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The most fascinating section of the book is where Maxwell analyzes Guti's rise to power, his founding of ZAOGA, and how he retained his grip on the expanding movement. Here is where the author's impressive range of sources becomes evident. In addition to conducting interviews with 115 informants, Maxwell mined the official and private publications of ZAOGA and its predecessor churches. His use of both in-house literature and extensive interviews allowed him to construct a thick description of the social matrix in which Guti flourished. As the urban poor sought to advance materially and morally, they put their faith in their charismatic leader as the visible symbol of their own desires for prosperity. In 1980, the black-led country of Zimbabwe emerged from colonial Rhodesia. With independence came new opportunities for mobility, growth, and expansion, and Guti capitalized on them. Maxwell documents how he systematically entrenched his power base through exploiting and then purging fellow Pentecostal leaders, both black and white.
Guti's rise to power provides a cautionary tale to gullible Western evangelicals who think they can sponsor "their" African partners, and then brag about their own successful African ministries. Maxwell's transnational framework exposes how autocrats like Guti build empires by closely controlling the flow of global resources they have carefully cultivated. The beauty of Maxwell's analysis is that it demonstrates how the forces of globalization can be harnessed for local purposes. It also silences scholars who like to attribute evangelical expansion among the poor to sinister manipulation by neo-imperialistic Westerners. Not only did Guti outwit and marginalize white Pentecostal missionaries sent to work with him, but he manipulated American funders by using their money to build a cult of personality around himself and his family. In my fifteen years of visiting churches in Zimbabwe, I have noticed the same pattern described by Maxwell: well-connected church entrepreneurs excel at using foreign resources to leverage their own positions in the local community. Also, ordinary believers enjoy attending whatever church growth seminar (and free lunch) is offered by passing Westerners—and don't mind being "saved" repeatedly by evangelists who tally them for glowing ministry reports back home.
The multi-ethnic urban base of ZAOGA allowed it to disregard many inconvenient demands of Shona traditional culture and of Zimbabwean nationalism, and to employ instead the language of transnational evangelical expansionism. When Zimbabweans moved abroad, grassroots needs for upward mobility, middle class respectability, security, and prosperity fueled the growth of ZAOGA as a transnational movement. In the decades after Zimbabwean independence in 1980, ZAOGA leadership cynically employed anti-missionary and anti-colonial rhetoric to aid in recruitment and international fund-raising—despite reproducing the paternalistic "excesses of missionaries past and present." The movement thus successfully wields seemingly contradictory global discourses of evangelical church growth, anti-colonial resistance, postcolonial indigeneity, and multicultural inclusivism.
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