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Recently Nigeria's National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) issued a ban on the television broadcasting of miracles—specifically, those not "provable and believable" (though the NBC failed to provide guidelines for establishing proof). The ban is aimed at the many Pentecostal ministries in that country who air video of healing miracles to draw people to their meetings and to Christ.

My response to this sort of "news of the miraculous" in Africa is mixed. First, I get a small thrill—a little, inner voice saying "Yay!"—when I am reminded of how powerfully God has touched that continent, so that miracles of healing would become standard television fare. Second, I share in the skepticism that suspects some charismatic ministers broadcast such events—without adequately checking the genuineness of the "miracles"—to aggrandize their ministries and gain followers. Third, I am angry (with, I hope, a holy sort of anger) that the Devil continues, as he always has, to discredit by any means possible the work of the Holy Spirit—in this case, through exploiting the base motives of some leaders.

No longer among my reactions, however, is a desire to dismiss all of African Christianity as shallow and unbiblical. Though I once did lean toward this opinion, I have moved away from it as I have learned more about the progress of the faith on that continent during the past century.

The twin lions of African Christianity
West Africa's two most distinctive, fast-growing indigenous religious movements are, first, the "prophetic independent churches" that began to appear after World War I, and second, the charismatic and Pentecostal churches that sprang up in the 1970s. Both are growing with stunning rapidity. And both are rooted in the belief that a personal Devil and demons are at work in Africa—especially through African traditional religion; that prayer is the key to all problems in this world; and that God continues to heal and deliver people today as in the day of the apostles.

These movements draw deeply from the African assumption—also strong in traditional religion—that the spiritual world is real and that it constantly impinges on the material world. In our Issue 79: The African Apostles, Dr. Ogbu Kalu of McCormick Theological Seminary compares this assumption to the modern, Word-centered beliefs of the early Western missionaries:

"The missionaries read the Bible through the lenses of the Protestant emphasis on Word over Spirit and the Enlightenment desacralization of the universe.

"The Africans, on the other hand, read the Bible through their own traditionally 'charismatic' worldview: they knew there were spirits in the sky, the water, the land, and the ancestral worlds. Only, now, they proclaimed the power of Jesus over these other powers.

"For example, when confronted with illness, the Africans read their Bibles and came up with a straightforward belief in healing. They were used to seeing illness and health as spiritual matters. They had always accepted witchcraft as the source of illness."

This supernaturalist belief results in a "wild side" of these groups that is very hard for Westerners (and especially non-charismatic Westerners) either to understand or to credit as legitimate. See, for example, the profiles from our Africa issue of several founders and leaders from West Africa's "Aladura"—Christian groups in the prophetic independent church stream.

An equally spirit- and prayer-focused, but slightly less indigenous movement followed, beginning a scant three decades ago. These are the Pentecostal and charismatic churches—West African churches with roots and ties in Western Pentecostalism, but almost entirely indigenous in leadership and style.

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May (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48