Troubled in spirit: the surprising direction of African Christianity

National Review, March 10, 2008 by Travis Kavulla

Nairobi, Kenya

A WOMAN like Margaret Wanjiru, the self-anointed bishop of one of Kenya's largest churches, could not have existed even a generation ago in Africa. That she does now owes largely to the worldwide evangelical reawakening that first got its legs in the United States.

Like American megachurches, Wanjiru's Jesus Is Alive Ministries has a formidable flagship establishment: a converted warehouse in central Nairobi that comfortably seats 5,000 people, though thousands more regularly pack into her services. These services rely on free-style prayer, catchy hymns, and sermonizing to keyboard synchronization--all tropes of American evangelical worship. Bishop Wanjiru, like many an American evangelist, also has interests outside the walls of her physical church. She owns a Bible school and a bus line, and appears in a primetime slot on one of Kenya's four television channels. After a visiting Oklahoma pastor prophesied that Bishop Wanjiru was marked for government, she ran for parliament. And, unlike many pastor-cum-aspirants in America, she won; now, the local press refers to her as the Hon. Bishop Dr. Margaret Wanjiru. (She holds a correspondence degree.)

Her Christmas Day service is full of energy. Floodlights illuminate the stage, bongos rattle tensely, and as things get underway Bishop Wanjiru sashays across the elevated dais at the front of the church, kicking her legs high as she leads the choir. It is an impressive display, and after ten minutes of frenetic dancing the tightly packed rows of chairs in the church are entirely disordered.

Bishop Wanjiru's services are long. Five hours is typical. But people stick around, and one soon feels they are waiting for something. Finally the climax arrives: Wanjiru holds out her hands to the audience and encourages them to feel the Holy Spirit. Many do. In the aisle to my right, a fiftysomething in a lime-green pantsuit begins to jump up and down with a vigor uncommon among women of her stoutness. She topples over and others follow, ushers struggling to pull apart the dogpile of the possessed. One of the church's three cameramen zooms in, and the close-up of the lady in green convulsing violently, her eyes rolling madly, is simulcast to the television sets around the church. Scenes like this often make the cut when the service is reduced into snippets for Wanjiru's TV program. Some of the afflicted begin to scream; one barks. Wanjiru enumerates the powers of Christ and at last calls on the intercession of His Spirit, whereupon the women collapse, a heap of polyester on the concrete floor, and lie unconscious for several minutes before the ushers help them to their seats.

Wanjiru's and congregations like it constitute the most vibrant strain of Christianity in Africa today: independent Pentecostal churches whose fortunes are hitched to an individual pastor's charisma and ability, a la the Acts of the Apostles, to work miracles by the intercession of the Holy Spirit.

In America, although thousands of churches invoke the Spirit every Sunday, Pentecostalism has long been the eccentric little brother of mainstream evangelical Christianity. It is one thing to be "born again": To use a current example, Mike Huckabee describes his personal salvation, at age ten, as a feeling of being overwhelmed by a sensation of cleanliness, after which, he says, he never wanted to be dirty again. It would be quite another thing for the former governor of Arkansas to begin delivering a message from God in an antique tongue.

Yet in this respect Africa has moved away from America. Prophesying in tongues, demon possession, and charismatic healing are not on the margins, but are part of the African mainstream. And while pundits regularly talk up the magnitude of evangelicalism in America, and its implications on culture and politics, Africa's Pentecostal awakening dwarfs it. It is hard to overstate the magnitude of this shift; as a percentage and in absolute numbers, the exodus from Africa's established to new Pentecostal churches like Wanjiru's is larger than the change wrought by the Reformation in Europe. One recent Pew survey claimed that Pentecostals do not constitute merely a plurality among Kenyan Christians, but are 57 percent of all Kenyans.

A HISTORIC FAITH

Sixty years ago, Pentecostals barely existed in Africa. In calling Pentecostal preachers "charlatans culled from the dregs of society," one British colonial governor summed up the prevailing attitude. Their participatory and wild-eyed services were prone, it was thought, to foster disorder. Laws that governed the registration of societies provided a vehicle that allowed many colonial governments to stymie the work of the more colorful Christian churches.

In the meantime, Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and a handful of other churches spread throughout Africa, often outpacing the reach of the inchoate colonial governments. Indeed, these churches often filled the role of government. In the 20th century, most Africans received their education, their health care, and their mail--insofar as these things existed at all--from the mainstream churches. A great many Africans still do.