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In the 1960s, isolated researchers began speculating that Africa could become a major center of Christian population by the end of the century. For decades this apparently extravagant prediction was noticed by few outside the small world of missionary scholars. After all, Africa was well behind Europe, Latin America, and North America in Christian population, and secularization theory overshadowed scholarship on world Christianity. Yet today there are an estimated 447 million Christians in Africa. In the next fifteen years Africa will likely surpass Europe as the largest Christian continent.
By the 1980s, massive migration and urbanization heralded another surprising demographic shift—the worldwide growth of Pentecostalism. With strong local leaders, faith-healing, surrogate family structures, and affective forms of worship, new urban churches sprang up like mushrooms after rain. Charismatic renewal movements also transformed the non-Western branches of mainline Protestant denominations. Old-time Pentecostal historians like Vinson Synan, who endured decades of negative scholarship that attributed his movement to psychological and social "deprivation," may be forgiven the triumphalism that marked his claim in 1998 that one-fourth of the world's Christians were "Pentecostals."
The nexus between these burgeoning movements—the overlap between African Christianity and Pentecostalism—is only now receiving the scholarly attention it deserves. Readers will welcome, therefore, University of Keele Professor David Maxwell's superb study of the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God, Africa. By locating ZAOGA both within the historiography of Christianity in southern Africa, and within the globalization of what he calls the movement of "Born agains" —evangelicals, charismatics, and Pentecostals—Maxwell sets a new standard for studies of non-Western Pentecostalism.
Maxwell charts the rise of Pentecostalism at the turn of the 20th century and traces its missionary advance into South Africa. While he acknowledges its multicultural origins, Maxwell gives due credit to the pre-existing Anglo-American missionary network without which it could not have spread from Azusa Street. By the 1930s, the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM) had reached colonial Rhodesia, brought by poorly educated Afrikaner farmers and Shona laborers. The entrance of Pentecostalism into British Rhodesia was greeted with suspicion by white colonials as a potentially subversive force that lacked the social benefits of established mission stations, such as schools and hospitals. Like the African Independent Churches (AICs) led by prophets in rural areas, the Rhodesian Pentecostal movement "operated as an autonomous black church." Maxwell breaks new ground in exploring the porous boundaries between the AICs and the tiny early Rhodesian Pentecostal movement at midcentury. But unlike the AICs that were building healing colonies on communal lands, Pentecostalism gained strength in the 1960s with a base constituency of urban laborers. Expansion from an urban base helps to explain why mid-century Rhodesian Pentecostalism pursued upward mobility through modernization, including use of electronic technologies, media resources, and careful cultivation of Western contacts.
The leading figure in Maxwell's narrative is Ezekiel Guti, who came upon the scene in 1959. Initially connected with the Apostolic Faith Mission and then the Assemblies of God, Guti evangelized growth points in Salisbury (Harare). Migrants poured into these areas both from the countryside and from neighboring countries. As workers sought healing, security, and family and community life in the big city, the way that Guti negotiated the boundaries between traditions and modernization drew them under his leadership and that of his fellow evangelists, notably the talented preacher Abel Sande. Maxwell shows how the drive for evangelization, and the focus on the personal needs of the urban poor, precluded the movement from alliance with the political nationalism of pre-independence Zimbabwe. Like most evangelicals around the world in the 1960s and 1970s, Rhodesian Pentecostals avoided politics.
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