believe it. The voice of the pentecostal radio preacher promises to bring healing, deliverance, and various forms of breakthroughs to listeners. It is now part of the religious practices of contemporary pentecostal pastors to ask listeners to touch the radio or television screen, as power is mediated to them as a form of pastoral intervention for dealing with existential problems in life. The ‘materialized spirituality’ for this was developed by US televangelist, Oral Roberts, who taught that ‘God’s healing power has points of contact which you do. When you do one of them, you release your faith directly to God, making contact with the power that spins the universe.’³² Secondly, mission, the conscious attempts at proselytization and conversion, is central to most dissenting traditions. Religious traditions seek to share their faith or communicate it to others (sometimes through methods which appear aggressive), and media in its various forms facilitates their mission agenda. Thirdly, ³¹ Lynch, The Sacred in the Modern World, p. 5. ³² Oral Roberts, When You See the Invisible, You Can Do the Impossible (Shippensburg, 2006), p. 66.

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religion is a very dynamic phenomenon and the changes that occur in it lead to the emergence of new religious movements. New religious movements, sometimes unlike the traditional or conservative traditions out of which they emerged, seek legitimacy through new technologies which enable them to remain in touch with globalized modern trends. In other words, new media technologies facilitate religious innovation: in the postmodern context, religious innovation owes much of its character to the power of media. Indeed, it may be argued that pentecostal/charismatic Christianity ‘went global’ precisely because of its extensive use of media.³³

EVANGELICALISM AND COMMUNICATION MEDIA T ECHNOLOGIES All Churches and Christian denominations in the world use one form of mediated religion or another in their liturgical and religious practices, worship, and evangelical and mission outreaches. However, since at least the middle of the twentieth century, Conservative Evangelicalism has stood out as the stream of Christianity that is most associated with modern media, especially in its electronic forms of television, the Internet, and the circulation of portable devices bearing Christian material in the form of sermons, motivational speeches, and gospel music. Jeffrey K. Hadden and Anson Shupe even go as far as to say that evangelical Christians have developed the most sophisticated communications systems on the planet.³⁴ That may be a matter of conjecture, but that conservative evangelicals in particular have been very innovative in the deployment of media resources is not something that any would doubt. CEMs place much emphasis on regeneration, spiritual renewal, holiness, and personal witness to faith. The born-again experience is one of its most critical features and this is a message that is often broadcast on evangelistic crusade platforms in order to carry out ‘the Great Commission’. In the history of twentieth-century Christianity and the rise of CEMs, two main developments occurred, both of them involving the extensive and effective use of modern media technologies. Among the most popular names associated with CEMs are John Stott and James I. Packer (both scholar-preachers and authors) and Billy Graham, who became the twentieth century’s most renowned evangelist. Billy Graham is better known as an evangelistic crusader but he is also credited for founding one of the best known evangelical academic magazines, Christianity Today. The pentecostal contemporary of Billy Graham was Oral Roberts: globalizing media helped ³³ Steve Brouwer, Paul Gifford, and Susan Rose, Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (London and New York, 1996). ³⁴ Hadden and Shupe, Televangelism, p. 40.

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both of them to carry their ministries out on the tides of American influence after the Second World War. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) did not just sponsor their leader to preach the gospel across the world but it also distributed his books and in particular a magazine called Decision, which (by 1980) was being circulated to 24 million readers in America alone.³⁵ Decision carried born-again testimonies from different parts of the world. It was mailed free to all who subscribed to it and helped to spread the Billy Graham form of conservative evangelicalism across the world. The BGEA also used other forms of media technology to communicate the gospel. Heather Murray Elkins describes the BGEA’s ‘truly evangelical use of technology’. In addition to such print media as magazines, newsletters, and books, the BGEA also used radio, television, films, virtual presence through satellites, and user-friendly websites to propagate its brand of evangelicalism. BGEA’s website allows viewers to click into prayer support groups in countries across the world for help.³⁶

PENTECOSTAL PRINT M EDIA We have worked against the backdrop of the historical fact that twentiethcentury evangelical Protestants, working through various agencies such as the Bible Societies, were ardent users of mass media in their evangelistic efforts. This heritage has been embraced by the dissenting Protestant tradition generally, retaining a focus on conversion, but also coming to serve other purposes, especially among the celebrity cultures of neo-pentecostalism. The relationship between pentecostalism and the (new) media goes right back to its origins. In his book To the Ends of the Earth, Allan H. Anderson notes that the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 (outlined in Chapter 7 in this volume by Andy Lord) helped to spread pentecostalism through the production and distribution of the magazine, The Apostolic Faith. This pentecostal magazine is said to have reached an international circulation peak of 50,000 copies by 1908.³⁷ The magazine created the self-fulfilling prophecy that Los Angeles, where Seymour’s Apostolic Faith Mission was located, was the centre of American pentecostalism. Many travelled there to ‘catch the fire’. The magazine carried stories of dramatic conversions to Jesus Christ, and the performance of signs, wonders, and miracles that helped to popularize pentecostal Christianity as a leading form of dissenting Protestantism. Azusa Street ³⁵ Hadden and Shupe, Televangelism, p. 86. ³⁶ Heather Murray Elkins, ‘The Tangible Evangelism of Billy Graham’, in Michael G. Long, ed., The Legacy of Billy Graham: Critical Reflections on America’s Greatest Evangelist (Louisville and London, 2008), p. 18. ³⁷ Allan Heaton Anderson, To the Ends of the Earth: Pentecostalism and the Transformation of World Christianity (Oxford, 2013), p. 45.

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became the centre of a revivalist missionary fervour helping the pentecostal movement to become a major player in ‘the remarkable transformation of world Christianity’ within a relatively short period.³⁸ Almost all early pentecostal movements paid particular attention to the development of a journal culture, magazines such as Confidence (from Sunderland, in Britain), Good News (from North Melbourne, Australia), the Pentecostal Evangel (Springfield, Missouri), and the Latter Rain Evangel (Chicago, Illinois) stitching together the nascent movement into a community of mutual recognition organized around a manifest message of the last days. We have seen how magazines, church newsletters, tracts, and books have historically served the evangelical interests of the church. The pentecostal stream of CEM has taken the reliance on print media to a different level, just as they have also broken out into television, radio, and the use of portable electronic devices. Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, and T. D. Jakes remain some of the contemporary pentecostal leaders whose publications are now displayed as bestsellers even in the bookshops of Ivy League universities such as Yale and Harvard. They focus very much on motivational preaching and empowerment for prosperity in this life. The ‘tent evangelist’ A. A. Allen, known for his healing miracles, was one of the first to add promises of health and wealth to his message. He announced in Philadelphia that he could lay hands on those who contributed $100 to his ministry and pray for them to be wealthy. This message, emphasizing miracles of healing and financial prosperity with accompanying testimonies, was popularized through his Miracle Magazine and was soon incorporated into the messages of many televangelists.³⁹ This tradition of pentecostal book and journal publishing precedes the rise of Oral Roberts, but was developed to a high art from Roberts’ headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma. When book writing was inherited by such successors as Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Kenneth Copeland, and Kenneth Hagin, it became a principal means of disseminating the gospel of prosperity, and the basis for an extensive pentecostal/charismatic publishing industry. Publishers such as Strang Communications, Charisma House, Destiny Image, and the like, while not as large as (say) the concentration of more mainstream CEM publishers in Grand Rapids, Michigan, benefited from an early form of cross-promotion between the televangelist on TV and the now ‘famous’ name in the catalogue. So large was this production that many secular publishers have developed dedicated brand lines (such as Hachette’s ‘Faithwords’) to cater for this global market. These books create a connection between the new forms of televangelism with their emphasis on material prosperity and books that teach the principles of success in life. Most of the earliest books consisted of transcribed sermons. The ‘kingdom principles’ of success, as Pat Robertson called the ³⁸ Anderson, To the Ends of the Earth, p. 47. ³⁹ Brouwer et al., Exporting the American Gospel, p. 24.

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prosperity message, came from a particular way of reading the Bible to make it say what people wanted (an exegetical practice known as ‘proof texting’). The Bible thereby was rendered into a workable guidebook for financial and material breakthroughs as willed for believers by Jesus Christ himself. Parachurch pentecostal organizations too have not avoided the use of media technology in missionary outreaches. In 1951 an Armenian American millionaire dairy farmer based in California, Demos Shakarian, founded the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International (FGBMFI). One of its principal contributions to world Christianity has been through the spread of charismatic renewal into non-pentecostal mainline denominations. Its influential monthly magazine, Voice, carried testimonies of powerful laymen who had been converted to Jesus Christ and been baptized in the Holy Spirit. As Canadian pastor David Courey recalls, FGBMFI became essentially identified with the organized charismatic movement around the world, and its commodified media culture: It was 1976 and there were Full Gospel Businessmen’s breakfasts to attend, Bob Mumford and Judson Cornwall tapes to hear, and especially books from Logos Press. Real Holy Spirit stuff like Dennis Bennett’s Nine O’Clock in the Morning, and particularly Harold Hill’s How to Live Like a King’s Kid, let alone the Pentecostal classics like Smith Wigglesworth’s Ever Increasing Faith from Gospel Publishing House.⁴⁰

Ministers of mainline denominations opposed to charismatic renewal have often expressed reservations about members of the FGBMFI. This is a lay organization that often attracts the middle class and very wealthy individuals (including public office holders) who are influential in society and in their denominations. Without the control of the church, the FGBMFI magazine became a source of information for many lay people who, having encountered the charismatic experience now began to challenge the orderly and staid forms of worship in their denominations, so becoming agitators for change.⁴¹

PENTECOSTAL TELEVANGELISM We cannot discuss pentecostalism and media without focusing some significant attention on televangelism. The word ‘televangelism’ crept into Christian vocabulary from the middle of the 1970s, with the proliferation of North ⁴⁰ David J. Courey, What Has Wittenberg to Do with Azusa?: Luther’s Theology of the Cross and Pentecostal Triumphalism (London, 2015), p. 1. ⁴¹ Andreas Heuser, ‘Charting African Prosperity Gospel Economies’, Hervormde Teologiese Studies 72.4 (2016), pp. 1–9.

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American TV preachers (Bekkering suggests it was first used in a Time magazine piece on Robert Schuller in 1975).⁴² One of the earliest works dedicated to the study of televangelism was Peter G. Horsfield’s Religious Television: The American Experience.⁴³ In that work, Horsfield recognizes that the relationship between CEMs and television was a marriage of convenience. Evangelical Christianity (particularly of the pentecostal kind) needed television to carry out its missionary mandate and within such a democratic dispensation in which economic, social, journalistic, and technological freedoms were cherished, the dominant factor in the dissemination of Christian religious material on television had to do with ‘the economic and functional interests of the commercial television industry’.⁴⁴ According to Horsfield, American television from the 1970s found it ‘advantageous to their own cause to promote’ what he called ‘a minority religious expression’ on television because this particular expression ‘reinforces television’s own economic and mythological intentions’.⁴⁵ The medium was indeed the message. Horsfield then goes on to make the following telling observation that explains how such a ‘minority religious expression’ using media, precisely television, was ‘mainstreamed’ onto the world Christian stage: [Television] has permitted this viewpoint to replace other religious viewpoints, even though these others are more representative of more popular American religious traditions. Television’s managers have exercised a powerful censoring effect on the expression of religious faith in America, giving them consequentially an exaggerated influence over the development of American religious culture and institutions and possibly over the nature of American and even global religious life.⁴⁶

That observation, that American television ‘permitted’ the viewpoint of a ‘minority religious expression’ to dominate the then prevailing traditions, may have made sense at the time Peter Horsfield was undertaking his study. The truth of the matter is that, first and foremost, as a new religious movement, the pentecostal style of religious expression was better suited to the culture of commercial television than the more firmly established mainline church traditions with their liturgically-ordered services. It is revealing that Horsfield recognizes that in 1970s America, it was the ‘more aggressive’ newer conservative evangelical churches (such as the pentecostals) that moved to pay for and use the new medium of television for their programmes.⁴⁷ Secondly, the liberalization of the airwaves that started in the USA always meant that ⁴² Denis J. Bekkering, ‘From “Televangelist” to “Intervangelist”: The Emergence of the Streaming Video Preacher’, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 23:2 (July 2011), p. 101. ⁴³ Peter G. Horsfield, Religious Television: The American Experience (New York and London, 1984). ⁴⁴ Horsfield, Religious Television, p. xiv. ⁴⁵ Horsfield, Religious Television, p. xiv. ⁴⁶ Horsfield, Religious Television, p. xiv. ⁴⁷ Horsfield, Religious Television, p. 6.

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those with the most viable budgets and marked religious passion were going to be able to pay for the use of media. The new pentecostal and charismatic movements possessed the hunger (and eventually the resources) to capture television as the best means of making their movement known. Thirdly, new media are a tool of social influence, offering these new religious movements the opportunity not just to globalize their initiatives but also to influence the way we have come to understand Christianity as a world religion. The television ministry of one of the USA’s televangelism icons, Oral Roberts, started in 1955. In a sense, he carried on in the media savvy tradition of household American names such as Charles G. Finney, Dwight L. Moody, and Billy Sunday, and he had been preceded into television by Rex Humbard.⁴⁸ We are told that Oral Roberts’ television ministry began with a revivalist programme, which was syndicated over sixteen stations. He later closed it down in order to take up a format with more variety to it. By the 1960s, he was reaching more than twenty-seven million people.⁴⁹ Oral Roberts brought healing and pentecostal subculture into homes across the United States and beyond through his weekly national television ministry. Roberts’ Abundant Life magazine gained a circulation of over a million making him (at his death in 2009) one of the best known pentecostals of his generation.⁵⁰ The exponential growth of Roberts’ ministry—which grew to include a university and a variety of other sometimes troubled ventures—has been attributed to a number of factors. Among the most important were his ability to transcend the local through public evangelistic healing crusades, and his innovative use of mass media. If the crusades were the ‘heartbeat of Roberts’ ministry’, Jonathan L. Walton notes, the Healing Waters radio and television broadcasts were its ‘oxygen’, and an essential mechanism for generating income in a voluntarist culture.⁵¹ He acted as the model and catalyst for many successors. Pat Robertson, known for his controversial sociopolitical pronouncements, founded the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in 1960, and Paul Crouch founded the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) in 1973. By the 1990s, spinoffs such as CBN’s Family Channel were reaching fifty million people and were ‘more popular than MTV’.⁵² Through digital satellite television both CBN and TBN have become channels for accessing the pentecostal/charismatic stream of dissenting Protestantism across the world. As William Lobdell has noted with regard to the rise and rise of Paul Crouch’s TBN network, the economics are not unlike that of other media enterprises, with the twist that income is based on donations:

⁴⁸ David J. Marley, Pat Robertson: An American Life (Lanham, 2007), p. 24. ⁴⁹ Horsfield, Religious Television, p. 9. ⁵⁰ Anderson, To the Ends of the Earth, p. 204. ⁵¹ Jonathan L. Walton, Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (New York, 2009), p. 62. ⁵² Marley, Pat Robertson, p. 185.

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Supporters’ tax-deductible donations fund the ministry’s worldwide television network—and keep it growing. Expansion is an overriding goal. Televised appeals seek money for new transmitters, more satellite time and fresh cable deals to bring God’s word to an ever-larger audience. As more people hear the Crouches’ message, more are inspired to send donations. That pays for further expansion, which brings more viewers—and more donations.⁵³

From the 1980s, Majority World successors would enter the same sort of industry, some, such as Edir Macedo, becoming billionaires in the process.⁵⁴ Inevitably, such involvements came with all the problems and regulatory complications associated with such industries, including charges of corruption and sharp dealing. Roberts’ influence also extended in two other key ways. The first was a highly material spirituality. The Roberts evangelistic crusades were distinct from those of people like Billy Graham in that, while Graham focused on the rhetorical transmission of the born-again experience, Roberts promoted that experience through laying hands on the sick. Graham’s ‘proof ’ was the size of his crusades—statistics relating to conversions, references back to Churches, attendees, and the like were assiduously tallied in an almost ‘military like’ manner.⁵⁵ Roberts’ ‘proof ’ came in visible manifestations such as empty wheel chairs, discarded crutches, and emotional testimonies of personal liberation. In the end, while Graham’s format spawned a film industry and television specials, the visible nature of Roberts’ format spawned whole TV networks. Secondly, Roberts became popular through the teaching of a gospel of prosperity using the fundraising formula of ‘sowing and reaping’ and the ‘positive confession’ of faith. Following Allen (and, it has been argued, the teachings of E. W. Kenyon articulated via William Branham),⁵⁶ Oral Roberts became a beacon of the prosperity message. Roberts’ slogan, ‘Expect a Miracle’, was basically directed towards divine healing, but it embodied more than that. It also included the neo-pentecostal emphasis on prosperity and particularly the idea of ‘seed faith’ in which people had to give in return for multiple blessings from God. This is what led to the classification of the movement to which Roberts belonged as the Word of Faith Movement, which literally refers to the practice of positive confession. As Walton explains,

⁵³ William Lobdell, ‘Pastor’s empire built on acts of faith, and cash’, LA Times 23 September 2004, http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-na-paul-crouch-story-20160531-snap-htmlstory.html, accessed 21.12.2017. ⁵⁴ Anderson Antunes, ‘The Richest Pastors In Brazil’, Forbes Magazine 17 January 2013, https:// www.forbes.com/sites/andersonantunes/2013/01/17/the-richest-pastors-in-brazil/#67c0491a5b1e, accessed 20.12.2017. ⁵⁵ Stuart Piggin, ‘Billy Graham in Australia, 1959 – Was it Revival?’, Lucas: An Evangelical History Review 6 (October 1989), p. 4. ⁵⁶ Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York and Oxford, 2013), p. 148.

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Faith is a confession, and the power of faith is made manifest by the tongue. For this reason, believers are encouraged to speak only positively concerning their situation in life, regardless of what their circumstances may be. Faith teachers say that negative speech indicates a lack of faith and resignation to one’s condition.⁵⁷

For the isolated, perhaps needy, individual alone in front of their television, this was a profoundly impacting message. Pentecostal television, emphasizing prosperity through sowing and reaping and positive confession, has thus grown significantly with the spread of the media forms to which they were suited. Names such as Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Bakker, Benny Hinn, T. L. Osborn, and today Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, T. D. Jakes, and many others are primarily associated with North American televangelism, but have huge followings in the Majority World. Indeed, until their ministry came to a scandalous end in the 1980s, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s PTL⁵⁸ television programme was one of the best known in the world. The American scene is not the only one that uses television and other media in the expression of Christianity, but the concentration of media assets and technology there has made it the model and often the mediator of much other practice around the world. The role of advances in media (satellite transmission, Internet streaming, etc.) can be seen from the fact that, in her heyday, the ‘media star’ preacher Aimee Semple McPherson managed to build national notoriety in the USA, and project a church planting movement (the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel) around the world. A vibrant stage performer who used all the tricks of the trade to engage Americans in the ‘old time gospel’, she was the religious embodiment of the ‘star infatuated years that followed World War I’.⁵⁹ By the end of the twentieth century, however, even a relatively localized figure such as T. D. Jakes could preach to more people around the world than whoever heard ‘Sister’, appearing on the cover of Time magazine and drawing over 130,000 people to vacation events in Atlanta, Georgia.⁶⁰ Jakes bears all the hallmarks of the ‘cultural outsider’ (black, born poor, religiously heterodox) which encouraged most televangelists to drive for success in ‘America’s religious broadcasting marketplace’.⁶¹ Dissenting conversionism, healing, and the ‘gospel of prosperity’ are forms of social capital which provide social mobility for the religiously rich but economically and socially marginalized. Brouwer, Gifford, and Rose argue that it is through the related increase in televangelism activities that ‘the American gospel of prosperity’ was exported to the non-Western world. While this may be an overstatement which ignores indigenous influences in the ‘receiving’ cultures, ⁵⁷ Walton, Watch This!, p. 94. ⁵⁸ ‘Praise the Lord’, or ‘People that Love’. ⁵⁹ Edith W. Blumhofer, Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister (Grand Rapids, 1993), p. 16. ⁶⁰ Shayne Lee, T. D. Jakes: America’s New Preacher (New York, 2007), p. 57. ⁶¹ Walton, Watch This!, p. 23.

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there is no doubt that globalized media have played a significant role in creating such forms of highly mediated dissenting revivalism. As Harvey Cox perceptively notes in the subtitle of his book Fire from Heaven, mediated pentecostalism has led to the ‘Reshaping of Christian Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century’.

EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW MEDIA AGE The liberalization of the airwaves within the rising democratic systems of the non-Western world allowed new religious communities to express themselves and establish their presence within the public sphere. The globalizing agenda of CEMs facilitated by their media empires opened up the religious worlds of dissenting Protestants, who freely latched on to the possibilities that new technologies offered for the global insertion of their ideas (and ‘digital selves’) into international public arenas. The old media systems (such as governmentowned and -controlled radio and television stations and newspapers) had marginalized the voices and presence of new Christian movements such as the pentecostal/charismatic communities. The new media—including digital satellite television, cellphones, and tablets that gave access to the Internet— removed many of the barriers that restricted media use by new religious movements. It took a very well-organized state—such as China—to filter free access global information flows, capacities beyond the underfunded and often chaotic regulatory systems of African and South American states. New media, Jeffrey H. Mahan suggests, ‘allow new forms of ritual, new ways to express belief and articulate a religious self ’.⁶² We must not think of new media in terms of completely new ways of communicating. In most cases, digital media is ‘new’ only in the sense that there have been technological improvements with old media given new and improved capacity in terms of function and portability. A classic example of this is the transition from reading the Bible on paper to reading the same material on a phone or tablet/pad. Similarly, in urban contexts, very few people now take notes with pen and ink during preaching (though a notebook under the arm or on the lap during preaching is symbolic of paying close attention during some megachurch services). The ‘messages’ as they are called in contemporary pentecostal settings, are often available on CDs, DVDs, and flash or pen drives. Increasingly, local pastors are confronted by the fact that their congregation members can now simply download or ‘live stream’ sermons from anywhere ⁶² Mahan, Media, Religion and Culture, p. 54.

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in the world. Some attendees simultaneously record services on their phones for later use, and those who cannot be physically present follow or even participate in services through live streaming on the Internet and Facebook. It is not the ‘newness’ of the content which sparks change. Rather, the media themselves change the relationship between the producer and the consumer, and reformulate the encounter between the content and the consumer’s world. Heidi Campbell, who has worked extensively on the intersection between new media (especially the Internet) and religion, identifies five distinctive features of new media: first, they are digital and so subject to manipulation with computers; second, they make possible the modular organization of information into larger units for dissemination; third, they help to automate the creation and manipulation of information with limited human restrictions; fourth, the modules are variable, allowing for the production of multiple versions; and fifth, new media objects are easily translated from one format to another.⁶³ The preaching of prosperity, success, and ‘possibility thinking’ means that pentecostal/charismatic Christian leaders like to think big. In imitation of their North American dissenting cousins, the non-Western versions of this movement now fill public spaces with signs and sounds. Believers, as Birgit Meyer observes, declare their beliefs with stickers on cars and Bible verses on buses, and advertise their programmes on giant billboards modelled after those erected by multinational corporations such as Coca-Cola. Through such signs and media usage, Meyer notes, pentecostal Christianity becomes virtually omnipresent in some parts of the world.⁶⁴ Pentecostalism is a globalizing religious project and media is the midwife that makes this possible. This globalizing aspiration takes place in the context of (to use Mitchell Stephens’ phrase) ‘the rise of the image and the fall of the word’.⁶⁵ While the emptying out of old forms (one of the effects of omnipresent media is that old rhetorics have failed, and words are now literally ‘cheap’) has led to ‘a sense of exhaustion in philosophy, politics and the arts’ in the West; in the Majority World the non-verbal, easily projectable value of images has fuelled a powerful upsurge of charismatic preaching and teaching. I have been struck, for example, by the increased use of icons such as the eagle in contemporary pentecostal iconography and signage. Religious images say a lot about doctrinal beliefs, practices, and aspirations. The traditional symbol of early twentieth-century classical pentecostalism was the dove, symbolizing the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan River by John the Baptist. In most contexts, the dove represents innocence and purity. ⁶³ Mahan, Media, Religion and Culture, pp. 54–5. ⁶⁴ Birgit Meyer, ‘Pentecostalism and Globalization’, in Allan Anderson, Michael Bergunder, Andre Corten, and Cornelis van der Laan, eds., Studying Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods (Berkeley, 2010), pp. 113–30 (119). ⁶⁵ Mitchell Stephens, The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word (New York and Oxford, 1998).

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It is quite a timid bird and weak compared to other bird species, reflecting the pacifism and self-conscious minority status of early pentecostals. Contemporary pentecostals, whether consciously or unconsciously, however, opt for the eagle as a public representation of their aspirations because it stands for strength, renewal, and the power of vision, longevity, and height. This is not the iconography of a holy remnant awaiting the second return of Jesus, but of a global flow projecting itself as a ‘majority-in-waiting’. Whether we are talking about the emphasis on positive confession, sowing tithes and offerings, or preaching of the word, this is a religion of power and self-enablement rather than one of weakness. The eagle is a representation not of those who wait, but those ‘who trust in the Lord’ so as to ‘mount up with wings like eagles’. When they walk they do not faint and when they run they do not grow weary.⁶⁶ The historic transition for this type of spirituality took place in the 1960s, when the charismatic renewal broke out of classical pentecostal subcultures into the mainstream churches. These were churches which had either been E/established or imperial churches, which were now being marginalized by secularism or the postcolonial rejection of the imperial past. ‘Spirit infilling’ for power thus took on political and economic inflections which had not been primary for the ‘end times saints’ of earlier years. As Paul Freston has noted, this has had significant impacts on Majority World politics,⁶⁷ influences which have leached over into the West in alliances which would have appeared odd to early pentecostals.⁶⁸ In the power of the Holy Spirit, contemporary pentecostal prosperity preachers teach, the believer is a person of authority who must believe in his or her ability to ‘speak positive things into being’. To that end the posture of prayer with clasped hands is often replaced with a fisted hand or open hands stretched towards heaven in expectation of ‘power from above’ in times of need. Such semiotic gestures have transferred the media presence of dissenting Christianity, much as the Black Power salute did for elements of the American civil rights movement. In the use of new media by religious communities, Mahan makes a telling observation that is very true of the transition that contemporary pentecostal/ charismatic movements have made from the margins. One area of influence is in corporate worship. Pentecostal worship, because of its being rooted in the experience of the Spirit, tends to be spontaneous, expressive, exuberant, and therefore more ‘entertaining’ than the liturgically ordered traditions. The altar of the Anglo-Catholic or episcopal traditions and the pulpit of the mainline ⁶⁶ Isaiah 40:31 (New International Version). ⁶⁷ Paul Freston, Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America (New York and Cambridge, 2004), pp. 16ff. ⁶⁸ For instance, the fusion of Baptist charismaticism with Latter Rain and Reconstructionism. See John Harrison on the Logos Foundation in Australia, in his ‘The Logos Foundation: The Rise and Fall of Christian Reconstructionism in Australia’, University of Queensland E-Press, https:// espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:8027/HARRISON_eprint_.pdf, accessed 21.12.2017.

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Protestant traditions have been ‘removed’ from contemporary Pentecostal churches. The space opened up represents a more democratic orientation towards personal movement. When the Spirit falls what happens is often akin to drunken behaviour (Acts 2) rather than restraint. In some versions of neo-pentecostalism (such as during Rodney Howard Brown’s ‘Toronto Blessing’ campaigns) screaming, running, shouting, jumping, rolling on the floor, dancing, or simply lying prostrate (‘soaking’) are some of the ways in which the Spirit is supposed to manifest. In virtually all charismaticized settings (whether pentecostal or mainline), forms of spontaneity in worship (such as raised arms) take place within settings conditioned by the singing of contemporary music and the use of ‘jazz’ instruments. This is a focus on the religious sensibilities of young people, rather than the archaic liturgical formulae in former establishment cultural productions as the Book of Common Prayer. In the postmodern context, young people cherish their freedom; in fact, they demand it, entailing a rejection of the Christianity of their grandparents.⁶⁹ When the contemporary Pentecostal pastor or worship leader appears in fashionable clothes with a cordless microphone in hand (or taped to his/her cheek) and preaches from PowerPoint notes, the performance and religious culture resonates better within the world in which the upwardly mobile young people of the late twentieth century have been raised. In Africa, one classical Pentecostal denomination, the Church of Pentecost, has been forced to relax its head covering regulations for women because the young women wanted to attend services with well-groomed hairdos. The Church of Pentecost has a strong holiness ethic and for years resisted the calls to make its services attractive to young people by relaxing a dress code that also prevented women from wearing trousers/pants to church. When the Church of Pentecost spread to other Western countries, the African women there did not need permission to come to church in jeans. In those cultures it was normal. Today (although it retains its community orientation) the Church of Pentecost has responded to the exit of large numbers of young people to new neo-pentecostal churches by becoming a more open classical pentecostal tradition in which many of its conservative rules have been relaxed. Attendant on this has been a simultaneous rise in the use of social and other forms of digital media.⁷⁰ The skilful and efficient appropriation of modern mass media by contemporary pentecostals is very striking, resulting in a professional approach which remains unparalleled when it comes to the use of media in church life. In some settings, Churches such as Hillsong are recognized as leaders in the broader

⁶⁹ Donald E. Miller and A. M. Miller, ‘Understanding Generation X: Values, Politics, and Religious Commitments’, in Richard W. Flory and Donald E. Miller, Gen X Religion (London and New York, 2000), p. 1; Mark McCrindle and Emily Wolfinger, The ABC of XYZ: Understanding the Global Generations (Kensington, 2009), pp. 40ff. ⁷⁰ Jonathan D. James, A Moving Faith: Mega Churches Go South (Thousand Oaks, 2015), p. 78.

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music and creative industries,⁷¹ and indeed the search for the ‘crossover artist’ has been a guiding principle in many media corporations. The success of Brooke Fraser, for example, or U2, or Switchfoot, has been rare, many crossover artists being seen as ‘too Christian for the market, and too secular for the Church’. In some cases, as with the fall of the megachurch pastor Kong Hee in Singapore, or corruption among Universal Church of the Kingdom of God televangelist-politicians in Brazil, attempts to fund crossover programmes have proved deleterious for the CEM cause.⁷² The new media, then, has been both indispensable in the visibility and globalization of contemporary pentecostalism, and fundamental in its reshaping. In the words of Meyer: Traveling crusades, the circulation of books, tapes, and DVDs and the beaming of televangelist radio and television programs have been central to capturing broad audiences. Likewise, there are a host of Pentecostal posters, banners, sign boards, stickers, and sounds that index the presence and power of Pentecostal churches, creating a heavily Pentecostal environment, especially in urban space but also spreading into the countryside. . . . Media not only make possible the spread of a church beyond the confines of a congregation but also feature as signs of technological mastery and up-to-dateness.⁷³

The religious presupposition underpinning the extensive use of media is the theological understanding that it is divinely providential for the church to use these resources in order to ‘cover the earth with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea’.

MEDIA TECHNOLOGY A ND CORPORATE WORSHIP One area in which media have transformed the nature and religious culture of Christianity is through the use of technology in worship. Carefully controlled lighting, acoustics, architecture, and human ecologies are embraced for their ⁷¹ Matthew Wade, ‘At Hillsong, Religious Expression is a Global Corporate Brand’, The Conversation 4 July 2014, https://theconversation.com/at-hillsong-religious-expression-is-aglobal-corporate-brand-28765, accessed 20.12.2017; Graham Richardson, quoted in Mark P. Hutchinson, ‘ “Up the Windsor Road”: Social Complexity, Geographies of Emotion and the Rise of Hillsong’, in Tanya Riches and Tom Wagner, eds., The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon The Waters (New York, 2017), p. 55. ⁷² ‘Singapore pastor jailed for using church funds to support wife’s singing career’, The Guardian 20 November 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/20/singaporepastor-jailed-misusing-50m-church-funds, accessed 20.12.2017; Ilana Van Wyk, ‘ “All Answers”: On the Phenomenal Success of a Brazilian Pentecostal Church in South Africa’, in Martin Lindhart, ed., Pentecostalism in Africa: Presence and Impact of Pneumatic Christianity in Postcolonial Societies (Leiden and Boston, 2015), p. 146. ⁷³ Meyer, ‘Pentecostalism and Globalization’, in Anderson et al., Studying Pentecostalism, p. 123.

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ability to mediate a sense of divine presence and transform worship into an ‘out-of-this-world’ experience. The use of screens and PowerPoint to facilitate both singing and preaching is now standard for all contemporary Pentecostal churches. Among megachurches, large choirs are supplied with the requisite number of microphones and worship leaders work with professional sound engineers, producers, choreographers, and so on, to ensure that the music is excellent and the ‘spiritual affect’ controlled. At points in the services of contemporary pentecostals, various instruments can be used to create a sense of divine presence such as the sounding of the trumpet, manipulation of keyboard sounds, or the beating of the drums to create a certain artificial but desired effect. In this sense, Meyer notes, ‘the media are far more than just instruments; they are substantial ingredients through which the service is produced as a “thick” sensational form that aims at involving participants with bodies and minds.’⁷⁴ In this way, whether we are talking about the use of microphones or musical instruments, new media are embraced by contemporary pentecostals and incorporated into church life as new technology for the mediation of a sense of ‘divine’ power and presence. This has been perhaps one of the greatest contributions of pentecostal (d)issent to world Christianity. Music videos are widely available in portable storage devices and on the Internet, which is proactively used as a milieu for teaching local congregations to recognize and adopt the work of major ‘artists’. The ‘click’ traffic registered on songs such as Hillsong’s ‘Behold’ (which at the time of writing had drawn more than twenty million viewers on YouTube) points to a worldwide network of local interest and self-alignment. American and other gospel songs are now used in virtually all pentecostal/charismatic contexts. The fact that even in non-Western charismatic church contexts services and celebrations are delivered in English makes the globalization of musical forms easier. Youthful and energetic Christian populations embrace charismatic worship not only because it is entertaining and inspiring, but it also provides the ultimate sense of belonging to a global movement that is changing the way Christianity is understood and expressed. The fact that the majority medium is English brings with it the added cachet of international mobility (and so the promise of prosperity). And yet as Quentin J. Schultze has pointed out, the common assumption that the most effective worship in the contemporary world is that which is visually augmented with presentational technologies may be false.⁷⁵ Many hail the new communication technologies for their ability to enhance and enliven the corporate worship atmosphere, but as Schultze argues, communication technologies can contribute to confusion ⁷⁴ Meyer, ‘Pentecostalism and Globalization’, in Anderson et al., Studying Pentecostalism, p. 124. ⁷⁵ Quentin J. Schultze, High-Tech Worship? Using Presentational Technologies Wisely (Grand Rapids, 2004).

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just as they can help to overcome it.⁷⁶ Further, in a media-soaked environment, there is the danger that the ‘churn’ in worship material may render future audiences ‘tone deaf ’ to creative change.

INTERNET AND O TH ER FORMS OF S OCIAL MEDIA Dissenting Protestant movements were quick to embrace the World Wide Web for the opportunities it offered beyond radio and television for religious purposes. They now mediate religious experiences online and have adapted to the reality of virtual culture as part of Christian mission and globalization. The use of the Internet, I have argued elsewhere, adds status to a religious organization’s presence and affirms its global relevance, offering opportunities to stay connected to the world.⁷⁷ The contribution of the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) standard to the globalization of Christianity has been enormous. In many parts of the Majority World, after all, economies have leapt over older ‘wired’ systems and enthusiastically embraced wireless technologies.⁷⁸ This has had implications for the use of mobile phones and their associated applications with the rapid increase in the use of SMS (Short Message Services) and WhatsApp. In an essay titled ‘Religious Discourse in the New Media’, Rotimi Taiwo has discussed social media use among Nigerian pentecostals for communal bonding, proselytization, and fulfilment of Christian social responsibilities.⁷⁹ The advantages that SMS and WhatsApp offer include the ability to send encrypted messages to masses of people within and without particular circles of influence. Mobile telephony reinforces beliefs about the ‘omnipresent’ nature of the Holy Spirit. Computer-mediated communication through cellphones even makes possible the holding of prayer meetings without physically assembling on church premises. In this sense, digital media help ‘realize’ (or make ‘manifest’, a term with significant theological freight in charismatic circles) the invisible spirituality implicit in neo-pentecostal aspirations.

⁷⁶ Schultze, High-Tech Worship?, p. 22. ⁷⁷ J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, ‘ “We Are On the Internet”: Contemporary Pentecostalism in Africa and the New Culture of Online Religion’, in Rosalind Hacket and Benjamin Soares, eds., New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2015), pp. 157–70. ⁷⁸ Carinna Friesen, ‘Mobile Musics, Mobile Technologies: Engaging the Cell Phone in a West African Context’, MUSICultures 43.1 (2016), pp. 16–17. ⁷⁹ Rotimi Taiwo, ‘Religious Discourse in the New Media: A Case Study of Pentecostal Discourse Communities of SMS Users in Southwestern Nigeria’, in Rosalind I. J. Hackett, New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa (Bloomington, 2015), pp. 190–204.

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New forms of social media are also used to serve purposes such as the sending of devotionals, encrypted personal motivational statements, prayer lines, and even video recordings of sermons and other devotionals to those interested in them. This is point-to-point, personalized media rather than broadcast. In several African Pentecostal churches, it is now standard practice for whole church services and prayer sessions to be sent out to people who, for some reason, cannot be physically present. I focus on the cellphone here because although these religious services are equally accessed through computers, the portability of the cellphone makes it easier for people to receive and participate in pentecostal services anywhere. Additionally the mobile telephony used for religious purposes has converged on areas previously dominated by radio and television, making possible an extensive network of people, communities, and their leaders in a world in which the virtual church has now become a non-mythical reality. The use of SMS within pentecostal settings in Africa and elsewhere, for example, allows preachers to solicit feedback through phone-ins and messaging. The various types of social media we discuss here facilitate the experience of multi-presence in connected networks of churches, enabling globally networked pentecostal/charismatic communities to effectively make their influence felt in the same services through technologically easy, omnipresent wireless, satellite, and high-speed broadband facilities. For African and Asian diasporic communities, this enables a state of ‘living between’ in transnational spaces where ideas and influences can ‘flow’ and be negotiated.

MEDIA AND PENTECOSTAL TRANSNATIONALISM In the study of dissenting Protestantism and religious globalization, contemporary pentecostal/charismatic Christianity offers a special lens with which to appreciate its dynamics. Pentecostal/charismatic churches are often organized as global megachurches, or alternatively through distributed apostolic networks, that address masses of followers through the prolific use of media technologies.⁸⁰ Other contemporary movements around the world have not only been inspired by American uses of television and other media but also by the publications of their leaders. In other words, what we are describing is no longer a North American phenomenon. Pastor Mensa Otabil of Ghana, Matthew Ashimolowo, a Nigerian based in the UK, and Ray McCauley of South Africa are all contemporary pentecostal leaders whose book publications are widely distributed across the African continent and beyond. More than that, ⁸⁰ Meyer, ‘Pentecostalism and Globalization’, in Anderson et al., Studying Pentecostalism.

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contemporary pentecostal movements are very much transnational in nature. World evangelistic crusades, whether they focus on healing motivation or prosperity, are no longer the preserve of the white American pentecostal preacher. Oral Roberts, T. L. Osborn, Benny Hinn, and others are all very well-known Americans who have visited non-Western contexts to hold mass crusades. German evangelist Reinhard Bonnke remains ‘undoubtedly the most popular Pentecostal preacher in Africa, who is now in his seventies and still “without honor” in his own country’.⁸¹ Under his successor, Daniel Kolenda, ‘Christ for all Nations’ Crusades draw hundreds of thousands of Africans nightly. However, the transnational nature of the movement and the wide use of media mean that religious personalities and products from nonWestern contexts now circulate as widely as those that used to reach the global South from the global North. As Hutchinson has noted in Chapter 14 of this volume, immigrant churches in Europe and North America (including Canada) are predominantly those established by pentecostals from the non-Western world. The result of an intrinsic engagement with new media is commodification. Books and electronic resources containing recorded sermons and motivational messages are displayed within the precincts of these immigrant churches. A classic example of the transnational nature of contemporary pentecostal culture as facilitated by the media may be found in the ministry of Bishop Dag Heward-Mills of the Lighthouse Chapel International in Ghana. This is a contemporary Pentecostal church headquartered in Africa, but one which cannot by any means be described as a local initiative. Lighthouse Chapel International has branches in many parts of the world, with three of its largest congregations in London, Geneva, and Johannesburg. In addition to his role as founder and General Overseer of the Lighthouse Chapel International, Bishop Heward-Mills also travels extensively as an international evangelist. Virtually every series of sermons he has preached is published in-house as a book and distributed from his Ghana base all over the world. Sunday Adelaja of the Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for all Nations (Ukraine) is, similarly, a prolific publisher, while pastors such as Joseph Prince, Phil Pringle, and others, turn over significant sums from their book and audio productions, often through dedicated ministries such as the Australian-based ‘Seam of Gold’. Mostly, however, their productions (from Smith Wigglesworth’s Ever Increasing Faith onwards) consist of transcribed sermons often edited by personal secretaries or ghost writers, and printed as books for sale to their own followers. The success of books by Bill Hybels or Bobbie Houston has been built on their construction of alternative conferences and network ‘publics’. Hillsong’s year after year success at the top of the Australian music ⁸¹ Allan H. Anderson, ‘The Pentecostal Gospel, Religion and Culture in African Perspective’, in Clifton R. Clarke, ed., Pentecostal Theology in Africa (Eugene, 2014), p. 165.

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charts has owed much to the timing of new album releases around their massive conferences (Hillsong Conference and ‘Colour Conference’) in Sydney and increasingly around the world. Their impact on the music chart data in the small Australian market was such that it impelled the Australian Recording Industry Association to re-categorize their music so it would not overshadow local artists.⁸²

CONCLUSIO N We have discussed the fact that there is a strong intersection between dissenting Protestantism and media in the world today, with media contributing tremendously to the globalization of religion. Within the Protestant tradition, it can be argued that those who use the media most organically are the pentecostal/charismatic prosperity-preaching megachurches and their celebrity pastors. In this dissenting version of Protestantism that we have labelled as pentecostal/charismatic, the church auditorium (as it is normally called) is a virtual television studio. From that location worship services and motivational seminars stream live on the Internet and recordings take place for broadcast on radio and television. Those who are mobile at the time follow and participate in church activities on their cellphones and tablets, and in many cases are even able to fulfil tithing obligations through electronic payment arrangements. During services, television production cameras and soundboards are placed at strategic locations and with screens on every side the technical crew parade the auditorium-filling services, making sure that recording versions are available for purchase immediately after. It is a truly technologically driven form of Christianity that is at home with using media for a process of globalization that has helped to establish the place of this new form of Protestantism within Christianity as the representative face of the faith in the world today. What I have described here is well summarized by the ‘brand vision’ of the Potter’s House contemporary Pentecostal church led by Bishop T. D. Jakes: ‘to become a global voice, along a lifelong journey of spiritual and economic hope, encouragement and empowerment to people locally, nationally and around the world’.⁸³

⁸² Bernard Zuel, ‘Hillsong beats Daniel Johns to number one on ARIA chart – but no one’s celebrating’, Sydney Morning Herald 3 June 2015, http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/ hillsong-beats-daniel-johns-to-number-one-on-aria-chart–but-no-ones-celebrating-20150603-ghfl34. html, accessed 20.12.2017. ⁸³ Walton, Watch This!, p. 112.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Allan H., To the Ends of the Earth: Pentecostalism and the Transformation of World Christianity (Oxford, 2013). Bekkering, Denis J., ‘From “Televangelist” to “Intervangelist”: The Emergence of the Streaming Video Preacher’, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 23.2 (July 2011), pp. 101–17. Blumhofer, Edith W., Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister (Grand Rapids, 1993). Bowler, Kate, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York and Oxford, 2013). Brouwer, Steve, Paul Gifford, and Susan Rose, Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (London and New York, 1996). Clarke, Clifton R., ed., Pentecostal Theology in Africa (Eugene, 2014). Freston, Paul, Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America (New York and Cambridge, 2004). Hackett, Rosalind I. J., ed., New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa (Bloomington, 2015). Hadden, Jeffrey K. and Anson Shupe, Televangelism: Power and Politics on God’s Frontier (New York, 1988). Herbert, David, ‘Why Has Religion Gone Public Again? Towards a Theory of Media and Religious Re-publicization’, in Gordon Lynch, Jolyon Mitchell, and Anna Strhan, eds., Religion, Media and Culture (London and New York, 2012). Heuser, Andreas, ‘Charting African Prosperity Gospel Economies’, Hervormde Teologiese Studies 72.4 (2016), pp. 1–9. Hoover, Stewart M. and Knut Lundby, eds., Rethinking Media, Religion and Culture (London and New Delhi, 1997). Horsfield, Peter G., Religious Television: The American Experience (New York and London, 1984). James, Jonathan D., A Moving Faith: Mega Churches Go South (Thousand Oaks, 2015). Lee, Shayne, T. D. Jakes: America’s New Preacher (New York, 2007). Lindhart, Martin, ed., Pentecostalism in Africa: Presence and Impact of Pneumatic Christianity in Postcolonial Societies (Leiden and Boston, 2015). Long, Michael G., ed., The Legacy of Billy Graham: Critical Reflections on America’s Greatest Evangelist (Louisville and London, 2008). Mahan, Jeffrey H., Media, Religion and Culture: An Introduction (London and New York, 2014). Marley, David J., Pat Robertson: An American Life (Lanham, 2007). Meyer, Birgit, ‘Pentecostalism and Globalization’, in Allan Anderson, Michael Bergunder, Andre Corten, and Cornelis van der Laan, eds., Studying Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods (Berkeley, 2010). Meyer, Birgit, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh, 1999). Morgan, David, The Lure of Images: A History of Religion and Visual Media in America (London and New York, 2007). Nord, David P., Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York and Oxford, 2004).

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Richard W. Flory and Donald E. Miller, Gen X Religion (London and New York, 2000). Riches, Tanya and Tom Wagner, eds., The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon The Waters (New York, 2017). Roberts, D. A., ‘ “Language to Save the Innocent”: Reverend L. Threlkeld’s Linguistic Mission’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 94.2 (December 2008), pp. 107–25. Rood, Paul W., ‘The Far East Broadcasting Company’, in George Thomas Kurian and Mark A. Lamport, eds., Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States, vol. 5 (Lanham, 2016). Sanneh, Lamin, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, 2009). Shultze, Quentin, Christianity and the Mass Media in America: Toward a Democratic Accommodation (East Lansing, 2003). Walton, Jonathan L., Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (New York, 2009).

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Index Aberhart, William 73 Aborigines Inland Mission 422 Abrams, Minnie Florence 421 Abundant Life Magazine 508 Act of Toleration xiv, 1 Adegbola, Ebenezer Adeolu 286 Adelaja, Sunday 52, 366, 519 Afghanistan 474 Africa 56, 57, 85, 137, 139, 143, 149, 158, 221, 243, 249, 263, 281, 292, 350, 356, 360, 369, 383, 387, 389, 473 et passim; Algeria 501; Bamalaki movement 280; Berber peoples 501; Central 386, 397; Christianity in 27, 30, 132, 166, 199; Congo, Inquiry 382; decolonization 339, 378, 379, 386, 396, 404–5, 414, 419, 430–2, 441, 450, 469; East 345; economy 353; evangelism 53; Gold Coast 202; Islam in 360, 485; literature 371, 378, 414; migration 52, 195, 285, 439, 475, 480, 481, 518; nationalism 263, 282; North 328, 361; partition 329; politics 9, 282, 367; polygamy 388; population 27; preaching traditions 192; secularization 366; slavery 381, 382, 500; spirit movements 239–42; theology 145, 147, 161, 287, 328, 340, 361, 440; women’s theology 162; traditional medicine 387, 389, 392; and see by country name; East African Revival; nationalism Africa Inland Mission 450 African Enterprise (NGO) 283 African Independent Pentecostal Church 348 African Initiated Churches xviii, 29, 30, 137, 155–8, 200–1, 205, 221, 240–2, 263–6, 284, 335, 340, 348, 359, 362, 365, 366, 372, 404, 419, 430, 432, 440, 454; Aladura 29, 266 African Methodist Episcopal Church 309, 436 African National Congress 70, 77, 88 Afrikaners 62; exceptionalism 70 Agnes, Mary 426 Airhart, Phyllis 71 Alcock, Alan 227 All Asia Mission Consultation, Seoul, 1973 471 Allen, Asa Alonso ‘A. A.’ 505

Allen, Roland 449 Allenby, Edmund Henry Hynman 101 American Bible Society 91 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions 316, 358 American Board of Missions 423 American Civil Liberties Union 177 American Enterprise Institute 178 American Methodist mission, Liberia 201 Amin Dada, Idi 282 Aminu, Enoch 363 Anabaptists 282, 318; and see Mennonites Annacondia, Carlos 45, 483 Angelus Temple, Los Angeles 187 Anglican Evangelical Group Movement 96 Anglicanism 21, 27, 39, 69, 104, 181, 228, 234–6, 267, 471, 492, 513; Anglo-Catholic tradition 96, 123, 279; in Africa 41; charismatic renewal 231, 233; Church of England xiii–xv, 34, 81, 87, 281; Church of Ireland 1, 181; Episcopal Church (USA) xvi, 2, 29, 41, 189, 201, 304; Evangelical Party 96, 281; fresh expressions 299; global 323; human sexuality 41, 166; India 270; Lambeth conference 41; liberal evangelicals 96; London 234; missions 400; ordination of women 189; Puritans xviii, 281, 398; Scotland 115; spirituality 233; Sydney 176; USA 143, 189; and see by country name Angus, Samuel 94 Anti-colonialism 262, 269, 271, 248, 262, 350, 390, 391, 391, 392, 396, 406, 413; and see imperialism; nationalism apartheid struggle and Churches 83; and see South Africa Apostolic church networks 234, 252, 323 Apostolic Faith Mission (Australia) 187 Apostolic Faith Mission (SA) 420 Apostolic Faith Mission (USA) 239, 419 Apostolic Faith, The (Magazine) 229, 504 Appadurai, Arjun 12 Appasamy, Aiyadurai Jesudasen 346 Archer, John Kendrick 72 Argentina 135, 215, 357; Buenos Aires 215 Armour, Philip Danforth 171 Arulappan, John Christian 237 Asbury Theological Seminary 119

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Index

Ashimolowo, Matthew 52, 194, 518 Asia 138–9, 338, 357, 362, 444; biblical interpretation 134, 146; Christianity in 20, 137–8, 145, 164; decolonization 471; migration 518; Southeast 132; theology 347, 360, 362; universities 57 Asia Pacific Theological Association 349 Asia Theological Centre (Singapore) 362 Asian Center for Development and CrossCultural Studies 483 Asian Initiated Churches 158, 269, 372, 433, 444, 454, 482 Assemblies of God 232, 308, 419; South Korea 208; UK 231; and by country name Association for Theological Education in Southeast Asia 347 Atlantic Press (publisher) 396 Auburn Theological Seminary 103 Australia 1–2, 54, 56–7, 63, 66, 80, 81, 84, 87–8, 93–4, 96, 116–17, 120, 183, 185, 187, 189, 190, 194, 227, 298, 353, 355, 357, 360, 418, 422, 473; Billy Graham crusade (1959) 53; Brazilians in 254–5; indigenous peoples 159, 337, 351, 357, 360, 418, 422–4, 429, 432, 494; Korean churches 474; megachurches 251; migration 254; ordination debates 189; racism 418, 424; Revivalism 186; and see Hillsong Church; Lamb, William; and by name Australian Christian Churches 252 Australian Council of Social Services 82 Axiom Church, New York 316 Azusa Street Revival 225–6, 229, 230–1, 237, 239, 299, 418, 420; and see Revivalism Back to Jerusalem Movement 474 Baglio, Antonio 485 Baha’ism 97, 472 Bakht Singh movement 433 Bakker, Jim 505, 510 Balokole see East African Revival Bandung Conference 285 Baptist Churches xiv, 8, 45, 64, 67, 70–1, 79, 95, 100, 105, 177, 182, 189–90, 231, 290, 298, 304, 314, 331, 345, 430; charismatic 30; in Africa 30; in Canada 75; in the USA 49, 447; Latin America 215; missions 382, 471; and politics 72; racism 433; social gospel 69; Taiwan 471; World Alliance 13; and see by title Baptist General Conference (USA) 471 Baptist Missionary Society xv, 412, 431 Baptist Union of New Zealand 72 Barnett, Paul William 117 Barth, Karl 39, 110, 113, 122 Barton, Edmund 94

Basel Mission 334 Basilides 328 Bauckham, Richard J. 113, 191 Baxter, Richard 398 Bebbington, David 62, 64, 412; quadrilateral 281 Bediako, Kwame 286, 346 Bee, Dollie 381 Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church) 109 Belgium – Empire 383 Bell, Robert Holmes ‘Rob’ 254 Benin – voodoo 365 Bennett, Dennis 232, 506 Bennett, Mary 423, 424 Berger, Peter Ludwig 5, 7, 12 Bergoglio, Jorge Mario (Pope Francis I) 245, 368 Berlin Conference, 1884 329 Berlin Congress, 1966 219 Bertholet, Alfred 105 Bethel Church – Jesus culture 290; School of Supernatural Ministry 349 Bethel College, Topeka, Kansas 349 Bethel Revival Temple (Morogoro, Tanzania) 57 Bethesda Pentecostalism (SA) 284 Bhagavad Gita 500 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 451 Bible 32, 56, 94, 109, 112, 117, 118, 123, 132, 134, 141, 142, 144, 150, 164–5, 167, 175, 366, 494, 500; anthropology 122, 123, 125; authority 38, 93, 112, 166–7, 369, 439, 495; bible societies 91, 496, 497, 504; civil rights 41; colporteurs 459, 460; commentaries 134; digital 127; ecology 165; and embodiment 93, 122, 124, 125; feminism 136, 187, 437; gender 370, 373; higher criticism 38, 57, 92, 94, 95, 100, 105, 124, 174; human sexuality 140, 166; indigenization 133, 135, 144, 141; interpretation 26, 36, 37–41, 46, 123, 91–127, 133, 135–6, 140, 144, 162, 164–5, 191, 204–5, 220, 229, 241, 261, 264, 437, 439, 440, 441, 480, 506, (African) 125, 137, (Asian) 125, 137–8, 146, 149, (Oceania) 138; literacy 449, 495, 497; Majority World 134, 141–2, 165, 167, 492, 493; miracles 228; politics 161; in popular culture 110, 127–8, 167; preaching 123, 127; publishing 110, 121, 123, 127, 493, 504; rabbinic interpretations 118, 122, 125; reading communities 159, 162, 245, 412; reception 116–17, 127, 137, 157, 275;

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Index translation 28, 131–2, 135, 143, 144, 350, 351, 453, 494, 498; versions: (Africana) 137, (digital) 496, 511, (Earth Bible) 138, (Green Bible) 121, (King James) 126, (Red Letter) 121, (Revised Standard) 91, 110; and see indigenization; preaching; The Woman’s Bible Bible Colleges 150, 286, 349: of Wales 54; short-term 106; and see Guinness, Henry Grattan Bible Conference Movement 99 Bible Standard Churches (USA) 187 Bible Study Fellowship 126 Bible Training Institute, Glasgow 331 Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, 216, 417, 504; technology, film 54; 1959 crusade, Australasia 53; worldwide 53; and see Graham Jr., William Franklin ‘Billy’ Bingham, Geoffrey Cyril 282 Binney Thomas 180, 182 Binyon Church movement 255 Biola University 487 Birch, Charles 291 Bishop Tucker College 280 Black, Hugh 174 Blake, Lillie Devereux 91 Bland, Salem Goldworth 72–3 Blomberg, Craig L. 113 Blyden, Edward Wilmot 327, 337 Bob Jones College 107 Boddy, Alexander Alfred 231, 505 Boesak, Allan Aubrey 140, 149 Boesak, Willa 149 Boff, Leonardo 287 Bonar, Horatio 176 Bonino, José Miguez 135 Bonnke, Reinhard 54–5, 519 Booth, Herbert 185 Booth, William 185 Booth-Clibborn, Arthur 185 Booth-Clibborn, Catherine (Kate) 185 Borg, Marcus J. 118 Bosch, David 216 Bottari, Pablo 45 Bourdieu, Pierre Felix 259, 261–2, 264, 266, 277, 281, 289, 293, 328 Boutwood, Arthur 97 Braide, Garrick Sokari 368 Branham, William 509 Brawner, Mina Ross 187–8, 420 Brazil 439, 444, 462, 481; megachurches in 51; missionaries from 55, 477, 481, and see Latin America; televangelists 509, 515 Brentwood Baptist Church 308 Brethren movement 304, 386, 391, 400, 501; Scotland 111

525

Briggs, Charles 94 Bright, Ursula Mellor 91 Bright, William R. ‘Bill’ 58 Britain see United Kingdom British Council of Churches 80 British Empire/Commonwealth – breakup 84; colonies xv, xviii, 16, 63, 84, 93–5, 99, 111, 447, 452; Commonwealth 83, 85, 326, 418; Imperial Federation 93; Orientalism 451; and see by country nameBritish Israelism 105 British Methodist Conference 302 Britton, Anna D. 187 Bromby, John 94 Brouwer, Steve 480 Brown, Olympia 91 Bruce, Frederick Fyvie 110–11, 114, 123, 177, 215 Brunner, Heinrich Emil 110 Buck, Pearl S. 427 Buddhism 46, 207, 260, 274, 493 Bultmann, Rudolf Karl 39, 111, 114, 115, 118, 121, 129; influence 113, 116, 174 Bunyan, John 497 Burke, Edmund xvi Burley, Norman 369 Burma, see Myanmar Buthelezi, Manas 286 C3 (‘Christian City’) Churches 321 Cabrera, Omar 45 Cadman, S. Parkes 174 Calvary Temple, Townsville 252 Calvin College, Michigan 176 Calvin, John 33, 317, 495; Calvinism, and missionaries 28, 176–7, 228, 362; cessationism 28, 33, 37 Cameroons, The 397 Campbell, Reginal John 96 Campolo, Tony 121 Campus Crusade for Christ (CRU) 58 Canada 1, 8, 44, 53–4, 63, 66, 69–70, 72, 78, 85, 86, 88, 94–5, 117, 149, 176, 185–6, 298, 353, 360; and indigenous peoples 84, 159, 424; Liquor Control Act 67; Presbyterianism in xvii; Québec 86; Vancouver 187 Capitalism 219, 262, 283; social capital 477; spiritual capital 270, 352, 357; and see Modernity Carey Press 412 Carey, William 131, 227 Carson, Donald Arthur 191 Carson, Rachel 121 Cary, Joyce 397, 404, 405, 414

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Index

Castellanos, César 51, 195 Castro, Emilio 446 Castro, Fidel 215 Catholic Apostolic Church xviii, 266 Central University College (Accra, Ghana) 57 Centre for Christianity in the non-Western World, Edinburgh 286 Chaga people 345 Chalmers, Thomas 176, 304 Chan, Frances 254 Chapin, Augusta Jane 91 Chardin, Teilhard de 291 Charisma House Publishers 505 charismatic renewal 85, 108, 118, 155, 222, 227, 232–4, 239–41, 245, 250, 251, 253, 254, 267, 288, 292, 357, 320, 330, 333, 334, 342, 356, 364, 374, 413, 420, 445, 447, 462, 469, 472, 478, 482, 493, 499, 502, 504, 506, 511, 512; scholarship 119; youth 514 Che’eng Ching-yi 330, 331 Chiang Kai-shek 450 Chicago Divinity School 103 Chicago, Illinois 49, 191; World Columbian Exposition 1893 170 Chile 132, 135, 162, 420, and see Latin America Chilembwe, John 431 China xvii, 55, 139, 149, 150, 158, 328, 462, 467, 466–7, 469, 472, 474, 511; bible interpretation 149; Christianity in 37, 163, 330–1, 343, 368, 449; Cultural Revolution 148–9; diaspora 248, 278; Manchuria 276–7, 466–7; missionaries 475, 483; missions 351, 466, 477, 482, 501; nationalism 449; overseas students 479, 481; Peoples Republic 474; traditional spirituality 157, 338, 365; Rape of Nanjing 140 Chirgwin, Arthur 393, 394 Cho, David (missionary) 416, 431, 471 Cho, David Yonggi (pastor) 50–1, 207–10, 213–14, 221, 246, 268; and see theology – blessing; Yoido Full Gospel Church, Seoul Choi, Jasil 208 Christ for All Nations (Organization) 54, 188; Crusades 519; and see Bonnke, Reinhard Christendom 64, 75, 76, 222, 446; postcolonial 413 Christian and Missionary Alliance 487 Christian Broadcasting Network 508 Christian Conference of Asia 315 Christian Council of South Africa 70 Christian Democrat Party (NZ) 86 Christian Democrats (Call to Australia Party) 86 Christian Herald 91

Christian Heritage Party (Canada) 86 Christian Heritage Party (NZ) 86 Christian Life Centre, Darlinghurst 252 Christian Outreach Centre, Mansfield 252 Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship Conference (COPEC), Birmingham (1924) 69 Christian socialism 73, 182 Christianity – civilizing 422, 449; global 470; indigenous 359; innovation 445; and see by name and/or theme; missions Christianity Today Magazine 435, 503 Christians for Biblical Equality 437 Church Growth Theory 221, 293, 420, 471 Church Leader’s Conference, Birmingham (1972) 80 Church Mission Society 334 Church Missionary Society (Australia) 351 Church of God in Christ 309, 420 Church of Pentecost 481, 514 Church of Scotland 336; Mission 450 Church of South India 8 Churches of Christ 71, 423 churches 304, 321, 379, 476; architecture 50, 70, 75, 304–6, 308, 310, 327, 480, 515–16, 518; apostolic networks 518; authority 299, 300, 303, 304, 307, 312, 313, 315, 318, 319, 416, 435, 460; black 433–6, 441; China 330, 331; choice 303, 320; congregations 296–300, 301–2, 304, 316; denominations 14, 298, 302, 306, 307, 310, 314, 317, 319, 320, 334, 349, 460; dysfunction 309, 316, 321; ethnicity/ race 309, 312, 317, 321, 331; finances 435; gender 319, 370, 416, 428, 460; house/cellbased 234, 254, 305, 311, 472, 475; indigenization 430, 431, 460; innovation 312, 326, 333, 336; migrant 519; multisite 304, 306, 308, 311; New mission churches 365; nondenominational 315, 321, 322; postdenominational 321–2; social impact 300, 322; state 299; Thailand 481; transcongregational 297, 301, 312, 313, 315–16; technology 515; worship 298; and see Apostolic Church networks, and by nameCircle of Concerned African Women Theologians 371, 460 City Temple, London 97 Clark, Randy 45 Clarke, William Newton 97 Clifford, John 60, 72 Coe, George Albert 122 Coe, Shoki 454 Coffin, Henry Sloane 103 Coggan, Frederick Donald 181

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Index Cold War 76, 110, 115, 472 Colombia 55, 214, 215; megachurches in 51 Colombo plan, Australia 481 Communism 21, 68, 74, 76, 278, 285; antiCommunism 76, 278; Communist International 285; in China 37, 248, 450 Comunidade Nova Aliança 254 Cone, James 434 Confidence Magazine 231, 505 Confucianism 150, 274; gender 425 Congo – Belgian 383; Democratic Republic of 30; Free State 382–83; missionaries in 430 Congo Reform Association 382 Congo-Balolo Mission 382 Congregationalism xiv, xvii, 8, 64, 67–9, 71, 80, 95–7, 100, 122, 171, 173, 175, 180, 182, 189, 290, 298, 301, 302, 303, 304, 314, 331, 334, 389, 434; China 330; Japan 273–6; South Africa 429; women’s ordination 435 Congress on World Evangelization, Cape Town, South Africa (2010) 219 Conscience, liberty of 2, 6, 16, 18, 61, 64, 104, 135, 301, 302, 318, 367, 405 Continental Missions Conference, Bremen, 1897 468 Cooper, Darien 437 Cooperación Misionera Ibero Americana (COMIBAM) 483 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (Canada) 73 Copeland, Kenneth 505 Coptic churches 328; Nigeria 147 Cornwall, Judson 506 Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood 437 Cox Jr, Harvey Gallagher 122, 220, 243, 258, 260, 419, 499 Craig, William Lane 114 Croker Ireland mission 424 Cromwell, Oliver xiv Crossway Baptist Church 252 Crouch, Paul 508 Crowther, Samuel Adjai 262 CRU see Campus Crusade for Christ Cuba 215 Culley, Robert 381 Cumming, James Elder 182 Cunningham, Loren 478 Cupitt, Don 119 Czechoslovakia – Prague Spring 116 D’Addeo, Giovanni 485 Dain, Jack 455 Dale, Robert William 180, 196 Danjo, Ebina 273–7, 292–3 Danvers statement 437

527

Darwin, Charles Robert 38, 398 Darwinism 91, 122, 291, 451 Das, Mohini Maya 427 Davis, Addie 189, 435 Dawson, Joseph Martin 6 Dayspring Church (Sydney) 308 de Dietrich, Suzanne 114 Deakin, Alfred 94 Decision Magazine 504 Deiros, Pablo 482 Denmark xiii Derrida, Jacques 347 Destiny Image 505 Deutsche Christen (German Christians) 109 Devanandan, Paul 346 Dewey, John 122, 170 Dickson, Kwesi Abotsia 346 Diefenbaker, John George 83 Disciples of Christ 120 Dixon, Retta 422, 424 Dollar, Creflo 192, 510 Donaldson, St Clair George Alfred 93 Douglas, Thomas Clement 73 Doyle, Arthur Conan 102 Du Plessis, David 456 du Plessis, David Johannes 232 Dumbrell, William John 117 Dunn, James D. G. ‘Jimmy’ 113 Durham, William 170 Dutch Reformed Church (NGK) 70, 176; theology 149, 284 Dye, Colin 195 Dyrness, William 156 East African Revival 240, 279–84, 288–9, 337, 358, 370, 446 East London Institute for Home and Foreign Missions 105 Eastern Virginia medical School 487 Ebenezer, Michael 271 Ecuador 214, 215 Ecumenical movement 8, 13, 69, 70, 78, 79–81, 83, 85, 98, 231, 238, 245, 285, 297; church union 71, 80; national councils 1 ecumenism 301, 315, 323, 330, 331, 334, 347, 349, 364, 427, 453, 461, 462, 463, 469, 492; councils 314 education 16, 53, 57, 79, 112, 115, 116–17, 124–5, 330, 454, 475, 479, 481; Bible training institutes 99, 105, 349; classical 174, 343; gender 236; informal 348, 370, 400, 401; mission schools 286, 347, 387, 400, 403, 405–8, 411, 426, 429, 430, 445, 448, 449, 450, 453, 486; theology 357, 362, 372; women 370, 371, 460; and see Universities

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528

Index

Edwards, Jonathan 183, 378 Église de Jésus Christ sur la Terre par son envoyé spécial Simon Kimbangu 265, 432 Ehrman, Bart Denton 114, 128 Elim Churches (UK) 231 Elliot, Elisabeth 437 Ellul, Jacques 152 Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for all Nations 52, 519 Emerging Church Movement 235, 254–5, 456 England xiv, 15, 60; Churches xiii; migration xvi, 52; and see Anglicanism; United Kingdom Enlightenment 10, 219, 232; materialism 36; post-enlightenment 167; rationalism 33, 38, 241, 255 Epstein, Ezekiel Isidore 118 Epworth Evangelist Institute 421 Ernest, Alfred 69 Established Churches 17, 24, 299, 312; disestablishment 1, 2; and empire 405; England xiv, 15, 23; Lutheran xiii; Scotland xiv, 15, 336 Eternal Word Television Network 493 Eternity Magazine 435 Ethiopia 132, 263, 327–8 Ethiopianism 132, 263, 284, 359 Ethnological Society of London 122 Etter, Maria Woodworth 187 Europe ix, xiii, 3, 4, 11, 19–21, 27, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 42, 46, 51, 52, 53, 57–8, 66, 92, 95, 131, 132, 133–4, 141, 142, 148, 151, 152, 156, 157, 167, 178, 222, 224, 240, 242, 265, 269, 285, 288, 293, 308, 327, 329, 339, 345, 361, 363, 365, 383, 389, 419, 443, 483, 519; Eastern 475; medieval 327; migrant churches 365; and see by country name Evangelical Fellowship of Canada 85 Evangelical Foreign Missions Association 453 Evangelical Free Churches (UK) 71 Evangelicalism 34, 40–1, 91, 100, 103, 107, 112, 123, 125, 128, 147, 171, 176, 186, 188, 189, 196, 215–16, 227, 265, 267–8, 279, 289, 307, 333, 418, 439, 469, 485, 492, 493, 495, 499, 503, 504, 505; abolitionism 381, 383; anti-witchcraft 202; church planting strategies 431; evangelism 453, 462, 476, 489, 492, 494; gender 418, 422, 426; left 439; liberal 103, 109, 110, 154, 177; magazines 435 (and see by title); mass evangelism 171, 177, 181, 183–4, 186,

201, 216, 391, 394, 492, 504, 509, 511 (and see revivalism); medicine 384 (and see healing); missions 199, 217, 453, 495; music 183; neo-evangelical 111, 113, 116; persecution 214; Pietism 348, 358, 446, 461, 497; politics 339; postevangelicalism 222, 235, 254; public influence 175; race 418, 439; religious right 436; revivals 378; scholarship 99; social gospel 270; student work 57, 115, 126, 479; televangelism 501, 502, 505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510, 515; Victorian 412; and see Bible; media; missions; preaching; revivalism; technology; universities Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD) 285 Evans, Andrew 363 Expository Times 180 Faith and Order Conference 469 Faith Central Baptist Church, Inglewood 192 Faith Centre, St Leonards 252 Faith Tabernacle, Lagos 160 Family First Party (Australia) 86 Far Eastern Broadcasting Company 501 Fascism 489 fascism – German 74, 104, 109, 110, 115, 179, 276, 489; Italian 74, 485; Japan 276; rhetoric 179 Federico, Vincenzo 485 feminism 17, 122, 124–6, 91, 136, 163, 188, 236, 418, 423, 428, 434, 441, 445, 459; Asia 427; black 436; Christian 423, 424, 438; internationalism 426; religious turn 417; second wave 418, 434; theology 437 Fiji – Methodism xvii Finney, Charles Grandison 183, 508 Fire-Baptized Holiness Church 419 FitzGerald, James 94 Fitzgerald, Tony 478 Flight, John 98 Florida Bible Institute, 107 Focus on the Family 437 Forsyth, Peter Taylor 175, 181 Fosdick, Harry Emerson 97–8, 102 Foundation for Theological Education in Southeast Asia 347 Fountain Trust (UK) 232 fourth world 360, 361, 471 France 16, 53, 55, 114; May Revolution 116 Frankl, Viktor Emil 118 Franson, Fredrik 330 Fraser Ligertwood, Brooke Gabrielle 515

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Index Free Church of Scotland Mission, South Africa 358 Free churches 72, 81, 194, 474; and by name Freewill Baptists 190 Freidzon, Claudio 45 Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International 493, 506; and see Shakarian, Demos Fuller Theological Seminary 106, 113, 119, 175, 221, 268, 271, 292, 471, 483 fundamentalism 39–40, 106, 108, 114, 133, 244, 323, 331, 428, 445, 447, 451–3, 469, 484; Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, The 95, 99, 100, 184; and see Hinduism; nationalism Funk, Robert Walter 120 Furnari, Josephine 308 Gage, Matilda Joslyn 91 Galiwin’ku, Elcho Island 432 Garden City Assembly of God 252 Garrick, David 193 Garvey, Marcus Mosiah 285 Gateway Baptist Church 252 Gatu, John 446 Gaxiola, Manuel 484 Gee, Donald Henry Frere 185 Geering, Lloyd George 119–21, 291 Genocide – Armenian 272; Christian 484; Holocaust (Shoah) 117–18, 139, 140, 148, 220 Gereja Bethany 249–50 Gereja Bethel Indonesia 249 Gereja Keluarga Allah 250 Germany 53, 54, 55; biblical scholarship 38, 39, 480; confessing Church 109; East 360; evangelists 519; German Christian Church (Deutsche Christen) 109, 276; intellectual migration 110, 488; missions 468; pietism 461; theology in 95, 97, 103, 104, 105, 126, 141, 181, 269, 275, 292, 468; and see fascism Ghana 12, 28, 57, 154, 201, 203, 221, 266, 289, 293, 343, 450, 518, 519; diaspora 192 Ghandi, Mahatma 260, 293, 387 Gien, Kashiwagi 275–6, 293 Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON) 41, 176 Global Christian Forum 462 Global Consultation on World Evangelisation, Manila, 1989 (Lausanne II) 468; and see Lausanne Movement global North 11, 15, 19, 39, 58, 93, 117, 121, 132, 134, 220, 258, 292, 352, 417, 433, 439,

529

451, 453 et passim; alienation 31; capitalism 259, 283; consumerism in 2, 18, 155, 222, 234, 290, 356, 412, 507, 515, 519; culture conflicts 6, 353; decline 489; disenchantment 156; disestablishment in 2; economics 289, 343; evangelicalism in 40; individualism xvii, 153, 194, 218, 219, 356, 373, 470, 476; materialism 219; medicine 385, 387; migration 255, 259, 355, 419; missions 462, 469, 477; Pentecostalism in 33; pluralism 1, 4, 8, 11, 16, 26, 30, 259, 290, 299; populism 258, 502; poverty in 36; rationalization 2, 5, 10, 42, 241, 357, 367, 374, 398, 470, 481; re-enchantment 364, 511; scientism 3; secularization 413, 439, 444, 456, 480, 501, 502; social change 124; technology 499, 508; theology 355, 361; welfare states 188, 386; and see Berger, Peter; Bible interpretation; healing, missions; secularization; technology; and by country name global South 19, 26, 40, 55, 58, 59, 220, 418, 454; biblical interpretation 39; Christianity in 20, 55, 85, 132, 413, 416, 439, 456 (and by country); indigenous peoples 388; modernization 35; Pentecostalism 33, 41; poverty 42; preaching 213; women 459, 460; and see by country name, region name; fourth world; Majority World globalization 4, 10–12, 14, 23–4, 33, 35, 47–8, 51, 108, 128, 132, 139, 163, 166–7, 196, 220–2, 225–6, 228, 239, 247–8, 257, 259–61, 267–8, 272, 285–91, 306, 309, 326, 329, 330, 341, 342, 346, 353, 363, 374, 413, 417, 421, 430, 432, 440, 444, 445, 447, 455, 456, 459, 462, 467, 470, 480, 484, 486, 489, 491, 492, 494, 499, 500, 501, 503, 508, 511, 512, 515, 517, 518, 520; corporations 31, 140; diaspora 279; disease 353; and economic change 29, 31, 337, 487; fourth world 360; gender 416, 423; Islam 486, 487, labour movement 343; migration 344, 354, 355, 356, 445, 468, 470–6, 489; pluralism 30; poverty 353, 445, 453, 458; race 416; reflexivity 333, 342, 343, 372; and spirit movements 235; theory 293; tourism 476, 478; transnationality 55, 495; urbanization 10, 19, 48, 50, 51, 181, 242, 247, 250, 481; and see secularization; technology glocalization 361, 445; religious 322, 334, 341, 470, 474 Gondarra, Djiniyini 432

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530

Index

Good News Hall, Melbourne 185 Good News Magazine (Melbourne) 505 Gordon, Adoniram Judson 99 Gore, Charles 123, 175 Graham Jr, William Franklin 40, 53, 106–8, 113, 171, 176, 192, 194, 200, 417, 433, 503, 509; Australia crusade 1959 78; Glasgow Crusade (1954) 77; Harringay Crusade (1954) 77; New Zealand Crusade (1959) 78; South Africa Crusade (1973) 78; Toronto Crusade (1955) 78 Granada 483 Grant, Jaquelyn 436 Great Depression (1929) 66, 74–5, 182, 267, 331 Great War see World War One Green, Thomas Hill 174 Grey, Jacqueline Nancy 125 Gripenberg, Alexandra 91 Groups of 12 (G12) 51, 195 Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’ 215 Guinness, Henry Grattan 99, 104–5, 382, 383 Gujarat Christian Workers (GCW) 270 Gullicksen, Kenn 321 Gundry, Robert H. 123 Gunsaulus, Frank Wakely 171–4, 179–80, 196 Guttmann, Bruno 345 Hackney College 175 Hagin, Kenneth 505 Hague, Dyson 100 Hamlin, Catherine 176 Hammond, Thomas Chatterton 176 Hardesty, Nancy 435 Harper, Michael Claude 232 Harris, William Wadé 29, 157–8, 200, 201, 221, 264, 284, 293, 368 Harvard Theological Review 275 Harvard University 505 Hash’d al Shaabi 487 Haverford College 98 Haynes, Ambrose 385, 392 healing 26–33, 36–8, 42–3, 45–7, 53–4, 55, 56, 58, 108, 155–7, 179, 184–5, 190, 205, 207, 210, 212, 228, 242, 266, 335, 362, 364, 367–9, 384, 384–9, 393, 397, 486, 504, 508, 509, 510, 510, 519; and charismatic movement 44; Healing Revival (USA) 44, 108, 210, 267, 478; Kimbanguism 432; medicine 330, 386, 407, 412; missions 460, 461, 475, 505, and see medicine; scientism Healing on the Streets (HoTS) 55 Healing Waters (media) 508 Hebden Mission, Toronto 185

Hebrew University 480 Heidegger, Martin 115 Henderson, Ian 115 Hepburn, Mitchell 67 Herbert, J. S. 280 Hession, Roy, Calvary Road 281 Heward-Mills, Dag 519 Hezbollah 487 Hill, Napoleon 171 Hillsong Church 14, 18, 50, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 305, 514, 516, 519, 520; and technology 48; conferences 194; London 195; network 311; TV channel 196; United 290, 308 Hinduism 7, 46, 141, 260, 332, 341, 346, 427, 450, 452; cultural fundamentalism 450, 474, 486 Hinn, Benny 510, 519 Hirohito, Emperor of Japan 466 historicism 2, 94 HIV/AIDS 155–6, 160, 362 Hocking, William E. 447 Holmes, Pamela 125 Holy Trinity Church, Brompton 233–4; Alpha Course 34, 233; and see Anglicanism; charismatic movement Hong Kong 54, 469 Hooke, Samuel Henry 111, 123 Hoover, May 420 Hope International Churches 481 Houston, Brian Charles 50, 252 Houston, Roberta ‘Bobbie’ 50, 519 Howard, John Winston 82 Hughes, Hugh Price 180–1, 184 Humbard, Rex 508 Hutton, John 176 Hybels, William ‘Bill’ 49, 310, 519 Idowu, Bolaji 454 Igbo people (Nigeria) 262 Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus 51, 432, 481, 515; and see Macedo Bezzera, Edir Illinois Institute of Technology 171 Imchen, Narola 460 imperialism 92, 138, 146, 148, 149–51, 155, 240, 280, 387–90, 396, 397, 414; administration 379, 386, 391, 397, 398, 399, 400, 404, 405, 453, 473, 489, 513, 514; American 154, 468; anticolonialism 387, 405, 407–10, 449, 467; British 447, 468 et passim; colonialism 199, 221, 240, 335, 337, 373, 374, 378, 381, 383; decline 445; France 204; Islamic 500; Japan 268, 275–7, 339, 466, 467, 484; politics 378; post-colonialism 12, 16, 23, 27, 53, 62, 132,

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Index 134, 136, 165, 240, 249, 261, 265, 329, 403, 404, 411, 413, 468, 489; racism 199, 390, 404, 407, 409, 410, 419, religious 358, 470, 472; Spanish 455, 500; and see by country name inculturation 326, 328, 332, 333, 334, 339, 340, 342, 344, 352, 356 (and see indigenization); conversion 337; gender 370 India xvii, 8, 53, 132, 226, 235–6, 243, 272, 444, 484, 451–2, 462; bhakti tradition 346; caste 236, 270, 451; Dalits 141, 154, 156–9, 161, 269, 357; diaspora 272; gender 236, 373, 425, 427; Gujarat pogrom 451; Madhya Pradesh 451; missionaries from 55, 433, 471, 475; Mizoram 341; Nadar 269, 270; Naga 345, 358, 443, 447; nationalism 238, 261, 451, 471; Orissa 451; Paraiyars 272; Pentecostalism 363; Serampore 452; social reform 237; spirit movements 238, 363; syncretism 283, 337, 340; Tamilnadu 237, 269; theology 138, 142; traditional religion 341; and see Hinduism; missions; nationalism Indian Initiated Churches 350, 454, 482 indigenization 133, 199, 201, 204, 210, 213, 214, 221, 222, 235, 239, 240–6, 249, 255, 257–62, 264, 267, 269, 271, 272, 276, 279, 280–4, 287, 293, 326, 333, 335, 338, 339, 342, 344, 345, 348, 350, 365, 369, 373, 374, 393–7, 401, 409, 413, 416, 427, 429, 430, 431, 440, 444, 447, 449, 450, 453, 454, 456, 458, 460, 463, 468, 469, 471, 472, 476, 481, 482, 483, 484, 489, 492, 494, 510 indigenous peoples 84; and see First Nations peoples, and by country and people name Indonesia 226, 246, 247, 357, 467, 472; Chinese minority 250; drugs 308; ethnicity 248, 250; Pancasila 248; pluralism 248; religious politics 247 industrialization 68; disestablishment 180; industrial relations 66; London, churches 192, 194, 196; migration 52, 85, 192, 194–6; postwar reconstruction 79; religious change 64, 195; social justice 83; and see by country influenza pandemic, 1918 28, 66 Institute of Contextual Theology 362 Inter-Church Council on Public Affairs (ICCPA), New Zealand 80 Inter-Collegiate Christian Unions – Cambridge (CICCU) 111; Oxford (OICCU) 111 International Association of Healing Rooms 45

531

International Association of Women Ministers 434 International Church of the Foursquare Gospel 187, 420, 510 International Congress on World Evangelization (Lausanne I) 216 International Fellowship of Evangelical Students 57, 215, 217 International Friendship Evangelism 481 International Missionary Conference, 1927 (Belgium) 200 International Missionary Council 431, 469; Theological Education fund 347 internationalism 331, 447 InterVarsity Christian Fellowship 57, 58, 112, 114, 312 Iran 472 Ireland 82, 176; disestablishment 181; Irish Question 1 Ironside, Henry Allen ‘Harry’ 112, 173 Isasi-Díaz, Ada María 291 Islam 247, 253, 260, 328, 472, 487, 493; coercion 485; conversion 487, 488; gender 259; globalization 248, 470; militancy 250, 362, 486; racism 149; rigourist 362 Islington conference 96 Israel 150, 151, 220; Bible 480; Koreans 480–1; students 481 Italy xiii, 483; Gissi 485; Methodism 485; poverty 485; Protestant missionaries 308; public religion 259, revivalism 484; Riesi 485 Ivory Coast 201, 202, 204, 221, 265 Jacobs, Donald 282 Jakes, Thomas Dexter 192, 193, 194, 505, 510, 520 James, Edwin Oliver 123 James, William 170, 472 Janes, Leroy Lansing 273 Japan 53, 137, 150, 159, 163, 274–8, 293, 328, 469; Bushido 275; Congregationalism 273; Hokkaido 276; Kanto Earthquake 276; Meiji Period 274, 276; militarism 74, 275; Taisho Period 276; theology 142; and see imperialism Jefferis, James 96 Jesus People 456 Jesus Seminar 120, 123 Jesus, historical quest 120, 132; Majority World reception 156 (and see Theology, soteriology; Jesus Seminar) Jewett, Robert 146 John Paul II (Pope) 123

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532

Index

Johns, Cheryl Bridges 125 Johnston, Anna 378 Johnston, Harry Hamilton, Sir 397, 399, 402, 404, 414 Joint Social Service Council (UK) 68 Jones, John 180, 280 Joyner, Rick 252 Jubilee 2000 movement 143, 246 Judaism – messianic 118 Kabale Conventions (1935, 1941) 280 Kalue, Ogbu Uke 286 Kang, Namsoon 347 Karen people 262, 277, 337, 338, 484 Karlstadt, Andreas Rudolph Bodenstein von 318 Kasibante, Amos 288, 289 Katiyo, Wilson 405, 406, 407, 411, 414 Kato, Byang Henry 286 Kawai, Michi 427 Kazakhstan 474 Keeble, Samuel 69 Keener, Craig S. 119, 156 Keller, Timothy J. 311 Kelly, Howard Atwood 100 Kempton, R. Henry Knowles 72 Kendall, Robert Tillman 195, 196 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 476 Kensington Temple (London) 51, 195 Kenya 393; Kikuyu 450 Kenyon, E. W. 509 Keswick Movement 99, 182, 184, 237, 240, 279, 280, 281, 282, 305 Kiek, Winifred 435 Kim, Jae-Jun 346 Kimbangu, Simon 29, 265, 368, 431; Kimbanguism 32, 265, 432 (and see Healing) King Jr, Martin Luther 116, 139, 171, 177, 178, 433, 434; preaching 84, 193 King’s College, London 397 Kingsway International Christian Centre (London) 52, 194 Kivengere, Festo 282 Kloof, Goshen 358 Klopsch, Louis 91 Knox College, Dunedin 111 Kolenda, Daniel 54, 519 Kong Hee 515 Kongo – traditional religion 30 Korea 53, 132, 133, 137, 150, 163, 275, 276, 329, 36; democracy 269; megachurches 50, 51; nationalism 262; Presbyterianism 339; shamanism 365; student 479; women 425, 426; and see Korean War; South Korea; Yoido Full Gospel Church

Korean War 110, 208, 222, 278 Koshy, T. E. 481 Koyama, Kosuke 454 Krapf, Ludwig 334 Kugler, Anna (missionary) 460 Kuhlman, Kathryn 44 Kuhn, Thomas S. 327 Kumamoto Christian Band 274 Kumamoto Yogakko School for Western Learning 273 Kumiai Kyōkai Mission, Korea 276, 277 Labour Churches (Canada) 73 Labour movement 72, 73, 74, 82, 206, 268; general strike (1917) – Australia 66; Canada 66 Labour Party (NZ) 72 Labour Party (UK) 72, 82 Ladd, George Eldon 112 LaHaye, Timothy Francis ‘Tim’ 437 Lake, John Graham 43–4, 45 Lakewood Church, Houston Texas 304 Lamb, William 105 Lancaster, Sarah Jane 187 Lang, John Dunmore 2, 176 Langstaff, Alan 227 Latimer House, Oxford 177 Latin America 20, 57, 134, 152, 154, 161, 162, 214, 215, 218, 219, 226, 243–5, 285, 287, 290–2, 356, 368, 418, 483; missionaries 483; theology 145, 116, 125, 136, 455, 497 Latin American Theological Fellowship (Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana) 215 Latter Rain Evangel Magazine 505 Latter Rain Movement 108, 349; churches 482 Lausanne Movement 455, 469, 469, 482 League of Nations 66, 102, 447 Lebombo Pentecostal Mission 369 Leitch, Margaret 423 Leitch, Mary 423 Lekganyene, Engenas Barnabas 419 Lentz, Carl 499 Leopold II, of Belgium 383 Lewis, Clive Staples 179 liberalism (theological) 2, 5, 7, 24, 38, 41, 74, 91, 94, 97, 98, 103, 104, 114, 119, 120, 122, 172, 173, 184, 207, 218, 232, 258, 267, 268, 274, 275, 279, 284, 287, 323, 347, 418, 428, 435, 439, 440, 441, 453, 469; decline of 34; economic 489; internationalism 98, 102, 114, 116; missions 447; modernism 102, 106, 126; political 178; protest 268; and psychology 36

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Index liberation theology 83, 136, 137, 151, 154, 207, 213, 218, 245, 271, 285, 287, 290, 355, 360, 431, 432, 455, 458 Liberia 149, 201, 239, 263, 264, 265, 327 Liddell, Eric Henry 466, 467 Life and Work Conference 469 Lighthouse Chapel International 519 Lim, David 483 Lincoln, C. F. 110 Living Faith Church Worldwide 51–2 Livingston Press 412 Livingstone, David 384 Lloyd-Jones, David Martyn 111, 176, 177, 195, 234 Loewe, Raphael 118 London Missionary Society xv, 315, 330, 334, 384, 389, 393, 393, 394, 412, 467; India 270 Long, Eddie 193 Lovedale Missionary Institute (SA) 338 Lowrie, John C. 201 Loyal Orange Institution 317 Lunda people 379 Luther, Martin 141, 318, 495 Lutheran World Federation 316 Lutheranism 27, 39, 49, 330; Norwegian 351 Lutli, Albert 429 Lyman, Mary Ely 124 Macdonald, Dwight 110 MacDonald, James Ramsay 182 Macdonald, Murdo Ewen 115 Macedo Bezerra, Edir 51, 509 Machen, John Gresham 39, 99 Macintyre, Ronald George 103–5, 304 Macquarrie, John 115 Madagascar 335; Malagasy people 379 Madigan, Kevin 484 Majority World 11–13, 15, 18–19, 20, 24, 117, 152, 220, 260, 292, 329, 335, 352, 368, 468, 477; Bible interpretation 125, 131, 133, 134, 139, 141, 144, 149, 152, 153, 440; Christianity in 21, 49, 145, 167, 432, 444; demography 143, 162; demonology 368; diaspora 290, 342, 353; gender 370, 425; indigenous peoples 159, 261, 346, 365, 371, 385; migration 477, 482; missionaries 354, 396, 431, 446, 459, 471, 482; modernization 9, 10, 11, 17, 18, 19, 24, 27, 29, 33, 35–9, 47, 53, 57–8, 156, 227, 265, 269, 274, 307, 329, 449, 471–2, 517, 518; politics 77, 149; poverty 142, 154, 159, 161, 362; race 148, 149, 425; revitalization 357, 365, 374, 499; theology 135, 139, 157, 164, 272, 279, 286, 290, 361, 362, 440; war 149

533

Malawi 431 Malaysia 150, 248, 467, 469; missions 460; Orangs 159; religious politics 247 Maldonado, Guillermo 483 Manchuria 275, 276, 466 Mandela, Nelson 139, 429 Manila – missions 468, 469; and see Philippines, The Manyano [guild] movement 370 Manz, Felix 318 March for Jesus 56 Marcuse, Herbert 116 Mariam, Mengistu Haile 285 Marsden, George M. 7 Marsh, Daisy 501 Marshall, Ian Howard 112 Martin, William J. 111 Marty, Martin Emil 173 Marxism 69, 72–4, 125, 148, 163, 215, 218, 222, 320, 338, 350, 360, 458, 489; capitalism 336; materialism 45, 181; theory 116; World Systems Theory 12, 23 Mason, Frances 262 Mau Mau Uprising 393, 469 Mawar Sharon Churches 249 Mazwi brothers (William, Jonathan, Petros) 358 Mbang, Sunday Coffie 166 Mbiti, John Samuel 286, 454 McAdam, W. J. 68 McCauley, Ray 518 McCheyne, Robert Murray 176 McCormick Theological Seminary 268, 286 McDonald, John A. 94 McGavran, Donald Anderson 221 McPherson, Aimee Semple 186, 187, 209, 420, 428, 510 Mead, George Herbert 122 Mears, Henrietta Cornelia 107 media 500; communications 517; digital 489, 498, 502, 503, 506, 511, 512, 517, 518, 503; Internet 367; mortality 426; music 500; publishing 379, 396; televangelism 499, 505, 507, 509; and see technology medicine 10, 28, 31, 42, 43–6, 55, 156, 187, 385; Asian 46; and spirituality 43, 46, 384, 460, 486; and see healing megachurches 13–14, 49, 172, 175, 192, 193, 194, 207, 208, 221, 244, 247, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 288, 306, 310, 311, 366; Africa 57, 194, 439, 476, 515, 520; Australia 363; London 473; migrant 355, 439; USA 48–9 Melodyland School of Theology 119 Mencken, Henry Louis 98

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534

Index

Mennonites 176, 282; and see Anabaptists Mercy Ministries (USA) 363 Methodism xv, 23, 27, 43, 44, 64, 67, 69, 70, 71, 96, 108, 154, 184, 203, 221, 227, 228, 264, 265, 277, 280, 284, 302, 316, 378, 396, 398, 400, 406–8, 411, 414, 421, 425, 429, 429, 437, 492; Africa 166, 201, 285; connexionalism 302; deaconesses 421; fresh expressions 235; human sexuality 166; hymns 410; Italy 484–5; militarism 100; missions 409, 432; Nigeria 454; ordination 421; politics 73; publishing 381, 385; social gospel 72; South Africa 83 Methodist Church of South Africa 83 Methodist Episcopal Church 44, 435; Chile 420, 421 Mexico 55, 483–4; indigenous Christianity 472 Meyer, Frederick Brotherton 468 Meyer, Joyce 505 Mgojo, Khoza 83 Micah Network 215 Middle East – missions to 474 migration 8, 11, 28, 30, 52, 55, 59, 232, 258; and see globalization, and by country name millennialism – postmillennialism 99 (and see theology); premillennialism 99, 104, 105 Milligan, Elsie 379, 386, 387, 392 Miracle Magazine 505 Mi-Shu Hutung Church 330 Misión Carismática Internacional (Church) 51 Missao Horizontes 483 missionaries 330, 337, 340, 351, 362, 384, 385, 475; African 473; Brazilian 439; China 466; churches 137; circumcision 450; conferences 58; crosscultural 53, 122; Ethiopia 176; gender 418; German 358; India 270; indigenization 270, 359, 453; Korea 126, 339, 473; literature 377, 378, 390, 392, 394, 395, 397, 400, 407, 408, 412, 413, 414; Majority World 335, 353, 361, 396, 439, 462, 466, 471, 473, 473, 475; Nestorian 132; Norwegian 330, 351; Papua New Guinea 363; short-term 308, 309; South Africa 74; USA 216, 307, 423; women 381, 386, 422, 424, 459; and see indigenization, and by country name missions 52, 54, 55, 131, 157, 199, 200, 203, 227, 232, 242, 262, 319, 332–4, 372, 374, 378, 379, 388, 391, 411, 414, 426, 460–1, 463, 471; Africa 280, 281, 282, 335, 408, 431, 486, 501; African-American 239;

agencies 99, 176, 279, 315, 380, 483, 391, 401, 422, 450, 459, 460, 476, 481, 494, 495; anti-imperialism 405, 456; Baptist 382, 447, 452, 460; China 466, 469, 477, 501; ‘civilizing’ 400, 401, 468; education 347, 450; finance 475, 477, 481, 509; global 257, 444, 447, 462; indigenization 133, 346, 459, 482, 484, 511; integral 216, 217, 219, 278, 286, 288, 309, 345, 327, 368; feminism 423; German 28; India 451; Japan 455, 469; Korea 37, 221; Majority World 293, 326, 444; medical 296, 384, 387, 393, 397, 486; Middle East 481, 482, 506; missiology 216, 235, 260, 351, 446; mission schools 460, 467, 494; mission stations 336, 343, 410; moratorium 413, 430, 446; partnership 336, 354, 430; Pentecostalism 230; publishing 412; racism 329, 337, 401, 414, 419, 423, 424, 429, 430; reverse 55, 133, 260, 332, 473–7; Scots 15; short term 476–8, 489; student work 469, 487; taxonomy 447; technology 517–18; urban 222, 234; women 328, 399, 401, 422, 423, 424, 426, 430, 445, 459, 460; youth culture 379, 472, 479, 514; see also by country name Missions Advanced Research Centre (MARC) 271 Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church 189 modernism 4, 7, 39, 98, 99, 106, 108, 186, 280, 362, 469, 489; biblical interpretation 113; identities 335 modernity 4, 5, 7, 9–11, 14–15, 17, 38, 55, 62, 63, 108, 227, 302, 311, 320, 342, 351, 391, 426, 452, 470, 499; abstraction 372, 373; alienation 34, 36; Berger model 5; capitalism 329, 336, 338; consumerism 56; culture change 344, 345, 371; democracy 52; diaspora 332, 334, 342; diseases 45, 58, 139; drugs and alcohol 54; gender 438; individualism 10, 289, 290, 291, 303, 342, 345; materialism 26, 46, 59; modernization 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 17–19, 24, 27, 29, 33, 35–40, 47, 53, 57–8, 156, 227, 247, 250, 262, 265, 269, 274, 289, 307, 329, 331, 337, 344, 362, 426, 449, 450, 471–2, 474, 517, 518; nationalism 451; pluralism 32, 59, 287, 290, 306, 452; politics 36; rationalization 291, 368, 373; risk society 46; spirituality 26; theology 185, 306; urbanization 48 Moi, Dabiel Arap - Nyayo-ism 282 Mol, Hans 88 Mongolia 474 Moody Bible Institute 106, 421 Moody Memorial Church, Chicago 112

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Index Moody, Dwight Lyman 73, 170, 173, 176, 183, 467, 508 Moody, William Vaughan 170 Moon, Ik-Whan 126 Moore Theological College 117 Moravians 332, 358, 378 Morel, Edmund Dene 382 Morgan, George Campbell 173, 176, 185, 195 Morgan, Marabel 437 Morris, Leon Lamb 112 Mosala, Itumeleng 125 Mott, John Raleigh 70, 98, 447, 462, 468–9 Mount Holyoke Female Seminary 91 Mowll, Howard West Kilvinton 2 Mukti Mission and Revival see Pentecostalism, Revivalism Mumford, Bob 506 Munro, Marita 189 Murdoch, Rupert 127 Murray, Andrew 182 Muscular Christianity 428, 437, 467 Muslim background believers 488 Muslim brotherhood 486 Myanmar 262, 277, 337, 362, 484; Karen Peoples 484 Naga Baptist Association 447 Naga peoples 345; missions 460; Naga club, 1928 447 Napoleonic Wars 384 Nation of Islam 192 National Association of Evangelicals 470 National Association of Evangelicals (USA) 216 National Church Councils 447; Australia 315; NZ 80; USA 434 National Committee of Negro Churchmen 434 National Congress of British West Africa 450 Nationalism 10, 11, 76, 84, 87, 158, 189, 211, 224, 227, 238, 261, 267, 274–6, 285, 287, 298, 301, 326, 366, 390, 392, 416, 445, 450; Africa 70, 263, 265, 266, 280, 283, 284, 328, 346, 365, 387, 406, 449, 469, 484, 486; Asia 150; Britain 105; China 449, 450; civil religion 278, 327; decolonization 416, 445; ethnicity 74, 241, 272, 274, 362; identity 77, 326; India 236, 261, 451, 474; Islamic 139, 251, 488; Kenya 450; Korean 207, 262, 484; Majority World 339, 361, 366; religious aspects 60, 61, 64, 65, 67, 226, 451; transnationalism 272, 282, 326, 332, 338, 470, 492, 500; and see Ethiopianism, and by country name Negro World Magazine 285 Nestorian churches 132, 332

535

Netherlands, The xiii Neusner, Jacob 118 Nevius, John Livingston 37, 329 New Democratic Party (Canada) 73 New Guinea 478 New Testament Church (India) 346 New Zealand 53, 63, 67, 80, 80, 88, 94, 95, 111, 116, 120, 473, 478; Bastion Point Controversy 84; Christian Action 79; Coalition for Concerned Citizens 79; Korean churches 474; Maori peoples 80, 84; religious politics 78, 86 New Zealand Alliance 69 New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services 82 Niagara, New York 99 Nicaragua – violence, biblical interpretation 135 Niditch, Susan 125 Niebuhr, Helmut Richard 314 Niebuhr, Karl Paul Reinhold 39, 110, 119 Nigeria xviii, 29, 52, 54–5, 57, 125, 145, 147, 149, 159–60, 166, 192, 194–5, 240, 284, 288, 338, 342, 363, 366, 395, 402, 404, 444, 462, 518; Anglicanism in 262; civil war 342; megachurches in 51; migration 192, 194; missions 262, 284 Nigerian Association for Biblical Studies 125 Nin, Anaïs 136 Noffs, Theodore Delwin ‘Ted’ 175 Nonconformism xvii; authority in 2, 19; democratic temperament 2 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 474, 489 North America xiv, 56, 153, 292; and see by country name North China Truth Bible Institute 349 North Korea 475 Northeastern University 406 Northern Ireland 56, 81 Northern Presbyterian Church – General Assembly 1923 104 Norway 231; Lutheranism 330; missions from 351 Nsibambi, Simeoni 280 Nubia – history 328 Nyabingi cult 280 Nyatsime College 406 Nzimbi, Benjamin Paul Mwanzia, Akinola, Peter Jasper 166 Obama, Barack 173, 174, 177, 178 Oberlin College 122, 184 Oceania 11, 19, 20, 132, 138, 145, 168, 360, 474; and see by country name Oduyoye, Mercy Amba 285, 346, 460

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536

Index

Oklahoma Baptist University 107 Okonkwo, Mike 195 Old Dominion University 487 Olympics see sport Ontario Bible College 487 Operation Mobilization 309 Oral Roberts University 44, 119 Orr, James 99 Osborn, Daisy 53 Osborn, T. L. (Tommy Lee) 53, 510, 519 Osteen, Joel 194, 505, 510 Otabil, Mensa 518 Oteh, Robinson Azenne 286 Ottoman Empire 151 Oxford Centre for Mission Studies 483 Oyedepo, David 51, 160 Pacific Games Outreach, Canberra 478 Pacific war 278; and see World War Two pacifism 101; and see Quakers, theology Packer, James Innell 112, 177, 503 Padilla, C. René 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222 Pakistan 282, 481, 487, 488; overseas students 481 Palau, Luis (evangelist) 416 Palestine 101, 139, 149, 150 Pankhurst, Christabel 428 Pannikar Alemany, Raimon 454 Parachurch ministries 312, 315, 320, 506 Paradise Assemblies of God 252 Parham, Charles Fox 229, 349, 419, 461 Park Avenue Baptist Church 102 Park, Hyung Yong 346 Parks, Rosa 435 Passion (conference) 308 Paton, Hugh 176 Payson, Edward 228 Peace Corps 476 Peale, Norman Vincent 36, 499 Pentecostal Evangel Magazine 505 Pentecostal Faith Tabernacle 28 Pentecostal Holiness Church 44, 107 Pentecostalism 54, 57, 58, 59, 64, 85, 119, 125, 145, 155, 184–8, 196, 207, 209, 213, 222, 225, 227, 228–38, 243, 244, 245, 247–53, 272, 280, 284, 288, 289, 292, 293, 304, 305, 316, 319, 333, 338, 343, 348, 349, 352, 355, 357, 363–6, 395, 418, 421, 436, 439, 445, 460, 461, 469, 482, 485, 492, 498, 499, 502, 505, 508, 510–20; African 12, 517, 518; classical 493, 506; full gospel 32; gender 230, 417, 420, 421, 436; in the USA 34–5; independent 418, 419; indigenous 293, 484;

innovation 292, 362, 368, 440; missions 493; neo-charismatic 249, 357, 493; politics 244, 245, 364; prosperity theology 18; race 247, 417–20; technology 30, 504; worship xv, 17–18, 20–1, 26–9, 33–4, 43, 49–50, 290; youth outreach 307, 357; and see Azusa Street Revival; theology, prosperity; and by country and organizational name Persian Empire 328 Peru 215 Philippines, The 53, 55, 132, 159, 462, 468, 474, 478, 482; missions 335, 501; Overseas Filipino Workers 343, 468, 482 philosophy – common sense 100; humanism 102; epistemology 140, 349, 350, 351, 387, 452; essentialism 190, 344; Kantian 269; materialism 213 Pickering and Inglis (publisher) 391 Pierce, Cal 45 Pierson, Arthur Tappan 92, 467 Planetshakers (Church) 250 Platt, W. J. 203 Plymouth Congregational Church 171 politics 69; religion in 72, 77; rhetoric 179 populism 100, 105, 222, 268, 365, 367, 436, 483, 489 positive thinking see theology, prosperity postcolonialism 138, 224, 242, 243, 260, 268, 282, 287, 336, 338, 346, 347, 348, 362, 365, 371, 372, 387, 405, 411, 414, 433, 440; and see imperialism postmodernism 4, 62, 93, 140, 225, 235, 291, 514 Potters House Church 520 Prabhakar, Dan 270–1 Prayer mountains 208 preaching 47, 71, 77, 132, 173, 174, 174, 186, 190, 191, 193, 282, 305, 357, 410, 503, 511, 519; African 192; African-American 172, 193; charisma 180, 194, 195, 204, 221; expository 177, 181, 357; gender 186–9, 371, 421; global South 200, 213, 220, 221; Latino 219; prosperity 107, 221, 356; public effect 175–7, 183, 184, 185; rhetoric 171, 172, 174, 177, 178, 178, 180, 181, 193, 194, 195; temperance 182; and see theology, and by personal name, region, and country Presbyterian Board of Evangelism and Social Action (Canada) 78 Presbyterian Church in the United States 428 Presbyterian Church of Africa 358 Presbyterian Church of America 437 Presbyterian Church of Eastern Australia 298

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Index Presbyterian Church of Ghana 28 Presbyterianism xiv, xvii, 2, 8, 15, 29, 39, 40, 47, 64, 67, 69–71, 80, 84, 94, 95, 97, 100, 115, 103, 105–7, 111, 115, 119, 133, 137, 163, 176, 177, 182, 221, 275, 276, 289, 290, 298, 301, 302, 304, 310, 314, 327, 331, 334, 358, 425, 427, 428, 435, 454, 492; declaratory statement 104; education 339; Korea 37, 474; Scotland 36, 112, 358; and see missions, and by organizational name, region, and country Price, Jr, Fred K. 192 Prince, Joseph 519 Princeton Theological Seminary 99, 107, 268, 286, 454 Pringle, Philip Andrew 18, 321, 519 prohibition 66, 67; and see temperance Promise Keepers Movement 437, 438 Protestantism – Africa 22; and new media 48; population 21 Protestantism – clergy 60; divisions 268; 274, 278; organization 296; race 416; and see ecumenism; theology, and by denominational name psychology 31, 44 Pure Fire Miracle Ministries (Ghana) 363 Puritanism xiii, xviii; and see Anglicanism Qatar 477 Quakerism 92, 44, 304, 434 Quiverfull Movement 437 Qumran Scrolls 109 Qur’an 500 Qureshi, Nabeel 487 Ramabai, Pandita 16, 236, 273, 373 Ras Shamra Tablets (Ugaritic) 109 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 451 Rauschenbusch, Walter 73 Ray, Chandu 471, 483 Recordites 96 Redeemed Evangelical Mission, Lagos 194, 195 Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York 311 Reformation xiii, 10, 104, 183, 222, 268, 298, 301, 317, 418, 492, 493, 495, 497; influence 118; printing 47; radical 118; theology 374 Reformed Church of America – missionary 273 Reformed churches 27, 112, 304, 320 Reformed University Fellowship 479 Regent College Vancouver 113, 177, 191 Regent University, Virginia Beach 119, 292

537

Regent’s Park Baptist College, Oxford 113 Religious Tract Society 380, 495 Renaissance 317 restorationism xv, 42, 64; and see Bible; theology revivalism 40, 47, 186, 211, 227, 230, 232, 241, 270, 283, 299, 335, 365, 378, 418, 420, 437, 492, 493, 497, 505, 508; Africa 240, 279, 281; Azusa Street 225–7, 230–1, 237, 239, 371, 418, 420, 461, 493, 504; Canada 78; evangelical 232, 280, 399; evangelism 77, 107, 113, 203, 237, 368, 502, 503, 505; Galiwin’ku 432; India 237, 270, 363; Indonesia 248, 370; Mukti Revival 16, 235–7, 251, 273, 299, 363, 418; Pilkington 279; Reveil 461; Tirunelveli 363; Toronto 45; Welsh Revival 176, 229, 231, 232, 237, 280; women 426; youth 107, 117, 118, 222, 282, 290, 307, 320, 478; and see Pentecostalism; Pietism; technology Rhodesia 200, 406; and see Zimbabwe Rich, Arthur T. 380 Richmond Hill Congregational Church, Bournemouth 180 Ricoeur, Paul 191 Ridley, John Gotch 105 Ridley, William 494 Riley, William Bell 173 Ritschl, Albrecht 97 Riverside Church, New York 97 Roberts, Granville Oral 44, 106–8, 210, 502–9, 519 Robertson, Marion Gordon ‘Pat’ 505 Robinson, Vicky Gene 166 Rollins, Peter 7, 456 Roman Catholicism 78, 85, 86, 87, 96, 159, 203, 214, 218, 222, 230, 243, 245, 253, 265, 278, 291, 321, 326, 359, 473, 482, 485, 493, 497, 498; anti-Catholicism 69, 74, 81, 290, 317; charismatic 20, 368, 493; missions 451, 454, 458, 493; Shroud of Turin xiii, 15, 258 Rowen, Samuel 470 Roy, Aphuno Chase 460 Rushdoony, Rousas John 6 Russia 55, 328, 477 Russian Orthodox Church 52 Russo-Japanese War 275 Rwanda 240, 279, 360; massacres 153 Sakae, Ōsugi 274, 275 Salvation Army xv, 87, 101, 184, 316, 434 Samkange, Stanlake John William Thompson 405, 406, 407, 408, 410, 411, 414

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538

Index

Samkange, Thompson Douglas 406 Samoa 478 Sampson, Frederick G. 172 Sanday, William 182 Sanders, Ed Parish 113 Sang, Chang 126 Sanneh, Lamin 346 Sanskrit 141 Santayana, George 258 Saudi Arabia 472, 488 Sauer, Erich 111 Scanzonia, Letha 435 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst 38, 97 scholasticism 317 Schuller, Robert Harold 507 Schweitzer, Albert 384 scientism 10, 38, 93, 98, 100, 108, 116, 155, 241, 386, 489; biology 190; naturalism 94 Scotland xiii, xiv, 2, 15, 94, 95, 113–15, 176, 182, 336, 467, 468; evangelicalism 176; and see Established Churches Scripture Union 240, 492 Scroggs, Robin 123 Scudder, Ida (missionary) 460 Sea of Faith movement 6, 119, 121 secularism 2, 4, 6, 99, 108, 121, 122, 149, 158, 360, 473, 502, 513 secularization 2, 4–7, 10, 16, 18, 23–4, 26, 56, 63, 64, 75, 76, 79, 85, 86, 93, 110, 120–1, 129, 149, 195, 222, 235, 253, 258, 259, 329, 356, 357, 367, 368, 373, 377, 412, 433, 435, 439, 444, 450, 473, 480, 486; theory 27, 83, 456, 470, 472, 474, 492, 499, 502, 507 Selbie, William Boothby 184, 185 Sepulveda, Juan 484 Seymour, William J. 229, 230, 461, 493, 504 Shakarian, Demos 506 Shakespeare, John Howard 71 shamanism 37, 119, 156; and see South Korea Shaw, Mabel 394 Shembe, Isaiah 368 Shields, Thomas Todhunter 67 Shintoism 274, 276, 339 Shona culture 409, 410 Sierra Leone 149, 263, 284, 475 Simpson, Albert Benjamin 209 Singapore 52, 54, 248, 277, 472, 515; charismatic churches 368; missions 468 Singapore Bible College 362 Singapore National Christian Conference, 1922 330 Singh, Bakht 346, 481 Smail, Thomas Allan 118

Smale, Joseph 231 Smith, Edwin W. 200 Smith, William Robertson 94, 112 Snowden, Philip 182 Soares, Theodore Gerald 174 social credit movement 73 Social Facets/Context Group 123 social gospel/justice 40, 41, 52, 64, 66, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 140, 148, 156, 161, 164, 167, 170, 179, 180, 182, 192, 214, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 236, 238, 244, 246, 270, 296, 297, 308, 311, 316, 318, 330, 352, 384, 423, 430, 434, 473; anti-nuclear movement 17, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 418, 427, 428, 436, 437, 462, 485; anti-Semitism 78; apartheid 429; civil rights 41, 77, 84, 116, 139, 172–3, 177, 285, 318, 416, 423, 435; gender 423, 425, 435, 436; human sexuality 77, 434; pacifism 64, 74; politics 206, 431, 436; Sabbath 64, 66, 74, 77; Settlement House movements 40; Social Justice Sunday 82; South Africa 139; race 77, 436, 441; and see by issue, and by movement name social mobilization 68, 158, 230, 243, 244, 245, 257, 266, 269, 279, 305, 309, 337, 338, 348, 349, 364, 367, 374, 479, 508 socialism 66–8, 69, 73, 74, 97, 110, 182, 218, 275, 285 South Africa 14, 54, 55, 62, 63, 64, 70, 74, 76, 77, 81, 83, 85, 88, 139, 149, 151, 156, 158, 159, 182, 284, 340, 357, 359, 360, 368, 370, 394, 420, 429, 473, 519; apartheid 70, 83, 85, 139, 140, 149, 151, 172, 284, 360, 429; Kairos Document (1985) 151; Natal 358; Tswana 28, 147, 344; Zionism 265, 419 South Korea xvii, 126, 158, 206–9, 211, 221, 226, 249, 267, 277, 278, 293, 444, 462, 479, 480, 291; megachurches 208; missionaries 55, 473, 474, 475; and see Cho, David Yonggi; Korea; theology; Yoido Full Gospel Church South Sudan 485, 486 Southern Baptist churches – ordination of women 189 Southern Baptist Convention xv, 189, 190, 289, 322, 364, 433, 434, 435, 437; gender 438 Southern Evangelical Mission, Melbourne 185 Southon, Arthur Eustace 385–9, 391, 395, 396 Spain xiii, 53, 483 Spartas, Reuben Mukasa Mugimba Sobanja 284 spiritualism 94, 95 spirituality 36, 56, 114, 156, 173, 189, 209, 225, 226, 229, 231, 232, 246, 270, 271, 292, 305,

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Index 313, 353, 368, 373, 420, 438, 496, 500, 510; ancestors 140, 153, 161, 211, 242, 287, 335, 340, 348, 365, 443; angels 201, 264; Calvary Road 280, 281; cell churches 251, 208, 221, 268; charisma 186, 252, 266, 267, 366, 419, 499; charismatic 251, 291, 303, 420, 432; communitarian 226, 243, 271, 312, 372, 409, 437, 478; conversion 161, 182, 244, 341, 391, 408, 483, 504; demonology 167, 362, 364, 368, 369; discipleship 235, 279, 301, 478; dreams and visions 29; experientialism 97, 185, 188, 229, 244, 253, 280, 283, 340, 460, 461, 476–8, 489; folk practices 158, 202, 203, 204, 221, 264, 388, 390, 403; gender 372, 399, 437, 438; holiness xv, 184, 185, 209, 211, 228–30, 243, 251, 253, 271, 330, 503, 514; Holy Spirit 227, 233, 241, 242, 253, 255, 309, 367, 373; identities 229, 235, 269, 373, 501, 512; innovation 195, 255, 367, 377, 514; jazz 43; liturgy 155, 232, 241, 310, 359; materialized 33, 184, 248, 267, 283, 340, 341, 365, 502, 507, 508, 509, 512, 514, 515, 516, 517, 518, 519; and medicine 45, 156; miracles 33, 55, 58, 229, 241, 269, 364, 504, 500; monastic 235, 328; music 8, 30, 43, 48–50, 145, 147, 162, 163, 183, 196, 229, 240, 243, 250–1, 272, 289, 310, 341, 350, 401, 410, 419, 457, 496, 500, 502–3, 514–16, 519–20; naïve supernaturalism 30, 42; pietism 320, 398; pragmatism 253, 332, 338, 342, 363; prayer 32, 208, 210, 211, 221, 229, 237, 362, 368, 386, 480, 504; prophecy 12, 27, 29, 54, 85, 104, 185, 194, 201, 205, 226, 232, 263, 266, 362, 364, 367, 369, 372, 404, 420, 493, 504; prosperity 195, 212, 231, 480, 513, 514 (and see theology, prosperity); protest 242, 437; revitalization movements 241, 279, 348, 352, 364, 374, 498; shamanism 155, 156, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 220, 221, 249, 268, 363, 368; spiritual warfare 45, 356; syncretism 46, 402, 404, 405, 414; testimony 25, 96, 100, 191, 229, 256; tongues 209, 229, 230, 237, 252, 353, 364, 461; visions 264, 202, 212, 340, 367, 487; wholeness 280; worship 235, 250, 289, 298, 299, 300, 310, 312, 319, 371, 461, 491, 496, 500, 516; and see capital; charismatic renewal; churches; healing; modernity; preaching; theology Spokane, Washington 45 Sport – Olympics 466, 467, 476, 477, 478 Sproul, Robert Charles 191 Spurgeon, Charles Haddon 173, 192, 200 Sri Lanka 137, 149, 423 St. Andrews Chapel, Florida 191 St Andrews College, University of Sydney 105

539

St George’s West Church, Edinburgh 115 St Stephen’s Church, Macquarie Street 176 St Thomas Christians, South India 332, 340–1 Stacey, David 122 Stackhouse, John 191 Staines, Graham 451 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 91, 96, 124 Stephens, Don 478 Stirling, R. B. 182 Stott, John 503 Strang Communications 505 Student Christian Movement 111, 113, 114, 116, 312 Student Volunteer Movement 98, 308, 315, 445, 467, 479 Sudan – Civil War 485; Dinka people 486 Sudhakar, Paul 346 Suez conflict 110 Suh, Chul Won 346 Suharto, Muhammad 248 Sun Yat-sen 450 Sunday schools 307, 308, 380, 412 Sunday, William ‘Billy’ 66, 73, 170, 508 Sunderland, England 231 Suter, Keith 8–9 Swaggart, Jimmy 505, 510 Swain, Clara (missionary) 460 Sweden xiii Swedish Free Churches 175 Switchfoot (Band) 515 Syriac Orthodox Churches 332, 340 Taiwan 53, 276, 454, 471, 472 Tajfel, Henri (Hersz Mordche) 118 Talbot School of Theology 175 Talmud 136 Tang, Susan (missionary) 460 Tanzania 57 Taoism 46 Taylor, Charles 55 Taylor, John 105 Taylor, Vincent 114 Taylor, William George (Australia) 96 Tearfund (UK) 215 technology 12, 26, 44, 47, 50, 51, 52, 95, 172, 174, 183, 196, 305, 339, 467, 479, 500, 507; in Africa 9; communications 227, 257, 259, 326, 491, 492, 498, 503, 504, 506, 514, 515, 516, 520; digital 196, 290, 496, 497, 498, 500, 502, 508, 511, 512, 517; entertainment 306, 520; film 48, 53, 54, 55, 58, 120, 128, 145, 193, 194, 366, 406, 426, 504, 509; globalizing 196, 500; human consequences 121, 123, 492; Internet 54, 152, 196, 228, 290, 491, 512, 517, 518; media 109, 113, 117, 126, 127, 128, 139, 178, 187, 193, 194, 247, 350, 366, 496, 499, 502, 505;

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540

Index

technology (cont.) printing 53, 117, 126, 173, 181, 350, 412, 491, 497, 502, 505; radio 30, 44, 46, 50, 54, 67, 77, 91, 97, 116, 139, 171, 178–9, 183, 187, 316, 491, 493, 497, 501, 502, 504, 505, 508, 511, 515, 517, 518, 520; television 30, 44, 45, 47, 50, 54, 91, 109, 113, 116, 174, 178, 194, 196, 259, 316, 366, 491, 493, 497, 499, 501–11, 515, 517, 518, 520; transport 227, 311, 326; video 516 temperance 64, 67, 68, 77, 182, 187, 264, 421 Temple Trust (Australia) 227 Templeton, Charles Bradley ‘Chuck’ 106–9 Teo, Kwee Keng (missionary) 460 Tertullian 328 Thailand 137, 149, 455, 469 Thatcher, Margaret 86 The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM) 330 The Woman’s Bible 91–2, 96 theology 97, 108, 114, 137, 143, 147, 159, 162, 181, 185, 191, 231, 279, 285, 287, 289, 290, 344, 345, 347, 350, 352, 362, 463, 469, 374, 386, 427, 433, 454, 473, 481, 484, 491, 492, 494; African 284–8, 293, 327–8, 340, 351, 354, 371, 455; afterlife 102, 103; ancestors 140, 153, 161, 211, 242, 287, 335, 340, 348, 365, 443; anthropology 155, 380, 382; apologetics 117, 128; Asia 137–8, 145, 149, 164, 347, 361; atheism 85, 86, 119, 128, 214; atonement 275, 280, 323; baptism in the spirit 228, 229, 232, 233, 353; biblical 110, 122, 225; Black 122, 151, 192, 269, 279, 284, 285, 327, 339, 362, 413, 434; blessing 148, 160, 209, 249, 268, 268, 275 (and see prosperity); capitalism 9, 10, 29, 155, 192; Christology/Godhead 99, 123, 137, 142, 144, 150, 152, 163, 184, 185, 227, 241, 258, 259, 261, 274, 275, 496; communitarian 17, 118, 142, 153, 162, 164, 343, 353, 354, 356, 374, 403, 455, 458; complementarian 187, 189, 437, 418, 422, 425, 426, 438, 439; conservative 5, 13, 82, 87, 292, 300, 441; contextual 454, 455, 458; cosmology 291, 340, 343, 356; conversion 32, 270, 337, 343, 363, 425, 489, 504; Dalit 159, 269, 271, 272, 293, 455 (and see India, Dalits); Death of God 23, 116, 117, 119, 220, 232, 499; demonology 54, 155–8, 167, 212, 241, 241, 288, 368 et passim; ecclesiology 51, 194, 291, 303, 304, 313, 314, 317, 318, 322, 323, 365; ecology 121, 138, 153, 155, 162, 222, 225, 319; embodiment 119, 190, 191, 192, 384, 476; eschatology 103, 152, 153, 165, 191, 205, 225, 228, 265, 266, 364; evil 67, 144, 148, 149, 152, 156, 157, 158, 172, 191, 202,

205, 212, 241–42, 245, 249, 288, 341, 356, 363, 365, 368–9, 389, 392, 408, 476; existentialism 115, 118, 269, 244; feminism 155, 190, 161, 291, 362, 417, 436, 459; gender 188, 189, 285, 370, 373, 394, 395, 417, 420, 421, 428, 437, 440; German 94, 105, 174, 181, 269, 275, 292; global 135, 163, 166, 290, 292, 346; grace 41, 122, 440; heaven 28, 191; heresy 140, 146; hermeneutics 135, 184, 283; Holy Spirit 40, 43, 54, 119, 155, 157, 182–3, 185–7, 224–31, 234, 237, 238, 252, 255, 292, 342, 348, 356, 369, 420, 460, 493, 506, 513, 514, 517, 518; hospitality 338, 409; immanence 12, 246, 263, 361; incarnation 143, 219, 228, 269, 271, 374, 463, 493; Indian 138, 142, 271 (see Naga); indigenization 24, 53, 55, 137, 152, 159, 221, 258, 273, 283, 473; inspiration 40; Japan 138, 142, 144; kenosis 146, 354; kingdom of God 225, 271, 288; Korean 138, 144 (and see Minjung); liberal 5, 13, 38, 98, 271, 441 (and see liberalism); liberation 83, 116, 125, 136, 137, 151, 154, 158–9, 207, 218, 245, 269, 285, 290, 360, 371, 383, 431, 455, 458; Majority World 142, 139, 153, 211, 279, 361, 454, 455; migration 152, 164, 489; minjung 159, 206, 209, 211, 212, 213, 267–9, 272, 291, 455; narrative 145, 146, 152, 159, 164, 200, 329, 387; NeoOrthodoxy 39; nominalism 6; oppression 151, 155, 206, 369; ordination 428, 434, 435; pacifism 17, 74, 101, 185, 275, 427, 434, 513; Pentecostal 292, 510; politics 6, 148, 150, 152, 160, 282, 318, 339, 382, 483, 489; popular 143, 159, 204, 284, 289, 159; poverty 160, 291, 355; pragmatism 108, 118, 165, 289, 348, 372, 461, 476; premillennialism 99, 104, 105, 184; priesthood of all believers 16; primitivism 118, 121, 187, 229, 234, 461; prosperity 18, 107, 160, 192, 194, 209, 210, 211, 214, 246, 268, 288, 342, 355, 366, 481, 493, 505, 506, 509, 510, 510, 512, 513, 514, 519; protest 348, 356, 357, 359, 414, 431, 434, 446; public 164, 259, 290, 360, 361, 418; reformed 189, 279, 374, 492; Restorationism 6, 21, 42, 217, 234; revelation 39, 175, 185, 265; sanctification 209, 228, 230; sexuality 367; soteriology 123, 156, 175, 180, 182, 207, 290, 293, 446, 494, 503; supernaturalism 120, 158, 174, 363; syncretism 97, 359, 365, 403;

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 21/8/2018, SPi

Index universalism 134, 166, 276, 291, 323, 329, 330, 338, 410, 463, 467, 470; and see healing; Bible, interpretation; and by country name Third Wave movement – signs and wonders 44; and see Vineyard Movement; Wimber, John Thoburn, Isabella (missionary) 460 Thomas (Apostle), in India 132 Thomas, M. M. 346 Thompson, John Arthur 113 Three-Self churches 329, 330, 344, 449, 472; China 135 Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College 466, 467 Tillich, Paul Johannes 107, 110 Tolstoy, Lyov Nikolayevich 275 Torrey, Reuben Archer 170, 173, 181–4 totalitarianism see fascism, Communism Trible, Phyllis 124 Trinity Broadcasting Network 196, 508 Trinity College Dublin 176 Trinity College Glasgow 115 Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Chicago 175, 191 Trinity Theological College, Singapore 362 Trinity United Church of Christ 171, 173; and see Wright, Jeremiah Truman, Harry S. 278 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 360 Tumsa, Gudina 285 Tutu, Desmond 149, 151 Twelftree, Graham H. 113, 119 Twelve Apostles Church, Ghana 266, 293 Tyndale Hall, Bristol 177 Tyndale House, Cambridge 112, 177 U2 (band) 515 Uemura, Masahisa 275 Uganda 163, 285; Anglicanism in 280 Ukraine 52, 519 Union Theological Seminary, New York 94, 97, 103, 174, 268, 291 Unitarianism xvii, 95, 275 United Aborigines Mission 423, 432 United Church of Canada 8, 71, 73, 80, 86, 290, 321 United Church of Christ, Japan 455 United Kingdom 15, 34, 53, 55, 88, 104, 105, 175–7, 181, 226, 232, 236, 355; African churches 518; Brexit 82; churches 289, 377; Cornwall 176; English Civil War 318; metropolitan culture 378; slavery 381; Sunday School enrolment 380; Victorian period 397; and see countries United Methodist Church (USA) 9, 189 United Nations 102, 447; religious liberty 278; social welfare 316; Universal Declaration of Human Rights 278

541

United Reformed Church (UK) 80, 301 United States – churches 314 United States of America xvii, 2, 3, 34–5, 54, 57, 63, 103, 188, 191, 216, 229, 236, 278, 290, 301, 304, 352, 357, 425, 441, 467, 473, 483; African Americans 136, 172, 174, 177–8, 229, 239, 284, 309, 419, 461, 510; (churches) 136, 192; Americanization 504, 518; Baptists 433; Bible 480, 495; California 175, 186, 192, 229; Chicago 170, 174, 196; Christianity in 92, 97–8, 104, 113, 128, 154; civil rights 116, 139, 177, 285, 418, 423, 425, 430, 433, 434, 513, 514; class 174, 188; counterculture 46; culture wars 129; First peoples, 151; Florida, Orlando 54; Gilded Age 171, 174, 231, 267; Gulf War 151, 487; Hawaii 227, 478; Healing Revival 44, 108, 210, 267 (and see healing); Hispanic migration 291; Hispanics in 152; industrialization 174; Korean churches 473; media 510; messianism 173; migrant communities in 46, 152, 175, 176; missionaries 285, 345, 423, 430, 445, 473, 475, 476; missionaries from 52, 55; Moral Majority 79; Nebraska 187; New York 173; Oklahoma 44; Pentecostalism 184, 421, 427, 447, 461, 504, 506 (and see Pentecostalism; revivalism); populism 108; race 1, 84, 174, 178; racism 309, 420, 433, 434; revivalism 504, 508; slavery 173, 229, 265, 423; student work 478, 480, 487; Texas, churches in 194; War of Independence xv–xvi; Zionism 342; and see Evangelicalism; revivalism; by name, and place name Uniting Church in Australia 8, 80, 290, 321, 323; indigenous people 432 Universal Church of the Kingdom of God see Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus Universities 1, 115, 117, 258, 279, 286, 469, 477, 479; Aberdeen 111, 346; Amsterdam 346; Beirut 346; Berkeley 346; Birmingham 346; Bordeaux 346; Calcutta 236; Cambridge 57, 112, 286, 346, 454; Chicago 122, 174; Christian 57; Doshisha 274; Duke 487; Emory 115; Ewha Women’s 126; Gonzaga 278; Hansei 268; Harvard 228, 258, 346; Heidelberg 268; Ibadan 125; Indiana 406; London 406; Makarere 286; Manchester 111, 215; McGill 117; Montana 120; Otago 111; Oxford 182, 185, 346, 487; Phillips 107; Pretoria 111; Princeton 346; secularization 258; student missions 58, 217, 307, 481; Sydney 117; Syracuse (New York) 481; Yale 346

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Index

University Bible Fellowship 479, 480 Urbana Conference (Illinois) 58 Valdez Alfred C. (A.C.), Jr 42 Vanuatu 478 Vatican Radio 493 Venda people 379 Venezuela 215 Venn, Henry 329, 449 Vennard, Iva 421 Verwer, George 309 Vico, Giambattista 132 Victorian Protestant Federation 69 Vietnam 467, 469, 482; Catholicism in 278 Vietnam War 110, 115, 154, 222, 278 Vineyard church movement 44, 56, 254, 321 Virginia Union University School of Theology 172; Yale 505 Voice Magazine 506 voluntarism 63, 66, 68–9, 300, 302, 303, 312, 313, 316, 318, 330, 334, 382, 476, 489 Volunteer Movement 330 von Harnack, Adolf 97 von Troll-Borostyáni, Irma 91 Vondey, Wolfgang 292 Waddilove School 409, 411 Wagner, Charles Peter 221, 252, 471 Waldensians 485 Wales 54, 176, 231, 301; Calvinism 176; Welsh Revival 229, 231–2, 237, 280 Walker, William Lowe 182 Wallace, Edgar 402, 404, 414 Wallerstein, Immanuel 12, 336 Walls, Andrew F. 293 Walton Churches Partnership (UK) 81 Wang, Thomas 469 Wangare, Margaret 370 Ward, Harry F. 122 Ward, Kevin 279 Ward, William 452 warfare 28 see by name of conflict Warneck, Gustav 468 Warneck, Johannes 446 Warren, Rick 194 Waterfront Strike (1951) 80 Watts, George Frederick 172 Webb, Arthur John 93 Webb, Theodore 429 Weber, Max 472 Welby, Justin Portal 234 welfare states 75, 79 Wesley College, Leeds 114

Wesley, Charles 23 Wesley, John 23, 183, 232 West African Literature Society 396 Westar Institute 120 Westminster Chapel, London 176, 195 Westminster Confession 100, 104 Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia 176, 268 Westmont College 175 Westphalia, Peace of xiii Wheaton College 106, 107, 215 White, James 128 White, John (missionary) 411 White, Paul (Jungle Doctor) 412 Whitefield, George 193, 232 Whitelaw, Thomas, of Kilmarnock 95 Whitfield, Constance M. 379 Whitley College, Melbourne 79 Whitman, Walt 466 Wiesel, Eliezer ‘Elie’ 118 Wigglesworth, Smith 506, 519 Wilkerson, Ralph 119 Wilkinson, Bruce 160 Willard, Frances 421 Williams, Marion Percy 391 Willow Creek Community Church – seeker sensitive 49, Association 310 Wilson, Thomas Woodrow 467, 451 Wimber, John 44, 254; and see Vineyard Movement Winners Chapel see Living Faith Church Worldwide witchcraft 29, 158, 202, 204, 206, 220, 221, 241, 407, 412; anti-witchcraft 367, 385, 386, 388, 390, 391, 392, 393, 397; and see shamanism Witherington III, Ben 113 Women’s Christian Temperance Union 187, 421, 422, 423, 426, 435 women’s liberation movement see feminism Women’s Missionary Union 438 Woodsworth, James Shaver 73–4 Word of Faith Movement 509 World Alliance of Reformed Churches 140 World Bible Conference, Philadelphia, 1919 99 World Communion of Reformed Churches 285 World Conference on Mission and Evangelism, Bangkok 1973 446 World Congress on Evangelism, Berlin, 1966 139, 417 World Congress on Evangelization, Manila 482

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 21/8/2018, SPi

Index World Council of Churches 13, 39, 102, 207, 285, 315, 347, 356, 416, 431, 446, 453, 455, 461, 471; Amsterdam Conference, 1948 447; Theological Education Fund 454 World Cup (Football), 2014 477 World Methodist Council 166 World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 52, 199, 330, 384, 447, 461, 467, 468, 489 World Student Christian Federation, Peking Conference, 1922 427 World Vision (NGO) 160, 270, 297 World War One 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 74, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 176, 181, 184, 205, 231, 331, 384, 395–7, 418; postwar change 63, 280, 451 World War Two 53, 74, 75, 79, 100, 102, 109, 110, 115, 119, 139, 181–2, 222, 288, 323, 385, 455, 467, 470, 471, 476, 484, 504; influence 117, 279, 290 Wright, Jeremiah 171–9, 196 Wright, Nicholas Thomas 113–14, 191

Yoder, J. Howard 282 Yoido Full Gospel Church 14, 50, 51, 160, 207–8, 211–12, 221, 246, 251, 268, 474 Yong, Amos 119, 292 Yonsei University 126 Yoruba people (Nigeria) 262 Young Women’s Christian Association 373, 421; India 427; Japan 427; racism 425 Youth for Christ 107 Youth with a Mission (YWAM) 478 Zacharias, Ravi 487 Zambia 431; missionaries 386, 387, 394 Zenana Mission 459 Zimbabwe 151, 241, 409, 411, 431; Bush War 406; literature 406 Zion Christian Church 344, 419; Churches 265, 342, 344 Zoulin, Zhang 466 Zulu Christians 340

543