The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume IV: The Twentieth Century: Traditions in a Global Context 0199684049, 9780199684045

Table of contents :
Cover
The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions Volume IV: The Twentieth Century: Traditions in a Global Context
Copyright
Contents
List of Contributors
Series Introduction
Introduction
Part I: Africa
1: Emerging Streams of Dissent in Modern African Christianity
‘DISSENT’ IN AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE
AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY’S EVANGELICAL ETHOS
BLACK CHRISTIAN MOVEMENTS AND IDEOLOGIES
THE NATIONALIST DIMENSION
Kimbanguism
Dissent and African Nationalism: Some Complications
INDIGENOUS RELIGION AND VERNACULAR TRANSLATION
Vernacular Translation: In a Word . . . .
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
2: Charismatic Churches and the Pentecostalization of African Christianity
DISSENT IN THE PENTECOSTALIZATION OF AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY
THE RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF NEW CHARISMATIC CHURCHES
Major Ministries in Nigeria and Ghana
The East African Experience
Major Ministries in Southern Africa
PROSPERITY HERE AND NOW?
CONCLUSION
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
3: Indigenization, Translation, and Transformation in African Christianity
INTRODUCTION: WAVES OF FAITH
WHOSE RELIGION IS CHRISTIANITY?
ON TRANSLATING THE MESSAGE
EMBRACING THE INTERRUPTION
CONCLUSION: A NEW REDEMPTION SONG
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Part II: Asia and the Middle East
4: Protestant Dissenting Traditions in Asia in the Twentieth Century
TRADITIONS OF FAITH
ASIAN AGENCY AND DISSENTING LEGACIES
ORIGINS, TRACES, AND PARALLELS
CHRISTIANITY IN ASIA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
CHURCH AND STATE
PERSISTENT MARKERS
NEW SYNTHESES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
5: Megachurches in Asia and the Dissenting Movement: The Case of Yoido Full Gospel Church
INTRODUCTION
‘Dissenting’ in Asia
The Megachurch Movement in Korea
Cho as the Case Par Excellence
The Study
DAVID YONGGI CHO AND CHURCH GROWTH
Cho and His World
Yoido Full Gospel Church
The Tent Church (1958–61)
Poverty
Healing
Church Growth
Full Gospel Central Church (1961–73)
Continuing Drive for Church Growth
Cell Group System
Yoido Full Gospel Church (1973–2008)
Flowering of Church Growth
Church Growth as a Global Phenomenon
MEGACHURCH AND DISSENTING: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS
The Church and State
Leadership
Message of Healing and Blessing
Cell Structure: Mobilization of the Laity
CONCLUSION
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
6: Dissenting Traditions and Indigenous Christianity: The Case in China
INTRODUCTION: TWO STAGES OF DISSENTING TRADITIONS IN CHINA
FACTORS GIVING RISE TO THE FIRST STAGE OF DISSENTING TRADITIONS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS SINCE THE 1900S
FACTORS GIVING RISE TO THE SECOND STAGE OF DISSENTING TRADITIONS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS SINCE THE 1950S
DRIVING FORCES OF ‘DISSENTING TRADITIONS’ IN CHINA
CONCLUDING REMARKS: THE CHINESE LEGACY
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
7: ‘Crying for Help and Reformation’: Dissenting Protestants in Ottoman Syria
DISSENT AGAINST WESTERN MISSIONARY POWER
CONGREGATIONAL FORMATION AS SYRIAN RESISTANCE
BIBLICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR DISSENT
CONCLUSION: UNMANAGEABLE DISSENT
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archives
Periodicals
Publications
Part III: America and Europe
8: Dissent as Mainline
FRAGMENTATION OF ‘THE BIBLE ALONE’: DISSENTER PROTESTANTS AND MODERN THOUGHT
Theological Fragmentation
Institutional Fragmentation and the Theological Origins of Mainline Decline
THE WANING OF ‘CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION’ AND THE RISE OF CONSUMER INDIVIDUALISM
Confrontation, 1880–1920
Consumer Synthesis, 1920–2000
THE RESTRUCTURING OF PROTESTANT AMERICA: THE STATE, POLITICIZATION, AND THE DECLINE OF DENOMINATIONALISM
CONCLUSION
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
9: Southern Baptists and Evangelical Dissent
SOUTHERN BAPTISTS AND EVANGELICALS: THE SITUATION
SOUTHERN BAPTISTS AND EVANGELICALS: AN INTENSE CONVERSATION
SOUTHERN BAPTISTS AND EVANGELICALS: PUBLIC SCRUTINY
SOUTHERN BAPTISTS AND EVANGELICALS: DEMOGRAPHIC AND CULTURAL REALITIES
DEFINING EVANGELICALS AND SOUTHERN BAPTISTS: NO EASY TASK
Southern Baptist Roots: Historical-Theological Identity
Baptist Identity: Distinctive Beliefs and Practices
Baptists in the South: Seeds of a Denomination
EVANGELICALS: COMMON CORE, UNCOMMON DIVERSITY
SOUTHERN BAPTISTS AND EVANGELICALS: SHARED INFLUENCES
SBC DENOMINATIONALISM: A NEW DOOR TO EVANGELICALS
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
10: The Twentieth-Century Black Church: A Dissenting Tradition in a Global Context
BLACK CHURCH AS A CONSTRUCT AND ITS TRADITION OF RELIGIOUS DISSENT
CURRENTS WITHIN THE DISSENTING TRADITION OF THE BLACK CHURCH: 1896–1965
The Conservative Religious Dissent Tradition of Critical Racial Accommodation
Pragmatic Religious Dissent Tradition of Critical Racial Accommodation and Civil Rights Activism
Radical Religious Dissent Tradition of Black-Led Interracial Organizing
Progressive Religious Dissent Trajectory of Civil Rights Activism
POST-LEGALIZED RACIAL SEGREGATION ERA: THE BLACK CHURCH AND NEW THEOLOGICAL TRADITIONS OF RELIGIOUS DISSENT
CONCLUSION
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
11: Pentecostals and Charismatics in America
EARLY PENTECOSTAL DISSENSION
CONTINUING FORMS OF PENTECOSTAL DISSENSION
USING TECHNOLOGY TO ADVANCE THE GOSPEL MESSAGE
THE DISSENSION BROUGHT BY CHARISMATIC RENEWAL
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
12: Free Church Traditions in Twentieth-Century Europe
EVANGELISTIC WITNESS
CHURCH AND STATE
THEOLOGY AND SPIRITUALITY
ISSUES OF IDENTITY
SOCIAL AND GLOBAL INVOLVEMENTS
CONCLUSION
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
13: Dissent by Default: ‘Believing Without Belonging’ in Twenty-First-Century England
‘BELIEVING WITHOUT BELONGING’
Christian Identity
Denominational Identity
Church Attendance
Denominational Attendance
Belief and Believing
DRIFT AND DISENGAGEMENT
Changing Values in the 1960s
Welfare State and Loss of Distinction
Neoliberalism of the 1980s
VICARIOUS RELIGION
DISSENT AND NONCONFORMITY
Active Christian Minority
Active Atheist Minority
CONCLUDING REMARKS
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Part IV: Latin America
14: Historical and Ideological Lineages of Dissenting Protestantism in Latin America
MISSIONARY ORIGINS OF PROTESTANTISM IN LATIN AMERICA
TRANSITIONS TO LOCAL AUTONOMY
PENTECOSTAL REVIVALS
SOCIAL CONTEXTS OF PENTECOSTALISM
PROTESTANTISM’S DEMOGRAPHIC BOOM
CONCLUSION
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
15: Chilean Pentecostalism: Methodism Renewed
EARLY PROTESTANTISM IN CHILE
METHODISM IN CHILE
THE PENTECOSTAL REVIVAL IN VALPARAÍSO
THE ROOTS OF THE CONFLICT: INDIGENIZATION AND THE METHODIST HERITAGE
CONSTITUTIONAL THEOLOGICAL INSTABILITIES WITHIN NORTH AMERICAN METHODISM
CONTEMPORARY CHILEAN PENTECOSTALISM AND THE PULL TOWARDS THE RESPECTABLE
CONCLUSION
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
16: Dissenting Religion: Protestantism in Latin America
INTRODUCTION
Black Anglicans and their Discontents in the Caribbean
Garveyism’s Religious Legacies
THE PENTECOSTALS
First Wave Protestantism in Latin America
Second Wave Pentecostalism
Pentecostalism as Dissent
Spinning off the Spirit
Third Wave Pentecostalism
CONCLUSION
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Part V: The Pacific
17: Localization and Indigenization of Christianity in the Pacific
THE PACIFIC
DEFINING INDIGENOUS CHRISTIANITY
LOCAL CHRISTIANITYAND DISSENTING TRADITIONS
Eastern Polynesia
Samoa
Hawai’i
Papua New Guinea
The Philippines
CONCLUSION
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
18: Fijian and Tongan Methodism
THE EARLY MISSION YEARS
CHURCH, STATE, AND CULTURE
WHOSE CHURCH?
FIJI: TWO WORLDS
CHURCH INDEPENDENCE IN TONGA
CHURCH INDEPENDENCE IN FIJI
NEW DENOMINATIONS AND NEW CHALLENGES
CONCLUSIONS
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Index

Citation preview

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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 , V O L U M E IV

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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 IV The Twentieth Century: Traditions in a Global Context

Edited by J EHU J . HA N C I L E S

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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 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 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: 2018958842 ISBN 978–0–19–968404–5 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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Contents List of Contributors Series Introduction Timothy Larsen and Mark A. Noll

Introduction Jehu J. Hanciles

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PART I: AFRICA 1. Emerging Streams of Dissent in Modern African Christianity Jehu J. Hanciles

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2. Charismatic Churches and the Pentecostalization of African Christianity Allan Heaton Anderson

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3. Indigenization, Translation, and Transformation in African Christianity Akintunde E. Akinade

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PART II: ASIA AND THE MIDDLE EAST 4. Protestant Dissenting Traditions in Asia in the Twentieth Century John Roxborogh

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5. Megachurches in Asia and the Dissenting Movement: The Case of Yoido Full Gospel Church Wonsuk Ma

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6. Dissenting Traditions and Indigenous Christianity: The Case in China Peter Tze Ming NG

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7. ‘Crying for Help and Reformation’: Dissenting Protestants in Ottoman Syria Deanna Ferree Womack

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Contents PART III: AMERICA AND EUROPE

8. Dissent as Mainline Laura Rominger Porter

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9. Southern Baptists and Evangelical Dissent Bill J. Leonard

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10. The Twentieth-Century Black Church: A Dissenting Tradition in a Global Context David D. Daniels III

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11. Pentecostals and Charismatics in America Cecil M. Robeck, Jr

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12. Free Church Traditions in Twentieth-Century Europe Toivo Pilli and Ian M. Randall

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13. Dissent by Default: ‘Believing Without Belonging’ in Twenty-First-Century England Sylvia Collins-Mayo

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PART I V: LATIN AMERICA 14. Historical and Ideological Lineages of Dissenting Protestantism in Latin America Stephen Dove

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15. Chilean Pentecostalism: Methodism Renewed Martin Lindhardt

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16. Dissenting Religion: Protestantism in Latin America Virginia Garrard

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PART V: THE PACIFIC 17. Localization and Indigenization of Christianity in the Pacific Brian M. Howell and Michael A. Rynkeiwich

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18. Fijian and Tongan Methodism Jane Samson

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Index

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List of Contributors Akintunde E. Akinade is a Professor of Theology at Georgetown University’s Edmund E. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Qatar. His publications include Christian Responses to Islam in Nigeria: A Contextual Study of Ambivalent Encounters (2014);The Agitated Mind of God: The Theology of Kosuke Koyama (1996, co-edited with Dale T. Irvin); Creativity and Change in Nigerian Christianity (2010, co-edited with David O. Ogungbile); A New Day: Essays on World Christianity in Honor of Lamin Sanneh (2010); and Fractured Spectrum: Perspectives on Christian-Muslim Relations in Nigeria (2013). He serves on the Editorial Board of The Muslim World, Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, Religions, The Trinity Journal of Theology, Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue, Orita: Ibadan Journal of Religious Studies, Odu: A Journal of West African Studies, and The Living Pulpit. He is the book review editor for The Journal of World Christianity published by Pennsylvania State University Press. Within the American Academy of Religion, he has served on the Editorial Board on its flagship journal, The Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR) and also on the International Connections Committee. Allan Heaton Anderson is Professor of Mission and Pentecostal Studies at the University of Birmingham. He is originally from Zimbabwe, and is the author of many books and articles on global Pentecostalism, and he has also specialized on Pentecostalism in Africa. His most recent books are An Introduction to Pentecostalism (2014), To the Ends of the Earth (2013) and Spreading Fires (2007). His most recent books are Spirit-Filled World (2018), An Introduction to Pentecostalism (2014), To the Ends of the Earth (2013) and Spreading Fires (2007). Sylvia Collins-Mayo is Associate Professor in Sociology at Kingston University. Her research interests focus on youth and religion with particular reference to the everyday faith of young people from Christian backgrounds. Her publications include Making Sense of Generation Y (2006, co-authored with Sara Savage, Bob Mayo, and Graham Cray); The Faith of Generation Y (2010, co-authored with Bob Mayo, Sally Nash, and Christopher Cocksworth); and Religion and Youth (2010, Pink Dandelion). Her current research includes the role of faith in secular places of work and the sociological aspects of prayer practices. David D. Daniels III is the Henry Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity at McCormick Theological Seminary, having joined the faculty in 1987. He earned a PhD in Church History from Union Theological Seminary and has authored over fifty academic journal articles and book chapters on topics

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related to the Black Church, Global Pentecostalism, and World Christianity. Daniels serves on various editorial boards, including the board of the Journal of World Christianity. He has delivered public lectures at colleges and seminaries across the United States along with presenting academic papers in over twelve countries throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe. Stephen Dove is Assistant Professor of History and Latin American Studies at Centre College. He is co-editor of the Cambridge History of Religion in Latin America (2016, Cambridge University Press). His research focuses on the shift from missionary to local Protestantism in Latin America, and he is currently working on a book manuscript based on research in Guatemala. Virginia Garrard has been on the faculty at the University of Texas since 1990. Her most recent work is The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America (2016, co-edited with Stephen Dove and Paul Freston). She is author of Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982–1983 (2010, Oxford); Terror en la tierra del Espiritu Santo (2012, AVANCSO); Viviendo en La Nueva Jerusalem (2009, Guatemala); Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (1998, University of Texas Press); and Beyond the Eagle’s Shadow: New Histories of Latin America’s Cold War (2013, co-editor with Mark Lawrence and Julio Moreno. She has also edited On Earth as it is in Heaven: Religion and Society in Latin America (2000, Scholarly Resources); Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America (1993, co-edited with David Stoll); and The History of Modern Latin America and the World (2018, co-authored with Peter Henderson and Bryan McCann). Her research interests include: historic memory and human rights during the Cold War in Latin America, archives and digital humanities, and contemporary Central American history. She is equally interested in religious movements and ethnic identity in Latin America, Pentecostalism and other Protestant movements, and the intersection of religion, culture, and politics in Latin America. Jehu J. Hanciles is D. W. Ruth Brooks Associate Professor of World Christianity at Candler School of Theology at Emory University and director of its World Christianity Program. Originally from Sierra Leone, he is the author of Euthanasia of a Mission: African Church Autonomy in a Colonial Context (2002), and Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration and the Transformation of the West (2008). He has written and published mainly in issues related to the history of Christianity, notably the African experience and globalization. His current research aims to survey the history of global Christian expansion through the lens of migration. Brian M. Howell is Professor of Anthropology at Wheaton College. He graduated from Wesleyan University (CT), majored in the College of Social Studies, has Masters from Fuller Theological Seminary and Washington

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University in St. Louis, and a Doctorate in Sociocultural Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. He spent eighteen months in the Philippines on doctoral fieldwork,with additional fieldwork in the Dominican Republic and United States. His books include Christianity in the Local Context (2008), Power and Identity in the Global Church: Six Case Studies (2009, co-editor with Edwin Zehner), Introducing Cultural Anthropology (2011, co-author with Jenell Williams Paris), and Short Term Mission: An Ethnography of Christian Travel Narrative and Experience (2012). Bill J. Leonard is James and Marilyn Dunn Professor of Baptist Studies and Professor of Church History Emeritus at the School of Divinity, Wake Forest University, where he was the founding Dean. He is the author or editor of some twenty-five books with particular focus on American religion, Baptist Studies, and Appalachian religious traditions. Leonard is a an ordained Baptist minister. Martin Lindhardt is an Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Southern Denmark. He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on Pentecostalism in Chile and on Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity and witchcraft in Tanzania. He is also the author of Power in Powerlessness: A Study of Pentecostal Life-Worlds in Urban Chile (2012), and the editor of Practicing the Faith: The Ritual Life of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians (2011), and Pentecostalism in Africa: Presence and Impact of Pneumatic Christianity in Post-Colonial societies (2014). Wonsuk Ma is Distinguished Professor of Global Christianity at Oral Roberts University. He also serves as Dean of College of Theology and Ministry. His research focuses on Asian Pentecostalism, Pentecostal mission, and global Christianity. As the Director of Regnum Books during an Oxford tenure, he was responsible for the publication of the thirty-five-volume Regnum Edinburgh Centenary Series. His publications include Mission in the Spirit: Towards a Pentecostal/Charismatic Missiology (2010, with Julie C. Ma). Peter Tze Ming NG is Professor and Chair of Chinese Christianity at China Victory Theological Seminary of Hong Kong, and concurrently an Adjunct Professor at both the School of Inter-cultural Studies in Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, USA and the Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese Society, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China, as well as a Senior Researcher of Lumina College Research Institute, Hong Kong. Prof. Ng has been Adjunct Professor of Sichuan University (2007–10), Lanzhou University (2007–10), and Shanghai University (20058, 2010– present), all in the People’s Republic of China. He has also been a Research Fellow at Yale University Divinity School (1991), Adjunct Professor at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley (1992), and Distinguished Fellow of Ricci Institute, University of San Francisco (2002) in USA. Besides, he was appointed Visiting Fellow

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of Wolfson College at Cambridge University (2005), Senior Research Fellow of Oxford Centre for the Study of Christianity in China, UK (2007), Henry Martyn Lecturer, UK (2007), and the Chairman of North East Asian Council for the Study of History of Christianity (2007–9). His recent book is Chinese Christianity: An Interplay between Global and Local Perspectives (2012, Brill). Toivo Pilli is Director of Baptist and Anabaptist Studies, International Baptist Theological Study Centre, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Associate Professor of Free Church History and Identity, Tartu Theological Seminary, Estonia. He is the author of Dance or Die: The Shaping of Estonian Baptist Identity under Communism (2008). Ian M. Randall is a Senior Research Fellow of Spurgeon’s College, London, and the International Baptist Theological Study Centre, Amsterdam, and a Research Associate of the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide. He has written a number of books on evangelical movements. Cecil M. Robeck, Jr is an Assemblies of God minister in the US. He serves as Senior Professor of Church History and Ecumenics and Special Assistant to the President for Ecumenical Relations. He has written widely on Pentecostal, Charismatic, and Ecumenical issues. Laura Rominger Porter is an independent scholar who writes and teaches about American religion, slavery, and the US South. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Notre Dame. She is the co-editor of Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism (2017). John Roxborogh (University of Otago) is an historian of Christian mission in Asia and Southeast Asia. He is author of A History of Christianity in Malaysia (2014), and co-editor of The Handbook of Popular Spiritual Movements in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia (2015, with Michael Nai-Chiu Poon). He is an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. Michael A. Rynkeiwich is Professor of Anthropology, retired, E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism, Asbury Theological Seminar. He is a graduate in anthropology from Bethel University, St. Paul, MN; with a Master’s and Doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota. He has carried out doctoral fieldwork in the Marshall Islands, Micronesia (eighteen months), and missionary work in Papua New Guinea (five years). His books include The Nacirema (1975) and Ethics and Anthropology (1976), both edited volumes with James Spradley; two edited volumes on Land and Churches in Melanesia (2001, 2004), and a textbook: Soul, Self, and Society: A Postmodern Anthropology for Mission in a Postcolonial World (2011).

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Jane Samson is Professor of History at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She is the author of numerous books and articles on the nineteenth-century Pacific world. Her current research concerns indigenous missionaries in the Melanesian Mission. Her most recent project is the Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean (forthcoming, 2020), co-edited with Anne Perez Hattori. Deanna Ferree Womack is Assistant Professor of History of Religions and Multifaith Relations at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology and a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). At Candler she teaches on the history and practice of Christian–Muslim relations and directs the Leadership and Multifaith Program (LAMP). Her research explores encounters between American missionaries and Arab residents of Ottoman Syria in the pre-World War I period. Her first book, Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press (2019).

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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 sideby-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 remained 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 another

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example, Anglicans remained stronger than did Episcopalians in the United States, but Methodists and Presbyterians often took on establishment-like 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 applicability,

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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, focussed 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 further 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 inevitable for a genealogy where trunks and branches outline a common history of

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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

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training, new technologies, and much more. The geographical, chronological, and ecclesiastical reach is broad: from the Elizabethan era to the dawn of the twentieth-first 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 mega-mega-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 Jehu J. Hanciles

This fourth volume in the series on Protestant ‘dissenting traditions’ covers the twentieth century (as does the fifth volume), a period of unprecedented globalization and worldwide Christian expansion. By 1900, after some threeand-a-half centuries of existence, Protestant ‘Dissent’ had experienced significant reshaping in its original British setting and produced powerful offshoots in North America and elsewhere within the Anglophone world.¹ However, dissemination into new areas in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the twentieth century marked the apogee of Dissent as a transnational movement; a process that coincided with the worldwide spread of evangelical Protestantism, within which the dissenting traditions are inexorably embedded.² This process of globalization, inseparable from indigenization in new contexts and continued adaptations in old settings, fomented more radical transformations than ever before. By the end of the century, Protestant Dissent had achieved not only its widest geographical reach but also the greatest genealogical distance from its point of origin. This process, attended by some of the most momentous developments in human history, was marked by a multitude of pathways or starting-points, continuities and discontinuities, as well as complications and contradictions. This compilation uses a regional framework to provide detailed snapshots of Protestant Dissent as a globalizing movement.

¹ In Britain, for instance, resistance to state intervention waned and involvement in political life increased, in part because state sponsorship and resources were critical for pursuing the social and moral reforms (notably the abolition of African slavery) so vital to the Nonconformist agenda. By 1880, Nonconformists accounted for 24 per cent of the Members of the British Parliament: David Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–1914 (Boston, 1982), p. 12. ² For treatment of the global spread of Protestant evangelicalism, see Mark Hutchinson and John Wolffe, A Short History of Global Evangelicalism (New York, 2012); Brian Stanley, The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott, A History of Evangelicalism (Downers Grove, IL: 2013); Mark Hutchinson and Ogbu Kalu, eds, A Global Faith: Essays on Evangelicalism and Globalisation (Sydney, 1998).

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Previous volumes have examined in considerable detail the historical roots of the term ‘dissent’ and the nebulousness of its meaning.³ A brief review is necessary here for two reasons: first, to aid comprehension of the radical changes in meaning and application that beset the concept as it travelled globally; second, to identify the principles and convictions that allowed dissenting traditions to take root and acquire new manifestations in different regions of the world while still retaining a basic family resemblance. The cognate terms ‘Dissent’ and ‘dissenting’ originally covered a wide range of Christian groups in Britain whose origins span the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Usage, in the technical (and most generic) sense, dates to the midseventeenth century when the 1662 Act of Uniformity required sworn allegiance to the crown and authorized ordination only through the Church of England. Groups that rejected the authority of the Established church (i.e., the church established by law), earned the label ‘dissenting’ or ‘Nonconformist’. These groups, mainly comprising Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Quakers, grew in numbers and complexity and later won concessions. But the designation ‘Dissent’ identified them as an ecclesiastical entity distinct from the Established [Anglican] ‘Church’. The alternative labels ‘Nonconformist’ and (later) ‘Free Church’ convey both their resistance to legislative demands by the state in matters of church discipline or liturgical practice and their determination as religious bodies to remain free of external control (a stance that tacitly favoured religious plurality). The fundamental issue that united the disparate dissenting groups was opposition to a national church or, more precisely, rejection of state interference in religious life. But ‘Dissent’ was more than a legal category. Refusal to conform was also motivated by a commitment to reform, a ‘desire to reclaim the true catholicity and apostolicity of the church’.⁴ Subsequently described as ‘Old Dissent’, these groups established a tradition that incorporated ecclesiastical autonomy, suspicion of political authority, and ideals of reform based on biblical principles. The birth of Methodism, along with other denominations produced by the eighteenth-century evangelical revivals, gave rise to the term ‘New Dissent’; since these groups also ended up outside the Established Church. The evangelical revivals not only swelled the ranks of dissenters but also imbued Protestant Dissent with striking evangelical vitality; manifest in heavy emphasis on a conversionist faith, fervent commitment to the propagation of the gospel (at home and abroad), moral and social reform (increasingly ³ In addition to the ‘Series Introduction’ in this volume, see David W. Bebbington, Victorian Nonconformity (Bangor, 1992); John H. Y. Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity, 1662–2000’, in Robert Pope, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (London, 2013); and Michael Ledger-Lomas, ‘Introduction’, in Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas, eds, The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: The Nineteenth Century, vol. III (New York, 2017). ⁴ Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity, 1662–2000’, p. 2.

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in alliance with the state), extensive lay involvement in ministry, prioritizing of religious education, and great stress on biblical teaching in faith and practice. ‘New Dissent’ became a national phenomenon, surpassing ‘Old Dissent’ in numbers and representation across England, and increasingly engaged in political life.⁵ The eighteenth-century revivals also triggered the Protestant foreign missions movement that intensified the transatlantic connections between Protestant dissenting groups and transformed Dissent into a global phenomenon. In fact, the evangelical vision for world evangelization was rooted in Nonconformist fervour. Nineteenth-century Protestant missions ‘began among the Nonconformist laity’, and dissenting denominations formed the earliest missionary societies.⁶ Dissenting groups outside Britain, notably in America and Australia, also founded their own missionary societies.⁷ By the early twentieth century, the preponderance of Dissenting missionaries in the Protestant missionary movement had contributed to the establishment of substantial populations of Christians outside the West in ‘the increasingly global networks of Dissent’.⁸ But the fact that this missionary movement was enmeshed within the structures of the British empire contributed to the complexities and contradictions that plagued global Dissent in the twentieth century. Other than the overseas missionary movement, the worldwide spread of dissenting traditions derived its greatest impetus from the extraordinary growth of Pentecostal-Charismatic movements—which expanded, by one account, from less than 1 per cent of all Christians in 1900 to 23 per cent by 2000.⁹ Global Pentecostalism has multiple origins, with separate and distinctive manifestations in Asia and Africa; a fact that further underlines the difficulties of analysing global dissent. However, in the North Atlantic world, Pentecostalism emerged out of the Wesleyan-Holiness movement, prompting the claim that ‘Pentecostals are grandchildren of Dissent’.¹⁰ The vast majority of Pentecostals may lack active consciousness of this pedigree; but in many parts of the world (notably Latin America) Pentecostalism

⁵ Ibid., p. 11. Nonconformity also became more respectable and middle class, and accounted for some 15 per cent of the population in 1901—Bebbington, Victorian Nonconformity, p. 2. ⁶ Andrew R. Holmes, ‘Evangelicalism, Revivals, and Foreign Missions’, in Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas, eds, The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: The Nineteenth Century, vol. III (New York, 2017), pp. 395–6. ⁷ Ibid., p. 395; Joanna Cruickshank, ‘Colonial Contexts and Global Dissent’, in Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas, eds, The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: The Nineteenth Century, vol. III (New York, 2017), p. 307. ⁸ Cruickshank, ‘Colonial Contexts and Global Dissent’, p. 309. ⁹ Todd M. Johnson and Gina A. Zurlo, ‘World Christian Database’ (Leiden; Boston, 2016), accessed October 2016. ¹⁰ See Timothy Larsen and Mark A. Noll, ‘Series Introduction’, in Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas, eds, The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: The Nineteenth Century, vol. III (New York, 2017), p. xv.

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arguably became a major, if not the chief, expression of the Protestant dissenting traditions. Yet, the globalization of Protestant dissenting traditions was inseparable from indigenization of expression and function. This complex dynamic is central to this study.

THE GLOBAL I N PERSPECTIVE The globalization of religious phenomena has a long history and, until quite recently, was mainly fuelled by the twin (and often intertwined) forces of human migration and imperial expansion; though the correlations are complex and sometimes ambiguous. The global spread of Protestant dissenting traditions that this volume examines is closely tied to the British Empire and inseparable from mass migrations of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Some 50 million Europeans migrated overseas between 1815 and 1915; including a vast army of Dissenting missionaries. By the 1920s, largely due to European colonization efforts, almost half of the world’s population (a greater proportion than at any time previously) had been brought under the domain of empire.¹¹ In addition to human mobility, new technologies of communication and travel extended the reach of ideas over vast distances and generated unprecedented global interconnectedness. As one 1910 account put it, ‘the whole world has become one neighborhood . . . [where] the nations and races are acting and reacting upon each other with increasing directness, constancy, and power’.¹² Remarkably, the most extraordinary developments in technologies of mass communication and travel, along with other unparalleled features of the twentieth century (such as air travel, the digital revolution, use of satellite technology, and the proliferation of cell phones), still lay in the future! It is only in recent decades that historians have begun to give serious attention to migration as a fundamental feature of historical change.¹³ The same is broadly true of efforts to analyse human development and religious exchange utilizing the ‘global’ or transnational (rather than the nation-state or particular ethnic groups) as a frame of reference. The dramatic rise in studies ¹¹ Patrick Manning, Migration in World History, Themes in World History (New York, 2005), p. 150. ¹² World Missionary Conference, 1910: Report of Commission 1—Carrying the Gospel to All the Non-Christian World (Edinburgh, 1910), pp. 344, 345. ¹³ See Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in PreModern Times (New York, 1993); Richard Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization (New York, 2010 edn);,Stephen S. Gosch and Peter N. Stearns, Premodern Travel in World History, Themes in World History (New York, 2008); Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder, What Is Migration History?, What Is History? (Cambridge, UK, 2009); Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium, Comparative and International Working-Class History (Durham, NC, 2002), and Manning, Migration in World History.

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of Christianity as a global religion in the last couple of decades reflects this trend. As we shall see, applying a global perspective to historical enquiry does not necessarily mitigate entrenched ethnocentric views or eliminate ideological preconceptions. Furthermore, what ‘global’ means can be fuzzy. In some instances it is synonymous with the world outside the West; leading to crude augmentation, whereby data from other places or regions in the world are simply added to existing narratives and essentially treated as supplemental. Even when interregional and transcontinental linkages or movements are in focus, use of the concept can reductively privilege high profile actors or dominant structures. It is therefore necessary for our purposes to clarify how ‘global’ is understood and the specific theoretical assumptions that inform its use as a unit of analysis to examine historical processes. The grand concept used to describe processes of transformation that accumulatively implicate the societies of the world in relations of interdependence and interconnectedness, thereby intensifying consciousness of the world as a single place, is ‘globalization’.¹⁴ The term is no longer new. But, after several decades of widespread usage, its meaning and significance are still much debated, and its nature persistently contested. In public discourse, the most contentious and conflicting claims focus almost exclusively on economic dimensions. But such are the complexities and paradoxes of globalization that analyses of its impact or implications vary significantly even among those who accept its cogency and relevance. It helps to recognize that globalization is not a single process but a composite of multiple, simultaneous, processes (economic, political, cultural, etc.) that are both differentiated and interrelated. For instance, while religious movements or phenomena mainly fall within cultural dimensions of globalization, effective analysis is impossible without scrupulous attention to economic and political strands. It is not enough to recognize that globalizing religious movements such as evangelical Protestantism or Protestant Dissent took root in different localities around the world and produced communities with a varying sense of shared identity and interconnectedness across time and space. It matters for historical assessment that the process was deeply shaped by worldwide systems of economic and political dominance and also that portrayal of its nature and outcomes often privileges prominent strands. At the risk of oversimplification, two major approaches (or variations thereof) shape assessments of cultural globalization. The first views the phenomenon as largely unidirectional; dominated (even managed) by decisions ¹⁴ For helpful treatment, see Giddens, Anthony, The Consequence of Modernity (California, 1990); Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: SAGE Publications, 1992); James H. Mitellman, The Globalization Syndrome: Transformation and Resistance (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000); Steger, Manfred B. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Neil J. Ormerod and Shane Clifton, Globalization and the Mission of the Church (New York: T & T Clark, 2009).

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and initiatives that derive from centres in the north Atlantic world. This perspective is evident in studies of Christianity that view the global spread of Christianity as synonymous with Western overseas expansion—‘part of the extension of colonial power and a project of cultural, social, and political domination’ (Chapter 17)—or treat Western models and theological constructs as universally relevant or normative. Since, from this standpoint, outcomes are deemed to be largely determined by dominant powers, colonized populations as well as marginalized groups in Western societies are depicted as passive recipients; i.e., as people with limited agency whose stories and contribution are at best secondary reflections of wider processes of historical change. In this understanding, the globalization of religion is essentially the transfer and transplantation of resources, institutions, traditions, and ideas from dominant centres in the Western world to non-Western societies. While this approach is perhaps no longer as prevalent as it was even a few decades ago, it is worthy of note not only because it persists but also because it was the dominant view for almost all of the twentieth century that this volume covers. In the opening decades of the century, Western Protestant missionaries remained firmly convinced that ‘the evangelization of non-Christian lands’, i.e., the non-Western world, required movement from a fixed centre (chiefly Europe and North America) and depended, as far as human means go, mainly on the actions and resources of the Western Church. This conviction was strongly evident at the historic World Missionary Conference held in 1910 at Edinburgh. Unprecedented global interconnectedness, fuelled by Western colonial expansion and new technologies of travel and communication, inspired confidence that ‘it is possible today as never before to have a campaign adequate to carry the Gospel to all the non-Christian world’.¹⁵ Even if there was a detectable layer of apprehension about the fate of ‘Christianity as a world religion’, fevered optimism that Christian missions faced a ‘decisive hour’ sounded the loudest note.¹⁶ Importantly, the vision of a world made Christian was informed by the understanding that ‘missionary enterprise is the projection abroad of the Church at Home’.¹⁷ Unbridled confidence in Western ability and the tools of globalization was not the only issue—indeed, there was tacit acknowledgement that the spiritual state of the ‘Home Church’ was not fully in keeping with its missionary obligation. Crucially, the triumphalism inherent in the Western missionary ¹⁵ World Missionary Conference, 1910: Report of Commission 1—Carrying the Gospel to All the Non-Christian World, p. 10. As Ken Ross notes, ‘technological advance was hailed as the handmaid to the spread of the gospel worldwide’: Kenneth Ross, ‘Edinburgh 1910: Its Place in History,’ 13 (3 Nov. 2010), p. 3. http://www.towards2010.org.uk/downloads_int/1910-PlaceHistory.pdf. ¹⁶ World Missionary Conference, 1910: Report of Commission 1—Carrying the Gospel to All the Non-Christian World, pp. 344, 345. ¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 344, 348. A view only somewhat tempered by the recognition that ‘we must not press upon other races undesirable and unessential features of our Western Church life’.

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vision all but precluded recognition that the cultures, traditions, and religious instincts of non-Western peoples would fundamentally shape the encounter with the Christian message or, in this case, Protestant dissenting traditions. There was no reference to the importance of local resources or indigenous agents—even though the small handful of Asian delegates at the meeting queried Western paternalism—nor any acknowledgement that key aspects of indigenous life over which foreign agents had no control would decisively impact missionary outcomes. Two devastating world wars, the expulsion of Western missionaries from China, the rise of Communism, and the collapse of colonialism (from the late 1950s) dented brash expectations and even prompted painful soul-searching; but the vision of global Christian expansion as the prerogative of Western churches and the fruit of Western Christian investment remained intact.¹⁸ By the 1970s, Cold War competition and American economic dominance revitalized confidence in the universal importance of Western values and ideas. In Western society, at least among the intellectual class, many pinned their hopes on Western scientific progress and the prospects of ‘an increasingly homogenized world culture’ (based on Western standards or models) as the basis for a new world order. Interestingly, by the end of the twentieth century, the equation of cultural globalization with Westernization was made with equal conviction by ‘missionaries’ of both Western secularism (or modern secularization) and the Western Protestant evangelical establishment.¹⁹ This unidirectional understanding of cultural globalization represents a parochial and deeply Eurocentric view of the world that devalues the resilience ¹⁸ Though perhaps Protestant missionary triumphalism became more pronounced in America than in Europe after mid-century. By the 1970s, widespread fixation with AD 2000 fired the missionary imagination and generated a groundswell of zealous enthusiasm that produced grand plans and schemes for world evangelization in which the non-Western world still loomed as the frontier. See David B. Barrett, ‘Forecasting the Future in World Mission: Some Future Faces of Missions’, Missiology, XV, 4 (Oct. 1987), p. 440. Plans and programs for evangelizing the nonWestern world had dominated the Western missionary endeavour for over four centuries; though the rise of the Student Volunteer Movement (in the late 1880s) had galvanized efforts for world evangelization in unprecedented fashion. Barrett reported that at least seventy of the ‘300 distinct plans to complete world evangelization’ referred to AD 2000. ¹⁹ I discuss these issues in Jehu J. Hanciles, Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration, and the Transformation of the West (Maryknoll, NY, 2008). Among major proponents and critics of the universal spread of Western economic modernity and secularization, see Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York, 1965); Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, Special Edition (Summer 1989); Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad Versus Mcworld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy, 2001 ed. (New York, 1995); Thomas L Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York, 1999); Samuel Huntington, ‘No Exit: The Errors of Endism’, The National Interest (Fall 1989); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996). Some of its strongest advocates subsequently recanted or modified their views: Harvey G. Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Reading, MA, 1995); Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2005 edn.).

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and worth of non-Western cultures and experiences. Examined from this analytical perspective, Protestant Dissent was exported and reproduced abroad wholesale, along with the English language and church structures, by the British overseas missionary movement aided by empire. In essence, global Dissent merely required the presence and activity of foreign missionaries and migrants. Such an understanding reflects remarkable faith in the capacity of Western agents to impose their will and design on the local populations in distant lands. It also disregards the immutable forces of translation and adaptation inherent in the cross-cultural spread of religious ideas; especially given the fact that the political conditions and social divisions which gave rise to the plurality of dissenting groups in Britain were non-existent abroad.²⁰ At the very least, it is noteworthy that a phenomenon rooted in rebellion against a state church spread to foreign lands under the aegis of (or in collaboration with) the state.²¹ Not to mention the fact that the elements of resistance and renewal enshrined in the Protestant dissenting traditions contributed to the rise of powerful home-grown Christian movements and galvanized indigenous responses to dominant religion, including Dissenting denominations. The alternative approach to the study of globalization perceives processes of global transformation as multidirectional, multicentred, and paradoxical. It allows that globalization may be experienced unevenly around the world but contends that no society can participate fully and claim immunity to its effects at the same time. The local and the global intersect and remain mutually dependent in a multitude of ways. Thus, while global processes may incorporate dominant strands they are no less marked by structures of interdependence and interpenetration that subvert the salience of fixed centres and trouble the notion of predetermined outcomes. In much the same way that local events can have global impact, globalizing movements must also contend with the power of local heritage and appropriation. Most important, the transfer or exchange of cultural ideas and practices is always subject to existing (or contextual) frames of reference; for ‘no cultural message, no aesthetic artefact, no symbol passes through time and space into a cultural vacuum’.²² Thus, notwithstanding the conspicuous role that Western colonialism and advanced technologies played in fomenting global interconnectedness, the ²⁰ This often led to painful contradictions, such as when the King Taufa’ahau (George) of Tonga compelled all Tongans to join the Free Wesleyan Church of Tonga, which he forcibly installed as the national church as part of a strategy of resistance against European colonialism: Cruickshank, ‘Colonial Contexts and Global Dissent’, p. 311. For a detailed examination, see Chapter 18 in this volume. ²¹ As Joanna Cruickshank notes, not all Dissenting denominations accepted state aid; and it has to be said that their relations with the colonial state were often ambiguous but occasionally hostile. Ultimately, however, almost all derived some benefit from the privileges and protections afforded by association (implicit or explicit) with British colonial rule. See ibid., p. 308. ²² David Held et al., Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford, CA, 1999), p. 374.

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spread of cultural forms requires adaptation, and sustained cultural engagement seldom affects only one side. Studies of global Christianity now generally eschew a single master narrative centred around Western missionary initiatives and cultural expansion. The relatively new world Christianity approach, for instance, has a decidedly pluralistic foci.²³ Proponents maintain that the treatment of Christianity as a global religion must incorporate the voices, experiences, and multiplicity of expressions of Christians worldwide in all their social, ethnic, and generational diversity.²⁴ Due to a strong emphasis on how ‘Christianity was received and expressed through the cultures, customs, and traditions of the people affected’, coverage can be skewed towards non-Western experiences.²⁵ But no region of the world, or Christian epoch for that matter, is excluded from its purview. Other major claims make this explicit: viz., that from its inception, the Christian movement has expanded and receded across multiple centres (Western Europe being one such centre for a short period of time);²⁶ that the history of Christian expansion has involved polycentric structures and multidirectional transnational networks;²⁷ and that full understanding of global Christianity requires attentiveness not only to structures of power and domination but also to ‘the diversity of local or indigenous expressions of Christian life and faith throughout the world’.²⁸ When informed by these interpretative assumptions, the study of the global spread of Protestant dissenting traditions seeks to understand the interplay between global and contextual forces, the complex interface of cultures, and the multicentred networks that shaped expansion.

²³ For coverage and critique of the world Christianity approach, see among others, Dale T. Irvin, ‘World Christianity: An Introduction’, The Journal of World Christianity, I, 1 (2008); Paul V. Kollman, ‘Understanding the World-Christian Turn in the History of Christianity and Theology’, Theology Today, LXXI, 2 (2014); Klaus Koschorke, ‘New Maps of the History of World Christianity: Current Challenges and Future Perspectives’, Theology Today, LXXI, 2 (2014); Joel Cabrita and others, eds, Relocating World Christianity: Interdisciplinary Studies in Universal and Local Expressions of the Christian Faith (Boston, MA, 2017); Wilbert R. Shenk, ed. Enlarging the Story: Perspectives on Writing World Christian History (New York, 2002); Jehu J. Hanciles, ‘New Wine in Old Wineskins: Critical Reflections on Writing and Teaching a Global Christian History’, Missiology: An International Review, XXXIV, 3 (July 2006). ²⁴ Ana Maria Bidegain, ‘Rethinking the Social and Ethical Functions of a History of World Christianity’, The Journal of World Christianity, I, 1 (2008), p. 88. ²⁵ Lamin O. Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003), p. 22. ²⁶ Andrew F. Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (Maryknoll, NY, 2002), p. 30; Andrew F. Walls, ‘Scholarship, Mission and Globalisation: Some Reflections on the Christian Scholarly Vocation in Africa’, Journal of African Christian Thought IX, 2 (Dec. 2006), pp. 34–7, 34–5. ²⁷ Klaus Koschorke, ‘Transcontinental Links, Enlarged Maps, and Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity’, Journal of World Christianity, VI, 1 (2016), pp. 29, 32 ²⁸ Irvin, ‘World Christianity: An Introduction’, p. 1.

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GLOBAL DISSEN T IN QUESTION In this volume, the term ‘Protestant Dissent’ is understood and applied on the basis of lineage (and logic). Attentiveness to lineage, even where concrete affiliation or consciousness of a genealogical connection is absent, is of great importance when the phenomenon is examined in a global context. It provides cohesion and contributes to analytical coherence. Thus, treatment focuses almost exclusively on denominations, movements, and groups whose existence are ultimately traceable to dissenting (Nonconformist or Free Church) movements in Britain. There is also tacit acknowledgement that the modern Protestant missionary movement, which had strong roots in British dissenting denominations and capitalized on existing transatlantic networks of dissent, laid the foundation for a loose global network of Christian churches, denominations, and traditions with a shared heritage (though variable sense of interconnectedness). The term ‘global Dissent’ is a useful shorthand for this vast array of entities; though we must note that the extensive overlap and shared attributes with global evangelicalism tends to muddy analysis.²⁹ No list of the features exhibited or emphasized by the constituents of global Dissent will satisfy. But key features that are associated with the phenomenon and manifested to varying degrees include the following: the quest for congregational autonomy, conversionism, a believers’ church, extensive lay involvement, a preference for biblical models and scriptural authority, emphasis on biblical preaching and personal devotion, spiritual renewal and moral reform (corporate and individual), preoccupation with living a holy or sanctified life, an egalitarian vision of church life (in principle if not in practice), innovative strategies in ministry and mission, liturgical (even architectural) simplicity, unapologetic outreach, provision for religious education, a questioning attitude to mainstream cultural norms, suspicion of external authority, the near absence of saint names in church appellation, appetite for spiritual gifts and power, charismatic ministry, hymn production, and a sectarian impulse. Even when only a modicum of these features are present, they typically produce quite energetic forms of Christianity. But, as a rubric, lineage has limitations. The globalization of Protestant Dissent involved continuity and discontinuities, countless acts of rebellion and separation, numerous starting-points, significant contradictions, and endless make-overs in a multitude of settings. Geographical reach and genealogical distance, not to mention the perennial issue of disconnectedness and division (the bane of nonconformity) can erect enormous obstacles to establishing lineage. In real life, the boundaries of Protestant Dissent are porous, fluid, or ²⁹ In addition to deep similarities, global evangelicalism was also characterized by remarkable adaptability, including its propensity to take new forms in response to local need ‘and embed itself in local identities’: Hutchinson and Wolffe, A Short History of Global Evangelicalism, p. 188.

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imaginary. Additionally, a host of developments in the closing decades of the twentieth century conspired to rob Protestant Dissent of discreteness: including the erosion of borders and cultural boundaries in the Internet age, unprecedented global migrations, widespread transnationalism, the explosion of Pentecostal-Charismatic movements (that have thinned the lines of demarcation with Anglicanism or establishment Christianity), and the decline in denominational allegiance (post-denominationalism). Moreover, huge populations of Christians, especially outside the North Atlantic world, with a traceable dissenting heritage and family resemblance, have no consciousness of affinity to ‘Dissent’ or tangible connection to its networks. Applying the concepts ‘Dissent’ and ‘dissenting traditions’ to the historical and cultural experiences of Christian communities for whom those terms have little meaning and no functional relevance presents conceptual challenges and invites a variety of analytical strategies. The use of logic (by which I mean critical judgement or defensible rationale) is necessary for navigating inevitable gaps and contradictions and to ensure a balance between coverage and cohesion. To what extent and on what basis, for instance, might new immigrant Christian congregations in Britain (and Europe) be labelled ‘Dissent’? There is surely a case to be made; but the case must be made—as the reference to ‘a new Nonconformity’ suggests.³⁰ To acknowledge the need for logic is also to concede that there are inevitably elements of subjectivity when assessing religious phenomena of such complexity and magnitude. Working within a regional framework, the contributors to this volume probe the radical shifts and complex reconstruction that have taken place as the dissenting traditions encountered diverse cultures and took root in a multitude of contexts, many of which were experiencing major historical change at the same time. There is general cognizance that outside the British ecclesiastical setting, Protestant Dissent acquired fresh characteristics and application as its core elements were absorbed and repurposed within diverse Protestant communities to respond to myriad needs and challenges. Everywhere, dissenting identities and ethos were subject to powerful socio-political currents and cultural shifts as well as forces of indigenization and adaptation. Inconceivable in Britain, dissenting denominations became the dominant religious constituency in other national contexts; and a number of critical elements or unique conditions—such as racial domination, religious plurality, multiple ethnicities, anti-imperialism, and the near absence of an ‘established church’ (Roman Catholicism in Latin America excepted)—shaped the nature and demonstration of dissenting traditions and principles worldwide.

³⁰ David Bebbington, ‘Introductory Note’, in Michael R. Watts, ed., The Dissenters: The Crisis and Conscience of Nonconformity, 3 vols., vol. 3 (Oxford, 2015), p. xviii.

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The first section (on Africa) makes the case that Protestant dissenting traditions represented a powerful force within African Christianity and acted as a major catalyst for growth. Key features of Dissent, notably the impulses towards religious reform and protest, found fertile soil within rapidly growing Christian communities in the colonial period. Protestant evangelicalism dominated foreign missionary expansion; but since both Anglicanism and Dissenting denominations were implicated in colonial expansion and racial domination, dissenting traditions emerged mainly through African initiatives and agency (Chapter 1). Dissenting ideals stimulated the rise of major renewal movements that were disruptive to both Dissenting missions and the colonial state. These African dissenting movements drew on black Atlantic linkages, but they were decisively informed by vernacular translation and indigenous religiosity, and marked by Pentecostal features (Chapter 3). From the 1970s, energetic Pentecostal-Charismatic movements also emerged as a major form of dissent, revitalizing older churches and spawning new independent ministries or denominations (Chapter 2). By the end of the century, the extraordinary growth and global outreach of African Christian ministries, especially Pentecostal strands, had transformed African Christianity into a major centre of Protestant Dissent. Admittedly, the concept of dissenting is foreign to most Asian Christians. However, as a result of extensive Western missionary operations, many of the major Dissenting denominations (Congregationalist, Presbyterian, British Methodist, and Baptist) along with faith missions, are well represented on the Asian continent. Thus, markers of Protestant dissent are readily recognizable and form part of complex streams of traditions, social phenomena, and historical events that have contributed to Asian Christianity (Chapter 4). But, except for the Philippines and East Timor where Roman Catholicism is the dominant religion, Christian populations are religious minorities in Asian countries. This has perhaps fostered national union schemes in India, China, the Philippines, and Thailand that somewhat unify Dissenting denominations and Anglicans. But the unrelenting plurality of the context defies easy analysis; and the Asian capacity for ‘navigating multiple identities—ethnic, national, and religious’ adds its own complications. In China, Protestant Dissent is chiefly marked by vigorous indigenous Christian movements that emerged out of Dissenting denominations as expression of autonomy and cultural adaptation while also contending with a totalitarian state (Chapter 6). Whether or not dissenting traditions are muted within nationalized denominations, Pentecostal movements in Asia, from house churches to megachurches, exhibit strong affinity with the dissenting tradition. A thoroughgoing examination of Yoido Full Gospel Church (South Korea), considered by many to be the mother of all megachurches in the world, provides useful insight (Chapter 5). Direct parallels to historic Dissent are limited, not least given South Korea’s multireligious context and history of

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Christian nationalism. But, the ‘largest single congregation’ in the world manifests much that is familiar within Protestant dissenting traditions: including strong charismatic leadership, a high degree of individual autonomy, countercultural Christian ministry (evident, for instance, in the ordination of women in a male-dominated society; though the clergy–laity divide remains prevalent), emphasis on biblical teaching and spiritual disciplines, and the extensive lay involvement. The volume’s sole exposition on the Middle East also indicates that, as in many countries colonized by Western nations, Christians in Ottoman Syria drew on the Protestant dissenting tradition to critique foreign (American) missionary control and establish independent congregations. Most important, Syrian practices of dissent—including defence of indigenous Syrian culture and emphasis on congregationally based church governance—‘shaped the trajectory of twentieth-century Protestantism in the region’ (Chapter 7). The spread of Protestant Dissent to North America dates to the colonial era and its population grew rapidly from the late eighteenth century. Here too, Dissent changed as it travelled. It is argued that momentous shifts in the realms of ideas, culture, and politics reconfigured dissenting Protestantism in the twentieth century and led to the displacement of older, mainline, Protestant dissenting denominations by evangelical institutions (Chapter 8). A major example of this new ‘mainline’ is the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, whose historical links to slavery and brand of religious conservatism long troubled its relations with Evangelicals. However, major changes in the American religious landscape, including the decline of Protestant privilege and increasing religious pluralism, have fostered convergence between the two groups (despite internal divisions) and deepened their role ‘as dissenters against what they believed to be a rising and dangerous secularization of the culture’ (Chapter 9). Issues of race and segregation are indelible features of Protestant Dissent in America; and Dissenting denominations predominate among African American Christians. In a period bookmarked by demeaning racial segregation (Jim Crow laws) and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, black dissenting traditions remained sharply focused on structures and movements that resisted or subverted the dominant racial order (Chapter 10). Emphasizing Christian egalitarianism, black churches sought through accommodation and activism ‘to erect a church that was for all people and races’. Meanwhile, the emergence and explosion of Pentecostalism, the most powerful religious movement of the era, impacted almost all major strands of American Protestantism. Chapter 11 traces a number of Pentecostal and related congregations, churches, denominations, and organizations and examines the nature of Pentecostal dissent. In Europe, the twentieth century was marked by largescale upheavals and rapid changes that presented major challenges to historic Free Churches such

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as the Waldensians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, Salvation Army, and Brethren. In a wide-ranging survey, Chapter 12 explores, among other things, changes in Free Church evangelistic witness, the impact of Pentecostalism, church–state relations in an age of political persecution and religious repression, contributions to fresh biblical and theological scholarship, the changing role of women, issues of identity in the face of ecumenical involvement, and renewed involvement in multidirectional global missions. But significant decline in attendance and affiliation among historic Protestant denominations (linked to wider social trends) was palpably evident throughout Europe by the end of the century. In England, where the Christian heritage runs deep but the majority of Christians believe ‘without belonging’, deeper analysis suggests that the minority who take Christianity seriously and chose to stand against a prevailing attitude of religious indifference may be the new dissenters (Chapter 13). The complex, often quite tangential, links between Latin American Protestantism and historic Dissenting denominations receive detailed attention (Chapter 14). The predominance of Roman Catholicism in the region (even after disestablishment) means that identification with Protestant religion (including Anglicanism!) is tantamount to non-conformity or dissent. However, dissenting principles took on more concrete form with the transition from foreign to autonomous Protestant churches in the twentieth century. The spirit of Dissent became manifest in rejection of foreign missionary control, the creation of alternative religious organization (expressive of religious freedom), and religious existence removed from structures of power. By the end of the twentieth century, however, these dissenting strands were increasingly powered by phenomenal Pentecostal growth. The deeply home-grown nature of Latin American Pentecostalism renders links with historic dissenting institutions difficult to assess. However, it is noteworthy that the first independent Pentecostal denomination in Latin America, the Methodist Pentecostal Church in Chile, emerged (in 1910) in a schism within the Methodist Episcopal Church. While Chilean Pentecostalism is fully indigenous and autonomous, historical analysis reveals deep roots in North American Methodism (Chapter 15). It is of great import that dissenting principles became more pronounced in the Latin American region when Protestantism—mainly confined to White immigrant populations until the nineteenth century—began spreading among the indigenous population. Even Anglicanism reflects this dynamic. After successful establishment among the native population in northern Latin America and the Caribbean, Anglicanism became ‘popularly associated not only with “Englishness” but also . . . with blackness’ (Chapter 16). Rootedness in the local African population triggered ‘dissenting’ movements such as Garveyism (which had ties to the Anglican Church) that drew on diasporic religious traditions and emphasized a black nationalist identity. It is worth

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noting that Garveyism’s promotion of African redemption and racial independence in the early twentieth century was strongly reminiscent of the late nineteenth century Ethiopian movements in Africa which also represented the chief forms of religious protest against European missionary Christianity (Anglican and Dissenting). But, in many ways, Pentecostalism, a movement that also draws deeply on indigenous spirituality, conceives of itself as an alternative religious community, and relishes contrarian views—even Pentecostal prosperity theology, it is noted, can be seen as ‘a theological counterpoint’ to the liberation theology of Roman Catholics—has emerged as the ‘ideal vehicle’ for Protestant dissent. Dissenting missionary efforts in the Pacific region accompanied colonialism and produced a wide variety of denominations. Exploring the lineages of dissent among the incredibly diverse Christian communities of this vast region with their complex histories is no mean feat. With examples from Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, and the Philippines, careful examination reveals that simplistic notions of ‘syncretism’ or familiar dichotomies (‘local versus global, or indigenous versus foreign’) are unhelpful for understanding how Dissent took root in local religious practices (Chapter 17). Dissenting traditions are ‘woven into the discourses of resistance’ that engage both imperialism and local state and involve forms of Christian life that challenge traditional culture. The story of Methodism in Tonga and Fiji exemplifies these complex contradictions. Among these Pacific Islanders, Methodism not only triggered dissent against racism and paternalism but also, through processes of indigenization, became the state church (as an expression of dissent, no less!) and eventually produced new revival dissenting movements that challenged the ‘relationship between land, church, and state’ (Chapter 18). This fascinating story of Tonga and Fiji Methodism exemplifies the radical transformations that reshaped Protestant Dissent as it emerged in new local contexts around the world. There are inevitable gaps in this global coverage; some more defensible than others. Treatment does not include Canada, and the Caribbean only gets brief mention. More could have been done perhaps to probe the global interconnectedness of some new strands of Protestant Dissent that have emerged in the last half a century or so. For instance, the much derided ‘prosperity teaching’ and the related megachurch phenomenon have global dimensions and arguably evoke historic affinities between Dissent and the business profession. Protestant dissent seems made to travel, and the link between dissenting traditions and migration date to the very beginnings of the phenomenon. It would have been helpful to explore what it means that churches and ministries in the non-Western world now account for the majority of Protestant Dissent. Due to global migrations from the late twentieth century, and a reversal of empire (so to speak), burgeoning Christian immigrant congregations have emerged in the old heartlands of Dissent in Europe and North America. Research strongly suggests that they represent a major component of late

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twentieth-century Dissent:³¹ evident, among other things, in formation of separate (or alternative) religious community, political marginalization, alienation from homegrown (established) churches, emphasis on biblical models, commitment to evangelism, and calls for reformation of Western churches. In the event, by the end of the twentieth century, the Protestant dissenting tradition had become fully globalized, highly diversified, and increasingly multidirectional in its impact. This compendium seeks to examine the multifarious and complex dimensions of this process. An overview of dissenting traditions in the global context of the twentieth century reveals the inherently intercultural, emphatically contextual, and ultimately pluralistic dynamics of Christianity as a world religion.

SEL E C T B I B L I OG R A P H Y Bebbington, David W. Victorian Nonconformity (Bangor: Headstart History, 1992). Bidegain, Ana Maria. ‘Rethinking the Social and Ethical Functions of a History of World Christianity.’ The Journal of World Christianity I, 1 (2008): 88–119. Briggs, John H. Y. ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity, 1662–2000’, in Robert Pope, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (London: T&T Clark, 2013). Cabrita, Joel, David Maxwell, and Emma Wild-Wood, eds. Relocating World Christianity: Interdisciplinary Studies in Universal and Local Expressions of the Christian Faith vol. 7, Theology and Mission in World Christianity series (Boston: Brill, 2017). Cruickshank, Joanna. ‘Colonial Contexts and Global Dissent’, in Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas, eds, The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: The Nineteenth Century, vol. III (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Hanciles, Jehu J. ‘New Wine in Old Wineskins: Critical Reflections on Writing and Teaching a Global Christian History.’ Missiology: An International Review XXXIV, 3 (July 2006): 361–82. Hanciles, Jehu J. Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration, and the Transformation of the West (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008). Holmes, Andrew R. ‘Evangelicalism, Revivals, and Foreign Missions’, in Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas, eds, The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: The Nineteenth Century, vol. III (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

³¹ The chapter commissioned to examine these developments failed to materialize. But see, among others, Jehu J. Hanciles, Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration, and the Transformation of the West (New York: Orbis Books, 2008); Claudia Währisch-Oblau, The Missionary Self-Perception of Pentecostal/Charismatic Church Leaders from the Global South in Europe: Bringing Back the Gospel (Boston: Brill, 2009); Afeosemime U. Adogame and James V. Spickard. Religion Crossing Boundaries: Transnational Religious and Social Dynamics in Africa and the New African Diaspora (Boston: Brill, 2010); Frieder Ludwig and J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, African Christian Presence in the West: New Immigrant Congregations and Transnational Networks in North America and Europe (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011).

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Hutchinson, Mark, and John Wolffe. A Short History of Global Evangelicalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Irvin, Dale T. ‘World Christianity: An Introduction.’ The Journal of World Christianity I, 1 (2008): 1–26. Ormerod, Neil J., and Shane Clifton. Globalization and the Mission of the Church (New York: T&T Clark, 2009). Sanneh, Lamin O. Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2003). Stanley, Brian. The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott, A History of Evangelicalism (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013).

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Part I Africa

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1 Emerging Streams of Dissent in Modern African Christianity Jehu J. Hanciles

By the opening decade of the twenty-first century, African Christianity had emerged as a prominent representation of global Christianity.¹ Throughout the twentieth century Christianity expanded much faster in Africa than in any other region. In 2010, the Christian share of the population in sub-Saharan Africa was estimated at 63 per cent (up from 9 per cent in 1910).² The African story is all the more remarkable given the fact that a century earlier there was serious doubt in European missionary minds about the prospects of Christianity on the continent.³ It would be unreasonable to censure Western missionaries for failing to anticipate the phenomenal growth of African Christianity. Even so, European assessments typically reflected a decidedly blinkered view of the processes already shaping the African Church. The entrenched but erroneous belief that the making of African Christianity depended almost completely on the actions and resources of the Western church meant that the central role of African agency and initiatives in ¹ Recent estimates suggest that Africans now account for a quarter (23.6 per cent) of the world Christian population: The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010 (Pew Research Center, 2012), p. 10; Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population (Pew Research Center, 2011), p. 10. Incomparable population explosion on the continent has been a factor (the same applies to Islam); but more people appear to be joining the church in Africa than anywhere else. This applies to both Protestants and Roman Catholics. See John L. Allen, ‘Global South Will Shape the Future Catholic Church,’ National Catholic Reporter, 7 October 2005; also, J. A. Siewert and E. G. Valdez, eds, Mission Handbook (Monrovia: MARC Publications, 1997), p. 34. ² Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population. By then, it was also ‘experiencing the fastest church growth of any region’ in the world: Siewert and Valdez, eds, Mission Handbook, p. 34; also, David B. Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001 edn), p. 5. ³ Clearly stated in reports at the historic World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910: see World Missionary Conference, 1910: Report of Commission 1—Carrying the Gospel to All the Non-Christian World (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1910).

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Christian expansion were paternalistically discounted. This outlook was also consistent with the ingrained vision of fashioning the African Church in the image of Europe. In this chapter, I argue that the prospects of African Christianity were poorly diagnosed in part because confidence in structures of domination blinded observers to the African Christian capacity for ‘dissent’.

‘D I S S E N T ’ I N A F R I C AN P E RS P E C TI V E In what follows, the term ‘dissent’ (with its strong ecclesiastical connotations) is used as a broad analytical construct to examine particular experiences and developments indicative of indigenous Christian responses to forms of Christianity instituted by European missionary movements. There is a case to be made, as I contend below, that the ‘dissenting’ impulse was inherent in the evangelical Protestantism that spread to Africa from the late eighteenth century; which is to say that the emergence of African dissenting strands is not entirely unforeseen. But the intimate ties between colonialism and European missions made the situation much more complex and partly explains why dissenting movements within African Christianity predominated in the early twentieth century. In Africa, British colonial authorities allowed churches and denominations belonging to dissenting or nonconformist traditions (Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists, etc.) to thrive alongside Anglicanism. With little variation, the former adopted approaches and policies (some due to practical necessity) that were sharply divergent from principles intrinsic to their ecclesiastical identity in the British context. For instance, though innately opposed to state control of religious existence they openly collaborated with colonial authorities because it suited church planting objectives. They were also, as we shall see, no less nationalistic in their missionary priorities and agenda than Anglican dominated operations. In terms of ecclesiastical life, resistance to structures or practices that interfered with congregational prerogatives or autonomy appeared to stop at the British shore. So apparently did commitment to renewal and innovation in ministry and liturgy. In the African colonial context, nonconformist agents were adamantly opposed to African independency, upheld European hegemony with unadulterated resolve, and worked assiduously to fashion African churches in conformity with British models. From an African perspective, there was little to distinguish English dissenting traditions (as an ecclesiastical phenomenon) from Anglicanism. The distinction between the two was virtually nullified by the fact that both ecclesiastical families were associated with colonial domination and foreign missionary control. Somewhat inevitably, dissenting impulses within African Christianity defied ecclesiastical categories and decried the wholesale imposition of European Christianity

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regardless of denomination or tradition. Indeed, many champions of African Christian dissent emerged from within European ‘dissenting’ traditions—one of the earliest and most vociferous was Edward Blyden, a Presbyterian clergyman (on whom, more below). And, on one occasion, an African church leader who seceded from the Wesleyan Methodist Church earnestly embraced Anglicanism! In a word, the confessional carapace of European missionary efforts has little relevance for explaining the rise of African dissenting movements. This is not to downplay the denominational character of the Western missionary project.⁴ Sectarian denominationalism was a conspicuous manifestation of the forms of Christianity transplanted to the African continent. Competing European missionary agents laboured assiduously to establish churches that were replicas or extensions of their home denominations. So much so, that the multiplicity of denominations is held to be a contributing factor to African Christian secessionism.⁵ But, with rare exceptions, missionary societies parcelled out territories or tribes to minimize overlap and friction between different denominations.⁶ Moreover, beyond evident liturgical differences or other visible trappings, few Africans Christians understood the doctrinal discord or competing models underpinning European denominationalism. As explained above, the differences between Anglicanism and nonconformism mattered little—to Africans, at least—in the colonial context. So, while the evangelical form of Christianity transmitted by the European missionary movement may have laid important seeds, the dissenting strands that emerged within African Christianity were framed and fomented by experiences that were radically different from the British heritage. The diverse streams of African dissent that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century covered a range of actions and activities that exposed the limitations of transplanted Christian ideals and practice insulated from the indigenous environment. They included forms of religious protest and resistance that triggered independent movements as well as initiatives marked by religious revival and innovation. Outcomes were often messy and in some cases these Christian movements presented the African Church itself with new dilemmas. On the whole, however, African dissenting movements galvanized the growth of African Christianity and impelled its transformation into an African religion. They were fomented by a variety of factors and developments. At least ⁴ It is worth noting that, partly because it emerged out of the antislavery movement which drew Evangelicals from across the ecclesiastical map to a common cause, the British foreign missions movement originally carried the seeds of interdenominational cooperation. But this proved short-lived. Even the London Missionary Society (LMS), expressly established in 1795 as a non-denominational entity, was eventually dominated by Congregationalists. ⁵ Allan Anderson, ‘A “Failure in Love”? Western Missions and the Emergence of African Initiated Churches in the Twentieth Century,’ Missiology XXIX, 3 (July, 2001), p. 279. ⁶ Though wily indigenous rulers exploited the competition to ensure maximum benefit in terms of schools (or clinics).

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four are worthy of attention: 1) the legacy of evangelicalism; 2) black Christian movements and ideologies; 3) incipient nationalism; 4) the African religious heritage and vernacular translation.

AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY’S E VANGELICAL ETHOS Africa was a major beneficiary of the global spread of dissenting traditions from Europe through the Protestant missionary movement. Many of the European and (later) North American missionary groups that competed so vigorously for the soul of Africa from the late eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries were themselves separatist movements. The total Protestant foreign missionary force in Africa increased by 81 per cent between 1890 and 1925: from roughly 1171 (in 1890) to 6289 (in 1925). Half of these came from Britain, and the vast majority were drawn from evangelical groups. The predominance of evangelicals within the European missionary movement means that modern African (Protestant) Christianity was incubated in evangelicalism to a considerable extent. This is relevant in two ways. First, there is an argument to be made that this evangelical ethos—specifically its propensity for religious reform and innovation (a source of denominational sectarianism), emphasis on biblical authority, and widespread commitment to making converts based on the centrality of Christ’s atoning work—contributed to a proclivity for dissent within African Christianity. Since a multiplicity of denominations shaped missionary operations in Africa, it is argued, African (Protestant) Christians came to view secessionism as ‘a natural consequence’.⁷ This is plausible. But secession was often the final outcome, not the original intent. It is perhaps more accurate to say that the strongly evangelical bent of Western missionary operations in Africa readily fostered an orientation towards activist reform that drew inspiration from biblical authority. Moreover, it would be over-simplistic to characterize the widespread rise of dissenting movements within African Christianity as a duplication of the dissenting tradition that flowed out of the British (or European) context. As noted above, adaptation to colonial conditions meant that the institutions recreated in Africa were not unadulterated replicas of the British original. Most important, the context and considerations that shaped African Christian dissent were far removed from the British Christian experience or heritage. Indeed, the general view that African Christianity is raised on foreign stock ⁷ Anderson, ‘A “Failure in Love”? Western Missions and the Emergence of African Initiated Churches in the Twentieth Century,’ p. 279.

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ignores the critical ways in which the pre-existing religious heritage shaped African engagement with the Christian faith.⁸ This leads to the second point. Within the African experience, the enduring potency of indigenous elements and the unexpected fruits of indigenous appropriation are directly connected to the story of dissent (see section ‘Indigenous Religion and Vernacular Translation’ below). This is to say that the African heritage and resources require as much attention as the advent of the foreign missionary and the transmission effort; not least because ‘none of us take in a new idea except in terms of the ideas we already have’.⁹ In this regard, African religious predispositions appeared to be particularly amenable to the promise of the gospel. Interestingly, even European missionaries came to the conclusion that the specific doctrines of the evangelical creed appeal more directly to the African mind than to the heathen mind in any other quarters of the world.¹⁰

The reference to ‘the African mind’ in this statement inadvertently affirmed the importance of African religious instincts and imagination for receptivity and outcomes in the encounter with European evangelical Christianity. It also helps to explain why the rise of African dissenting movements ought to be seen not simply as a disruption of European projects but as the validation of African agency and religious aspirations. It is worth noting that the number of Africans exposed to white missionaries, even in the heyday of the Western missionary project, was exceedingly small.¹¹ African agents, serving as catechists, schoolmasters, and interpreters, or dispersed as traders and labour migrants, were by far the dominant missionary agents in African societies. Many no doubt disseminated predigested ideas aimed less at applying the gospel to the African context and concerns than to perpetuating Western notions and designs; though use of local idiom and adaptation to African categories presented natural constraints. The point at issue is that the vast majority of Africans have heard the gospel from other Africans. This fact is quite relevant to understanding the prevalence of the dissenting tradition within African Christianity. To reiterate a previous

⁸ The persistence of this perspective belies its patent erroneousness. As Lamin Sanneh has pointed out, the same verdict is seldom applied to Islam; the implication being that the spread of Islam in Africa was due to ‘its intrinsic merit’, free from external imposition: Lamin O. Sanneh, Piety and Power: Muslims and Christians in West Africa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), p. 75. ⁹ Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of the Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), pp. 28, 35. This is to say, as Walls adds, that ‘new elements can only be comprehended by means of and in terms of the preexisting language and its conventions’. ¹⁰ World Missionary Conference, 1910: Report of Commission 4—the Missionary Message in Relation to Non-Christian Religions (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1910), p. 31. ¹¹ Richard Gray, Black Christians and White Missionaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 65.

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point, these movements did not so much interrupt the spread of a European religious system as assert African prerogatives and priorities in the formation of African Christianity. In short, there is some truth to the idea that the prevalence of evangelicalism within the European missionary movement provided a certain orientation within African Christianity that helps to explain the rise of dissent. But the evangelical strain that took root and generated dissenting or renewal movements was locally fashioned and sustained by strong affinity with African religious consciousness. In the African context, the adaptability of evangelicalism—its propensity to take new forms in response to local need or ‘embed itself in local identities’¹²—was fully realized. Innate African religiosity provided fertile soil for its core features and also gave it distinctive orientation and emphases. African evangelicalism is also best understood not as a distinct strand but as an organic entity embedded in the African Christian experience, enshrined in a variety of traditions, and expressed in a variety of forms.

BLACK CHRISTIAN M OVEMENTS AND I DEOLOGIES The focus on European missionary agents in the making of modern African Christianity obscures a major strand that was arguably more consequential for the emergence of dissenting movements. From the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the missionary vision, ideologies, and initiatives of black Christians from America (and the West Indies to a lesser extent) shaped the African church in profound ways.¹³ This ‘black Atlantic’ movement directly contributed to the spread of Christianity on the continent.¹⁴ Indeed, it is worth noting that it was black Christians, not European missionaries, who first

¹² Mark Hutchinson and John Wolffe, A Short History of Global Evangelicalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 188. ¹³ I treat this issue in more detail elsewhere. See Jehu J. Hanciles, ‘The Black Atlantic and the Shaping of African Christianity, 1820–1920,’ in Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity, ed. Klaus Koschorke and Adrian Hermann (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2014), pp. 29–50; Jehu J. Hanciles, ‘Back to Africa: White Abolitionists and Black Missionaries,’ in African Christianity: An African Story, ed. U. Kalu Ogbu (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007); and Jehu Hanciles, Euthanasia of a Mission: African Church Autonomy in a Colonial Context (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), pp. 164–72; Ogbu U. Kalu, ‘Ethiopianism in African Christianity,’ in African Christianity: An African Story, ed. Ogbu U. Kalu (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007). See also, David Northrup, Crosscurrents in the Black Atlantic, 1770–1965: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008). ¹⁴ The concept of a ‘black Atlantic’ (or black Atlantic world) was developed by Paul Gilroy in the 1990s to describe the formation of a diverse transnational cultural network of African peoples within the transatlantic system: Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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initiated Christian missions in modern Africa, created ‘the oldest Christian community’ in the sub-continent, and ‘laid the foundation stones of the present African Church’.¹⁵ The earliest black Christian group—ex-slaves repatriated from Nova Scotia to the Sierra Leone settlement in 1792—were products of evangelical revivals in America and arrived in Africa as whole congregations. Significantly, they were all ‘dissenters’!¹⁶ Furthermore, in 1822, resentment against white domination led a major segment of the black Methodists within this group to sever connection with the Wesleyan conference in London and establish a separate church.¹⁷ This, the first recorded ecclesiastical session in modern Africa, exemplified the rise of new dissenting impulses triggered by the spread of evangelicalism into new global contexts. It presaged future developments within African Christianity. The interactions and exchange between black Christians and African Christians throughout the nineteenth century encouraged the transfer of ideologies that directly impacted African Christian responses to European hegemony and ethnocentrism. The most important of these ideological strands was ‘Ethiopianism’, a movement with complex roots in the black Christian experience that combined race and religion and made evocative use of ‘Ethiopia’ (a biblical term symbolic of black Africa).¹⁸ The Ethiopian manifesto demanded racial equality, defended African capabilities (linked to the argument that Africa’s advancement required African agents and institutions without European tutelage), insisted that the evangelization of the continent was primarily an African responsibility (‘Africa for Africans’ became a rallying cry), and called for the adaptation of Christianity to the African experience and culture. The ideas and ideals of the movement did not always result in visible institutional transformation or produce ecclesiastical separation. But, at

¹⁵ See A. F. Walls, ‘A Christian Experiment: The Early Sierra Leone Colony,’ in The Mission of the Church and the Propagation of the Faith, ed. G. J. Cuming (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 107f.; Paul E. H. Hair, ‘Freetown Christianity and Africa,’ Sierra Leone Bulletin of Religion VI, 2 (Dec., 1964), p. 14; John Baur, 2000 Years of Christianity in Africa: An African Church History (Nairobi, Kenya: Paulines, 1998), p. 17; Lamin O. Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 62; Sylvia M. Jacobs, ‘The Historical Role of Afro-Americans in American Missionary Efforts in Africa’, in Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, ed. Sylvia M. Jacobs (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 17. ¹⁶ The majority were Methodist, followed by Baptists and members of the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion. ¹⁷ Named Ebenezer Methodist Church, it is still thriving today in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital. ¹⁸ For more, see George Shepperson, ‘Ethiopianism: Past and Present,’ in Christianity in Tropical Africa, ed. Christian G. Baèta (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 249–64; Hanciles, Euthanasia of a Mission: African Church Autonomy in a Colonial Context, pp. 147–55; J. Mutero Chirenje, Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883–1916 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

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least among the educated class, they fuelled African Christian aspirations and eroded tolerance for forms of Christianity associated with foreign missions and the colonial state. Ethiopianism, in short, contested vital aspects of Christianity transplanted from Europe and helped to foment dissent. Ethiopian movements emerged in different parts of the sub-continent in different ways and at different times. But they invariably drew stimulus from racial inequality and colonial oppression. In the West African region, Ethiopianism first appeared in the Sierra Leone colony around the mid-nineteenth century. It quickly gained traction in an environment where the presence of black Christians, growing numbers of well-trained local clergy, a rising African intellectual class, and a native pastorate experiment (based on the three-selves formula) created perfect conditions for its demands.¹⁹ Its proponents were young African Anglican clergymen like James Johnson (c.1839–1917) who were emboldened by the arrival of Edward W. Blyden (1832–1912), the leading champion of Ethiopianism at the time and a Presbyterian clergyman.²⁰ The movement garnered widespread support across denominational lines and engulfed the small colony in a fever of controversy. Here the calls for reform, amplified by a vibrant press, focused on adaptation of Europeanized Christianity to conform to an African identity and the creation of an independent, non-denominational, ‘national’ church.²¹ This aspiration was stimulated and sustained by deep-seated exasperation with foreign control and the growing clamour for racial inequality within the wider society. As Johnson put it: The desire to have an independent church closely follows the knowledge that we are a distinct race, existing under peculiar circumstances and possessing peculiar characteristics . . . and that the arrangement of foreign churches made to suit their own local circumstances can hardly be expected to suit our own in all their details . . . ²²

¹⁹ For a full treatment, see Hanciles, Euthanasia of a Mission: African Church Autonomy in a Colonial Context. ²⁰ Blyden, a West Indian of African descent, migrated to Liberia in 1850 where he served variously as Presbyterian clergyman, educator, diplomat, and statesman. Blyden served as Liberia’s ambassador to both Britain (1877–92) and France (1905). His fervent defence of African nationalism and vigorous endorsement of the black emigration to Africa contributed immensely to the development of the church in West Africa. On his life and impact see, among others, Hollis R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot 1832–1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); M. Yu Frenkel, Edward Blyden and African Nationalism (Moscow: African Institute of Academy of Sciences, 1978); E. Holden, Blyden of Liberia: An Account of the Life and Labors of Edward Wilmot Blyden, as Recorded in Letters and in Print (New York: Vantage Press, 1966). ²¹ Hanciles, Euthanasia of a Mission: African Church Autonomy in a Colonial Context, pp. 161–4. ²² Letter dated 19 April 1873, James Johnson to M. Taylor and others (C.M.S. CA1/0123): quoted in E. A. Ayandele, Holy Johnson, Pioneer of African Nationalism, 1836–1917 (London: Frank Cass, 1970), p. 42.

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The Sierra Leone episode did not produce a separate church but it publicized and triggered the spread of Ethiopian ideas and ideals in the region. The Ethiopian movement achieved its greatest prominence in the wake of the dismantling of the all-African Niger mission established by Bishop Crowther (c.1806–91), the first African Anglican bishop.²³ This 1890s episode coincided with the ‘scramble era’ of European colonialism; a period that saw the arrival of a new generation of European missionaries who were generally more educated and more knowledgeable about African culture and religious life than their predecessors but arguably more harshly critical and intolerant of African beliefs and values. Their highhanded efforts to address defects in the mission and dreadful treatment of Bishop Crowther, the most revered African Christian of the nineteenth century, ignited popular outrage. To aggrieved and enraged African Christians, the Ethiopian vision of an African continent evangelized by Africans and populated by churches adapted to indigenous life and heritage appeared utterly compelling. Feeding off the flames of seething resentment, Ethiopian convictions and demands shaped the rising spirit of religious protest and the spate of independent African churches it produced within both the Anglican and nonconformist denominations. At this stage, the dissenting ethos was heavily infused with cultural nationalism, chiefly expressed in rejection of European control and culture. With few exceptions, the new independent churches incorporated ‘Africa’ and/or ‘native’ in their names: to wit, The Native Baptist Church (formed by secession from the American Southern Baptist Church in 1888);²⁴ United Native Africa Church (formed in 1891 as a non-denominational church drawing members from Anglican, Methodist, and Baptist denominations that grew into hundreds of churches across Nigeria), and Bethel African Church (formed in 1901 when hundreds of members seceded from St. Paul’s Breadfruit Anglican Church in Lagos). Some members of these new African church movements also adopted personal African names (to replace European ‘Christian’ names) and proudly donned African attire. Quite often, the dissenting impulse was directed less against the Anglican Church than at European missionary operations. In fact, many elements of denominational Anglicanism, including liturgy, doctrine, and structure, made the cross-over. But the desire to retain some semblance of Anglicanism, especially its paid clerical structure made ecclesiastical dissent costly; and the more successful the independent church the greater the financial burden. This

²³ For more on this story, see Lamin Sanneh, West African Christianity: The Religious Impact (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983), pp. 177f.; E. A. Ayandele, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria 1842–1914: A Political and Social Analysis (London: Longmans, 1966), pp. 319–25; G. O. M. Tasie, Christian Missionary Enterprise in the Niger Delta 1864–1918 (Leiden: Brill, 1978), pp. 91–116. ²⁴ Later changed its name to Ebenezer Baptist Church.

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proved the undoing of some dissenting movements like the Niger Delta Pastorate Church, which expanded rapidly in a short space of time but returned to the Anglican fold after six years.²⁵ But the spirit of dissent was abroad; and the quest for African forms of Christianity that did not conform to European traditions was now irreversible. About 1912, Garrick Braide (c.1882–1918), an Anglican catechist in the Delta region, had a visionary experience and announced that God had called him to be his messenger.²⁶ Braide already had a reputation for religious devoutness, and he continued to spend long hours (or whole nights) in solitary prayer. He also began to practice divine healing and propounded a Christian message that took account of African religious life. He called on hearers to abandon the old gods (destroy fetishes and idols), confess their sins, and be baptized (abandoning the protracted catechetical process). His reform countenanced polygamy but, in a manner quite similar to the traditional ritual system, he promoted austere religious observances: including abstinence from alcohol, renunciation of magic, strict sabbatical observance, prescribed times of prayer, and regular fasting. Demonstrations of power—in addition to healing and miracles, he reportedly bested traditional priests in a rainmaking contest—cemented his claim to being a prophet. His ministry produced revival and mass conversions (sometimes of whole villages). Braide’s ministry was unusual but not incompatible with the evangelical Anglicanism that prevailed in his area. His bishop, James Johnson, was supportive. Johnson had been one of the leading proponents of Ethiopianism in Sierra Leone (see section ‘Black Christian Movements and Ideologies’ above).²⁷ Transferred to Lagos and appointed pastor of St Paul’s Breadfruit Anglican Church, he found ample scope to pursue his brand of African nationalism. When he had prayers for the queen of England in the prayer ²⁵ Founded in 1892, the Niger Delta Pastorate Church combined Ethiopianism with espousal of the three-selves strategy promulgated by CMS Secretary Henry Venn (1796–1873). But initial success and rapid growth was ultimately undermined by an economic downturn; and lack of a bishop rendered separation from the Anglican communion unsustainable: see Ayandele, Holy Johnson, Pioneer of African Nationalism, 1836–1917, p. 252; Sanneh, West African Christianity: The Religious Impact, p. 143. ²⁶ For a detailed treatment of the Garrick Braide movement see Tasie, Christian Missionary Enterprise in the Niger Delta 1864–1918, pp. 166–201; also, Deji Ayegboyin and S. Ademola Ishola, African Indigenous Churches: An Historical Perspective (Lagos, Nigeria: Greater Heights Publications, 1997), p. 59; Norbert C. Brockman, ‘Garrick Sokari Braide,’ Dictionary of African Christian Biography (Center for Global Christianity and Mission). ²⁷ As a young clergyman, the immensely popular Johnson had demonstrated the same intense religiosity and evangelistic fervor now manifested by Braide. Nicknamed ‘Holy Johnson’, he became a leading champion of Ethiopianism in the 1860s and was transferred to Lagos from Freetown by the CMS in part to diffuse the controversies unleashed in church and society by the movement. See Ayandele, Holy Johnson, Pioneer of African Nationalism, 1836–1917; also, Jehu J. Hanciles, ‘The Legacy of James Johnson,’ International Bulletin of Missionary Research XXI, 4 (Oct., 1997); Hanciles, Euthanasia of a Mission: African Church Autonomy in a Colonial Context, pp. 158–64.

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book substituted with prayers for the native chiefs, alarmed European missionaries predicted a secession. But Johnson defied the expectation of both critics and supporters. He remained faithful to Anglicanism even after over two-thirds of his congregation (nurtured by his African consciousness) seceded to form the Bethel African Church, partly in protest at the illtreatment of Johnson by the European bishop. In this he arguably embodied the contradictions of a time of transition.²⁸ Even so, he possibly viewed Braide as his protégé. Braide did not set out to start a church or separate movement; even if the multitude of converts produced by his evangelistic ministry overstretched the resources of Anglican Churches.²⁹ But his vision of reform extended well beyond making African converts. The clamorous Ethiopianism that had raged in the region a decade earlier had impacted his thinking. He condemned the church for its rejection of the African worldview and denounced European impositions on church life and liturgy. In his view, the form of Christianity bequeathed by European missionaries failed to meet the needs of Africans. He called for an indigenized liturgy; specifically a system of church worship in which Africans would praise God in vernacular languages. These were the same ideas that a younger James Johnson had championed but which, as assistant bishop (serving under a European diocesan), he appeared less eager to pursue. In the event, Braide’s extraordinary campaign outgrew the official structures of the Anglican Church. He became a cult figure, adopted the title Elijah II, and insisted that the words of God’s prophet superseded that of the church’s creeds and dogma. He attracted a massive following of perhaps more than a million. To the consternation of his African bishop, followers began to abandon the Anglican Church in droves, leaving Anglican congregations decimated. As was often the case in the African colonial context, the campaign for religious reform impacted the social order and triggered a political response. Braide’s attack on the buying and selling of liquor was so effective that alcohol consumption dropped dramatically, impacting colonial revenue (since the sale of alcohol was taxed). The outbreak of World War I compounded these economic woes. Additionally, Braide’s strictures against European domination and calls for Africanization sounded alarmingly seditious, to colonial

²⁸ A vigorous critique of the imposition of European customs (including dress and names) on the African church, he neither changed his own name nor abandoned the vestments of the Western church. As bishop he also opposed many African independent church movements. After decades of spirited rebellion he opted to become more (not less) dependent on European authority than ever. ²⁹ The number of ‘inquirers’ in Niger Delta churches increased from little more than 300 in 1909 to 2933 by 1912; in some provinces there were so many to baptize that church services lasted well into the evening: Tasie, Christian Missionary Enterprise in the Niger Delta 1864–1918, pp. 183f.

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authorities, at least. Braide was arrested in 1916 on charges that included breaching of the peace (a reference to his destruction of idols), agitating an insurrection, inciting racial hatred (of blacks against whites), and undermining constitutional authority. He died shortly after his release a year or so later. Disenchanted with the Anglican Church, his followers instituted a separate movement called ‘The Christ Army’. But without their enterprising leader the new church struggled and lasted only until the late 1930s. In southern Africa, Ethiopianism emerged separately and its trajectory was shaped by distinct contextual elements.³⁰ Compared to colonies in West Africa, white control and racial oppression were far more entrenched, the black (American) Christian involvement was much more extensive (in part because the churches lacked the large body of well-trained native clergy present in Nigeria or Sierra Leone), and independent African or tribal churches emerged more readily. Here too, Ethiopian influences date to the late nineteenth century. However, the initial manifestations occurred not in connection with Anglicanism but within the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Further indication that denominational character or history (nonconformist or otherwise) had little impact on the critical issues that shaped dissent within African Christianity in various colonial contexts. In the 1870s, Nehemiah Tile (d. 1891), a probation minister in the Wesleyan Methodist Church (South Africa) who was working among the Tembu people incurred the displeasure of colonial and church authorities with his support of Tembu nationalism and acceptance of African cultural practices.³¹ In the face of this opposition, Tile eventually left the Methodist Church and founded the Tembu National Church (in 1884). In the spirit of Ethiopianism, he championed a form of Christianity consistent with African selfhood and accommodative of cultural tradition; but he was not anti-European. Indeed, in part due to his vision of a national church, he found Anglican norms very appealing. He set out to learn Anglican doctrines, sought Anglican training for his ministers, and installed the Tembu chief as head of the church (in imitation of the Church of England). The profound irony of these actions— an African Christian leader who seceded from a ‘dissenting’ denomination and embraced Anglicanism—reinforces the point that Africans mainly dissented for African reasons! Less than a decade later, in 1892, Mangena Mokone (1851–1936), an elder in the Wesleyan Methodist Church (Pretoria), resigned in opposition to racial segregation—the establishment of separate conferences for African and European leaders within the church was the final straw—and established what he ³⁰ For a comprehensive study, see Chirenje, Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883–1916. ³¹ J. A. Millard, ‘Nehemiah Tile,’ Dictionary of African Christian Biography (Center for Global Christianity and Mission).

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called the Ethiopian Church.³² Many scholars date the African independent church movement in South Africa to this event, in part because it triggered a spate of similar initiatives. Since Christianity in colonial South Africa was closely linked to a European identity and intertwined with political structures, African churches paid a heavy price for ecclesiastical dissent. They were denied access to education (controlled by European missionaries with government subsidies); and applications for land or licenses (needed for religious legitimacy and services) were routinely ignored by colonial authorities.³³ In 1896, the leaders of the growing African church movement became affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church in America (itself a dissenting body). The move was motivated as much by the former’s need for resources as for some semblance of legitimacy and organizational cohesion. When AME Bishop Turner visited South Africa in 1898 to formalize this alliance, he ordained sixty-five ministers, organized the churches into regional conferences, and consecrated one of the African leaders as assistant bishop. The African movement subsequently fragmented; but exchange between Africans in South Africa and American blacks continued to galvanize religious protest and secession. So much so that in the early twentieth century, British colonial authorities took steps to curb the AME affiliated churches and placed travel bans on black Americans.³⁴ European reaction to the spread of African dissent was uniformly hostile. The collaboration between John Chilembwe (d. 1915), a rising nationalist figure in Nyasaland (now Malawi) and Joseph Booth (1851–1932), an English Baptist missionary, was a rare exception.³⁵ Far more predictably, the exodus of Africans from the mission-established churches generated deep resentment among whites, who also outrightly rejected African calls for reform, equality, and cultural adaptation. Not that it mattered. Dissent, fuelled less by doctrinal conflict than by racial rejection and cultural alienation, developed unstoppable momentum. Free from European supervision and control, highly motivated African leaders enjoyed full liberty to apply the gospel to African realities in a ³² Ibid. Like earlier advocates of Ethiopianism, but independently of them, Mokone drew inspiration from Psalm 68:31 which, ironically, European missionaries had proclaimed in connection with the evangelization of the African continent. The same verse was popular among black Christians. Mokone, it is said, ‘took this to mean the self-government of the African Church under African leaders’: Bengt G. M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 39. ³³ Carol A. Page, ‘Colonial Reaction to Ame Missionaries in South Africa, 1898–1910,’ in Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, ed. Sylvia M. Jacobs (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), pp. 179f. ³⁴ Ibid., pp. 187–9. ³⁵ The two men vigorously endorsed the ‘Africa for the African’ vision and released a manifesto (in 1897) which called on ‘every man, woman, and child of the African race, as far as may be practicable, to take part in the redemption of Africa during this generation’: cf. Northrup, Crosscurrents in the Black Atlantic, 1770–1965: A Brief History with Documents, p. 76.

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way that resonated deeply with indigenous communities. The churches within this reform movement grew rapidly. When Pambani Mzimba, the first South African trained black Presbyterian minister, seceded from the Free Church of Scotland in 1898, the entire congregation of Lovedale Church (mainly of Mfengu origin) went with him. By 1911, Mzimba’s independent Presbyterian Church of Africa had more than 13,000 members in thirty-five congregations.

THE NATIONALIST DIMENSION Prior to the encounter with Europeans, Africans did not think of themselves as African. The primary source of identity for African peoples was the clan, tribe, ethnic or lineage group; though overlapping bonds, cultural mixture, and linguistic affinities blurred boundaries. In any case, the concept of Africa and Africans existed among Europeans long before it developed among Africans. As David Eltis observes, ‘it was only when Europeans and Africans dealt with each other that they tended to emphasize characteristics that they shared with other Europeans and other Africans’.³⁶ What is loosely described as African (or pan-African) nationalism emerged primarily among educated Africans in response to political domination, cultural condemnation, and racial rejection by Europeans. This broad ‘nationalist’ consciousness was shaped to some extent by interaction with black American intellectuals, who tended to view the African continent as an undifferentiated domain—a ‘fatherland’.³⁷ This incipient African nationalism emphasized the solidarity, common interests, and distinctive character of African peoples.³⁸ Movements like Ethiopianism gave these ideas a distinctly religious weight, evident in calls for non-denominational African churches. But the nationalist element in African dissent meant that the calls for religious transformation invariably implicated political affairs. This was so for two interrelated reasons. First, the European missionary movement that prompted dissent was itself a nationalist movement. Christian missions (Catholic and Protestant) operated as national ventures significantly ³⁶ David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 224. ³⁷ A term used by Martin Delany (1812–85), a prominent black abolitionist, American Civil War veteran, and physician. See Martin Delany, Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, excerpt in Northrup, Crosscurrents in the Black Atlantic, 1770–1965: A Brief History with Documents, p. 53. ³⁸ This conception was superseded in the long run by nationalist projects within the territorial boundaries imposed by European colonizing powers. Though, even these almost everywhere failed to overcome tribal affinities; in part because divide and rule colonial policies (notably by the British) exacerbated or encouraged deep tribal divisions and loyalties.

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shaped by the designs of empire. Mission and empire were not always well aligned and sometimes clashed in their objectives. But the entrenched notion that territorial acquisitions were divinely ordained for the expansion of the gospel combined with the monopolistic nature of colonial rule to ‘nationalize’ the Western missionary effort. For obvious reasons, colonial authorities favoured missionaries from their own nation while missionary agencies or orders, in turn, focused their energy and resources in territories colonized by their government. European missionaries looked to their respective colonial authorities for protection and special consideration in much the same way that they looked to their respective countries for financial support. The expulsion of German missionaries from British and French colonies during the First World War underlined this nationalist paradigm. The nationalist character of European missionary operations was relevant to African dissenting responses. African converts in mission churches were incorporated into a religious system that approximated the ideals and customs of the foreign missionaries’ home nation—regardless of denomination. African dissenting movements were not primarily aimed at emulating denominational formation. (A non-denominational church was the preferred objective in some instances). They were, first and foremost, motivated by the desire for churches that were distinctly African or reflected a ‘national’ character, in the same way that the ecclesiastical structures and religious systems transplanted to Africa by European missionaries bore the imprint of nationalist identity. Given the objectives and dynamics of the colonial contexts, however, the creation of African churches could only be achieved through religious rebellion and radical reformation. The second (related) reason for the strong nationalist temper of African dissent has to do with the fact that British denominations of all stripes—not just the Church of England—were allied with the colonial state which, in turn, relied on missionary agencies or services to engineer a particular social order. As such, separation or secession from these ‘mainline’ denominations was inherently subversive of colonial designs. As a major case in point, European missions controlled virtually all paths to literacy. This European education system not only served as the primary means of converting Africans to Christianity and spreading European culture; it was also the main source of the skilled labour desperately needed to run colonial bureaucracy.³⁹ ‘Dissent’, or separation from European founded churches or operations, undermined this arrangement and threatened the stability if not the viability of the colonial state. This is not to suggest that African dissenting movements rejected Western education. Most of the men, and some of the women, who lead ³⁹ Foreign missions ‘supplied between 90 and 100 percent of all schools in British colonies in Africa’: Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, UK: Apollos, 1990), p. 65.

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dissenting movements were beneficiaries of Western education and were at least semi-literate. Indeed, by and large, dissenting movements only established their own schools when barred from mission controlled facilities. The point, however, is that rejection of European missionary control and operations had implications for the entire colonial order. From an African point of view, also, the reform agenda inevitably crossed the artificial boundaries of ecclesiastical life to the wider society for the simple reason that ultimately what was at stake was a people’s heritage, way of life, and future. Essentially, in colonial contexts, the fortunes of the African church were inextricable from the forces shaping African society. The church constituted a frontline where the European and African worlds collided. To varying degrees, each act of ecclesiastical separation or nonconformity indicated a refusal to submit to a project that upheld the values of a foreign nation. In this regard, African Christian dissent represented an alternative nationalist vision, elements of which ‘were regularly expressed in sermons and church activities, including themes of racial equality, the dignity of the black race, and the competence of Africans to rule themselves’.⁴⁰ Additionally, immense grassroots appeal transformed dissenting initiatives into sites of community formation (outside foreign control) that made them lightning rods for latent political nationalism. One major example must suffice.

Kimbanguism In 1917/18, Simon Kimbangu (c.1890–1951), a baptized Christian in the Baptist church in Belgian Congo (Central Africa), experienced visions and received a divine commission to preach.⁴¹ The Baptist missionaries refused to appoint him as an evangelist because he was semi-literate, but made him a lay preacher.⁴² When the visions persisted, Kimbangu, who felt untrained and illprepared, fled to Kinshasa and sought employment as a migrant labourer. The ⁴⁰ Inus Daneel, ‘African Initiated Churches in South Africa: Protest Movements or Mission Churches?’ in Christianity Reborn: The Global Expansion of Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald M. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2004), p. 199. ⁴¹ On Kimbangu, see Welo Owango, ‘The Impact of the Kimbanguist Church in Central Africa’, The Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center XVI, 1–2 (1988), pp. 115–36; D. J. Mackay, ‘Simon Kimbangu and the B. M. S. Tradition,’ Journal of Religion in Africa XVII, 2 (June, 1987); Allan Anderson, African Reformation: African Initiated Christianity in the 20th Century (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001), pp. 125–30; also, Sabakinu Kivilu, ‘Simon Kimbangu,’ Dictionary of African Christian Biography (Center for Global Christianity and Mission). ⁴² The London based Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) had been working in the Congo, a Belgian colony, since 1879 and was forced by the extremely large territory to use local African catechists or deacons who exercised some independent authority but were not allowed to baptize converts.

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visions intensified (now including a call to heal) and, after three months, Kimbamgu returned to his home village (N’Kamba). When church members refused to accept him, he embarked on an itinerant ministry. In 1921, he healed a sick woman in a nearby village by laying on of hands. Other miraculous healings followed (of the blind, the lame, the deaf, and the crippled); and these incidents generated a new movement. Kimbangu led services everyday but, unlike other prophet-healers, he did not conduct baptisms. Converts were directed to go back to the mission churches. The average Congolese, however, viewed Christianity as a foreign religion allied with the colonial state. Christian converts where typically required to leave the traditional setting and join separate communities (‘mission villages’) under European control and modelled on European life.⁴³ For this reason they were labelled muntu mundele (or mundele ndombe) by the Bakongo— meaning blacks living like whites or blacks with European manners. Kimbangu’s ministry, however, manifested an authority and spiritual power that equalled (or surpassed) that of any European missionary and thus transformed local understanding of the Christian message.⁴⁴ His ministry was also perfectly aligned with Bakongo Christian hopes for a form of Christianity that renewed rather than sought the abolition of their traditions and produced social change rather than create segregated communities. As Mackay notes: the fact that he, an African, possessed spiritual power in his own right (and thus stood in the same role of mediator as the missionaries who in the past brought power to the church) was seen by Kimbangu as heralding in a new era. That new era which came through Kimbangu was conceived in terms of the new order which was the focus of the church’s aspirations.⁴⁵

Within the indigenous worldview, also, the fact that an African now occupied a role previously associated with white missionaries took on apocalyptic significance and heightened expectations that the work of God would usher in a ‘new order’.⁴⁶ Whether or not Kimbangu harboured hostility to the colonial regime is unclear; but he appeared to have embraced the idea that his ministry signalled the dawning of a new era, one that, in the minds of the Bakongo (Christian and non-Christian), denoted the end of colonialism and the restoration of power to Africans. Such expectations had clear political implications that would not have been lost on European authorities. In his preaching, Kimbangu condemned idolatry, witchcraft, lascivious dancing, and polygamy. His daily services and healing ministry unleashed a religious revival. Initially, he worked closely with the local elders of the church, ⁴³ Owango, ‘The Impact of the Kimbanguist Church in Central Africa’, pp. 126–7 ⁴⁴ Interestingly, Kimbangu was a Kikongo name meaning ‘he who reveals the hidden things’: ibid., p. 128. ⁴⁵ Mackay, ‘Simon Kimbangu and the B. M. S. Tradition’, pp. 130–1. ⁴⁶ Ibid., pp. 136, 137, 142 (also, p. 123).

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who endorsed and regulated the growing movement. ‘In many villages’, wrote one European missionary, ‘people have forsaken their idols and have begun to seek the Lord. . . . The words of Kimbangu had a powerful and miraculous effect . . . they extended over the whole country . . . . Faith in idols crumbled as by a spell.’⁴⁷ As Kimbangu’s fame spread, huge crowds flocked to his village. Many deserted gruelling jobs on plantations and railroads; hospital beds emptied (as relatives removed the sick); many children stopped attending mission schools; and attendance at Catholic churches declined. Within two years, hundreds had left the Baptist mission. If the destabilizing effects of the prophetic movement on the social order invited a colonial response, the impact on churches turned grudging cooperation into unveiled opposition. Hostility from local Baptist missionaries bred acrimony and made separation inevitable. White farmers, business owners, and worried church officials pressured the Belgian colonial authorities to take action. The fact that Kimbamgu had prophesied the transfer of power from whites to blacks was seized on as anti-colonial and sufficient grounds for issuing a warrant for his arrest. Kimbangu escaped the first attempt to bring him into custody and went into hiding. But he surrendered to the authorities three months later. On 3 October 1921, in a highly charged political atmosphere, he was tried before a military tribunal on charges of sedition and sentenced to death. King Albert I, the Belgian monarch, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment with 120 lashes. Sent to a prison 2000 km away (in Lubumbashi) Kimbangu was never released and never reunited with his family or followers. He died thirty years later in isolation. His public ministry had lasted for only about five months. In the wake of his sentencing, mass arrests and deportation of his followers were implemented with the full backing of European missionaries. Between 1921 and 1957, about 150,000 Kimbanguists were reportedly banned, imprisoned, deported to different parts of the Congo, or killed.⁴⁸ The movement went underground and threatened to splinter. The main body remained under the leadership of Kimbangu’s wife, Mwila Marie (d. 1959). In the long run, repression helped to consolidate the group’s identity; and deportation of Kimbanguists served to disseminate Kimbanguism to other colonies in Central Africa. The movement spread further still when new converts in other countries were arrested and similarly exiled. It became a multi-ethnic national movement that transcended the colonial territories or denominational structures of European missions. Under Kimbangu’s son, Joseph Diangienda (1918–93) the diverse group of Kimbanguists were finally organized into a single ecclesiastical entity with the name ‘Eglise du Jesus Christ par le prophète ⁴⁷ Quoted in Owango, ‘The Impact of the Kimbanguist Church in Central Africa’, p. 131. ⁴⁸ Anderson, African Reformation: African Initiated Christianity in the 20th Century, p. 127.

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Kimbangu’ (EJSCK)—‘The Church of Jesus Christ on Earth’. After years of appeal, the official ban on the Kimbangu Church was lifted by the Belgian authorities in December 1959, six months before Congo gained independence. But, even after four decades of repression, the stigma of ‘dissent’ remained (at least to European missionaries). In the early 1960s, Kimbanguist children were evicted from mission schools and patients who were known to be Kimbanguists were refused admission to the missionary hospitals.⁴⁹ In the end, foreign missionary antagonism only served to fortify a movement that had become a symbol of Congolese nationalism. The Kimbangu Church built its own hospitals, dispensaries, medical clinics, schools, and a seminary.⁵⁰ International recognition followed; marked by the church’s admission, in 1969, to the World Council of Churches. In April 1971, 350,000 Kimbanguists held a Communion service in N’Kanda, Kimbangu’s home town. By 1996, there were an estimated seven million Kimbanguists, making it one of the largest African dissenting movements to emerge in the colonial era.

Dissent and African Nationalism: Some Complications It must be stressed, however, that the rise of Kimbanguism does not tell the full story of the nationalist dimensions of African dissenting movements. With few exceptions, African dissenting movements triggered a violent response from the colonial state, invariably with full-throated European missionary approval. Yet, the interplay between religious reform, cultural resistance, and political aspirations was complicated. Dissent could be either source or manifestation of deep seated divisions within the church; political ambitions could be detrimental to religious renewal or clash with reformation efforts; and revivalist fervour sometimes transcended the locally bound nature of political nationalism. In at least one instance, inchoate dissent was hijacked by nationalist zeal. In Nyasaland (now Malawi), John Chilembwe (c.1860–1915), an ordained Baptist minister and a fervent advocate of African selfhood, established an independent Christian project comprising churches, evangelistic activities, and vocational schools which he superintended as pastor and teacher.⁵¹ ⁴⁹ Owango, ‘The Impact of the Kimbanguist Church in Central Africa’, p. 133. ⁵⁰ Agricultural settlements, brickyards, and many other successful enterprises were established. By 1968 there were 93,600 children in Kimbanguist schools. ⁵¹ See George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969). Financial support for his Providence Industrial Mission was provided by the National Baptist Foreign Mission Board in the United States. But this was an African led initiative with an emphasis on Africa empowerment (the vocational schools were based on Booker T. Washington’s ideas of practical training). The overarching objective was to equip

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Angered by grievous exploitation of blacks by whites—the recruitment of Africans to fight in the First World War infuriated him—Chilembwe led some 200 followers in an uprising against white settlers in 1915. The rebellion was crushed, much of his mission was destroyed, and Chilembwe lost his life. Today, he is celebrated as a Malawi national hero. But his political legacy arguably came at the expense of his religious impact. However deep the anguish and despair caused by oppressive white rule, his ill-fated revolt sabotaged the prospects for religious renewal in the short term. In other situations, African Christian dissent collided with African political movements. In the 1950s, Alice Mulenga Lenshina (1920–78) a Bemba woman in the Presbyterian mission in Northern Zambia, began to pray for the sick in her home village of Kasama. So began the ‘Lumpa Church’, a separatist millennial renewal movement that became the largest church in north-eastern Zambia by 1959, with perhaps over 100,000 members (most of whom had left Presbyterian and Catholic missions).⁵² Followers were organized into separate self-sustaining communities that shunned the outside world. The church rejected all secular authority—thus never registered—and members were prohibited from appearing in secular courts or paying taxes. This approach put the movement at loggerheads with political structures, which included the colonial government (in its closing years), traditional rulers, and political nationalist movements. The main nationalist party (headed by Kenneth Kaunda) was maddened by the withdrawal of such a sizeable group from political participation. Simmering antagonism between the two sides escalated into violent conflict after Zambia gained independence in 1964. Lumpa settlements were demolished, thousands of its members were killed or imprisoned, and the church was banned. Lenshina died while under house arrest in 1978, and the movement barely survived⁵³ In this case, the ideals of African religious reform clashed irrevocably with the objectives of African political nationalism. Interestingly, at least one African-led mass movement within the church rejected the ‘dissenting’ impulse, even though the same movement was viewed by colonial authorities as potentially subversive. In the early 1930s the phenomenon that became known as The East African (Balokole) Revival began in

Africans for economic self-sufficiency and self-rule. By 1912 there were 900 students enrolled in five schools. Ibid., p. 166. ⁵² Lenshina criticized both the Presbyterian and Catholic missions for failing to follow Christian principles though she retained some Calvinistic tenets. Her teachings rejected many traditional practices, condemned witchcraft, and discredited the sacrament of Holy Communion (which was seen as an ancestral rite). For more, see, Anderson, African Reformation: African Initiated Christianity in the 20th Century, pp. 136–9; Norbert C. Brockman, ‘Alice Mulenga Lenshina’, Dictionary of African Christian Biography (Center for Global Christianity and Mission). ⁵³ It was revived by Lenshina’s daughter Jennifer Bwalya Bubile and renamed the New Jerusalem Church.

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Anglican missions in the frontier region of northern Rwanda and southern Uganda.⁵⁴ The revival was marked by intense conversion experiences, public confession of sin, and forceful evangelism. The Balokole (‘saved ones’), as the revivalists were called, generated a transregional, multilingual, cosmopolitan African evangelical movement that spread to Kenya, Sudan, Congo, Tanzania, and beyond. Though colonial authorities looked askance on the movement, it was by no means anti-colonial. Also, though partly stimulated by Keswick Holiness teaching and influenced by John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (the definitive nonconformist text), and though its insistence on racial equality and production of prominent African leaders befitted the growing African nationalism,⁵⁵ it was not a ‘dissenting’ movement. In truth, the revivalists denounced facets of Anglicanism and their actions threatened briefly to divide the church. But they remained avowedly Anglican and staunchly opposed to secession.⁵⁶ In one final instance, political activism preceded and laid the ground work for the emergence of an independent African movement. In 1910, about the same time that Garrick Braide began his ministry, a similar movement emerged some 1300 miles to the west. William Wadé Harris (c.1860–1929), a member of the Glebo tribe in Liberia, a schoolteacher and catechist in the Episcopal church, was in prison for sedition.⁵⁷ Amidst increasing conflict between indigenous peoples and Americo-Liberian immigrants (mainly American whites), Harris’ opposition to foreign domination had led to his ⁵⁴ For details, see Kevin Ward, ‘ “Tukutendereza Yesu”: The Balokole Revival in Uganda,’ Dictionary of African Christian Biography (Center for Global Christianity and Mission); Derek R. Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c.1935 to 1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Derek R. Peterson, ‘Revivalism and Dissent in Colonial East Africa’, in The East African Revival: Histories and Legacies, ed. Kevin Ward and Emma Wild-Wood (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 105–18; James W. Katarikawe, ‘The East African Revival Movement’ (M. Miss., Fuller Theological Seminary, 1975). ⁵⁵ It was in the socio-political arena that the actions of the Balokole caused the most disruption. Their disdain for traditional customs and rejection of familial obligations antagonized the wider society; while their transnational networks transcended the territorially or locally defined patriotism of the African political movements. This is the main thesis of Derek Peterson’s recent book Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c.1935 to 1972 (Cambridge, 2012). That said, in the post-independent era, prominent Balokole such as Ugandan Bishop Festo Kivengere (1919–88) stood up against political oppression. ⁵⁶ In fact, in some areas like Western Uganda, the revivalists came to dominate Anglicanism and the majority of the clergy (including Archbishops and bishops) identified with the Balokole tradition. Complicating the issue further, sectarian movements like the ‘Christian Church in Africa’, which broke away from the Anglican Church (in 1957) were triggered by opposition to Balokole dominance of Anglican Christianity. Within a year the CCA claimed some 16,000 members: see Peterson, ‘Revivalism and Dissent in Colonial East Africa,’, pp. 114–15. ⁵⁷ On Harris, see David A. Shank, ‘William Wadé Harris (ca. 1860–1929): God Made His Soul a Soul of Fire’, in Mission Legacies: Biographical Studies of Leaders of the Modern Missionary Movement, ed. Gerald H. Anderson et al. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), pp. 155–65; Gabriel Leonard Allen, ‘William Wadé Harris (c. 1860 to 1929),’ Dictionary of African Christian Biography (Center for Global Christianity and Mission).

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brief suspension as head of his school. Soon thereafter, he befriended Edward Blyden, the leading champion of Ethiopianism (see section ‘Black Christian Movements and Ideologies’ above) and he became persuaded that local tribes would fare better under British rule. He was arrested for treason in 1909 when he replaced a Liberian flag with a Union Jack on a flagpole at Puduke Beach. Sentenced to prison but paroled shortly after, Harris resumed his leadership of the indigenous rebellion against the Liberian government. The insurgence provoked full-scale war in 1910 and Harris was sent back to prison. While in prison, Harris had visionary experiences in which he was commissioned with the following words: ‘Harris . . . God is coming to anoint you, you will be a prophet . . . you are like Daniel.’⁵⁸ On his release from prison, Harris discarded his European clothing, put on a long white robe with black bands crossed over his chest and a white turban on his head, and embarked on an itinerant ministry that lasted from 1913–29. He portrayed himself as a black Elijah, walked barefoot, carried a long bamboo cross, a Bible, and a gourd of water (for baptism). Accompanied by two women missionary assistants, he traversed the length of the Liberian coast before extending his ministry to the Ivory Coast, Gold Coast, and Sierra Leone. He preached repentance, demanded the destruction of all idols or fetishes, rebuked local spiritual authorities, and practiced healing. Whole villages embraced Christianity; and over 100,000 Africans were reportedly baptized in an eighteenmonth period. He was promptly expelled by French colonial authorities in the Ivory Coast and barred from returning; but a community of ‘Harrist Protestants’ emerged there, nonetheless.⁵⁹ Membership in mission churches surged. But efforts by British Methodist missions to impose discipline and control on Harris converts led to the establishment of independent Harrist Churches that still exist today in the Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Ghana.

IN DIGENOUS RELIGION AND V ERN ACULAR TRANSLATION In terms of religious life, most Africans experienced the European missionary movement as a powerful effort intent on the complete overthrow of indigenous beliefs and practices. Well into the twentieth century, European views of ⁵⁸ Ayegboyin and Ishola, African Indigenous Churches: An Historical Perspective, p. 51. ⁵⁹ Shank, ‘William Wadé Harris (ca. 1860–1929): God Made His Soul a Soul of Fire’, pp. 156, 160. Mass conversions after he arrived in 1914 led to his arrest and expulsion by fearful French authorities; who perceived his ministry as a threat to the ‘centralized administration of the Catholic Church’. Moreover, in the run up to the First World War, there were concerns that his mass campaign was a Protestant ploy to overrun French territory.

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indigenous culture remained decidedly negative and the notion that animistic societies were bereft of religious content persisted. The proclamation at the Edinburgh 1910 meeting that Africa promised an abundant harvest for missionary labour was predicated on the conviction that ‘here, as in no other continent, there was a mass of dark, illiterate, dissevered, and degraded paganism to be enlightened and uplifted into the Church of Christ’.⁶⁰ There was also unanimous opinion that ‘animistic heathenism is essentially weak through intellectual and moral bankruptcy, and . . . it inevitably goes down before the sustained attack of Christian missionary effort [italics added]’.⁶¹ Indigenous culture, then, was viewed as wholly incompatible with Christianity in European garb. Few European agents challenged this deeply ethnocentric understanding. Much later, John V. Taylor (1914–2001), a Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary in Uganda (later CMS Secretary and Bishop) drew attention to the acute tensions between the European and African worldviews and explained that faithful interaction between the Christian message and the African religious universe was indispensable for a full-fledged African Christianity.⁶² But such insight was rare among European missionaries. Commitment to the wholesale transplantation of European Christian institutions, traditions, and models typically corresponded with undiscriminating rejection of African customs and traditions. Where the foreign missionary project succeeded, the church often emerged as an exotic appendage to the religious landscape, removed from daily dilemmas, and disengaged from the traditional religious arsenal. Thus, while Europeanized Christianity brought many gains—including new religious truths, pathways to social advancement, and connectedness to a global religious community among them—it left critical aspects of the African religious universe unaccounted for. The wholesale supplanting of indigenous culture by a European religious system never transpired. Not even close! European missionary clout and resources were often crucial in paving the way for expansion into new areas. But even though it produced Europeanized structures and forms, the European missionary encounter with African societies was never wholly one-directional. The African religious environment and imagination impacted receptivity and outcomes. As noted above, the persistent view that African Christianity is raised on foreign stock ignores the dynamics of religious change and the critical ways in which the pre-existing religious heritage shaped African engagement

⁶⁰ World Missionary Conference, 1910: Report of Commission 1—Carrying the Gospel to All the Non-Christian World, p. 242. ⁶¹ World Missionary Conference, 1910: Report of Commission 4—the Missionary Message in Relation to Non-Christian Religions, p. 36. ⁶² See John V. Taylor, The Primal Vision: Christian Presence Amid African Religion (London: SCM Press, 1963).

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with the Christian faith.⁶³ Indeed, recent scholarship queries the popular tendency to view the arrival of foreign agents as the starting point of the church.⁶⁴ The African heritage and resources require as much attention as the advent of the foreign missionary. Within the African experience, the enduring potency of indigenous elements and the unexpected fruits of indigenous appropriation are directly connected to the story of dissent. The prophet-healing movements that emerged in the opening decades of the twentieth century were not simply expressions of religious protest. They were also powerful movements of religious reform and innovation that harnessed indigenous resources in the transmission of the Christian faith. In these ministries, the Christian encounter was marked by meaningful dialogue between the new and the old—not the vanquishing of one by the other—in a way that allowed Christianity to take full root in the African world. Deriving their authority from Scripture for the most part, the leaders of these movements demonstrated that African agents could be empowered to do God’s work outside European missionary structures and tutelage. In a word, the determination to apply African readings of Scripture to African realities, and on African terms, provided major catalyst for the emergence of dissenting movements.

Vernacular Translation: In a Word . . . . European hostility to indigenous culture arguably impeded African appropriation of the Christian faith on a large scale.⁶⁵ But it is one of the great ironies of the European missionary encounter with African societies that the same agents who rejected indigenous culture provided the means for revitalizing it and augmenting its value. European missionary efforts in the production of Scripture in African languages surpassed that of any other region. Writes David Barrett: For the first time in history a mass movement of pagans into the church out of strong traditional societies has been accompanied by, paradoxically, both a largescale missionary assault on pagan society and also a full-scale drive to provide those same societies with the means for later repudiating that assault—namely the

⁶³ As Lamin Sanneh has pointed out, the same verdict is seldom applied to Islam; the implication being that the spread of Islam in Africa was due to ‘its intrinsic merit’, free from external imposition: Sanneh, Piety and Power: Muslims and Christians in West Africa, p. 75. ⁶⁴ Ogbu Kalu, ‘Introduction: The Shape and Flow of African Christian Historiography’, in African Christianity: An African Story, ed. Ogbu Kalu (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007), p. 12. ⁶⁵ Mass conversions either involved leading African agents and or took place in situations of widespread dislocation or social disruption.

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whole vast range of vernacular scriptures which served the rank and file of those societies as an independent standard of reference against the missions.⁶⁶

In the mid twentieth century, there were few societies on the continent ‘without at least one set of missionaries living in their midst, learning the local language, reducing it to writing, standardizing the dialects, producing translations of the scriptures and educational and catechetical materials for the schools’.⁶⁷ By 1966, translations into African languages accounted for onethird of all translations worldwide (up from six per cent in 1800).⁶⁸ Whether or not it reinforced tribal division, widespread circulation of vernacular literature in African communities ‘nourished both ethnic consciousness and Christian devotion’.⁶⁹ It inspired dissent because it validated the plausibility of African worldviews and subverted European missionary authority and approaches. Vernacular translation of the Bible allowed direct interaction between indigenous understanding and the biblical message in a way that bypassed or undermined foreign missionary transmission of the Christian message sheathed in European culture and enlightenment assumptions. Ordinary believers discovered that the bible ‘seemed to lend much more support to traditional African customs than to the imported cultural customs of the European missionaries’.⁷⁰ Among other things, the recognition and use of the indigenous name for God to represent the God of the Bible not only revealed the Christian God as active in a peoples’ past but also shifted the terms of comprehension and application to the minds and world of indigenous believers.⁷¹ As Lamin Sanneh observes, ‘Christian expansion [in Africa] was virtually limited to those societies whose people had preserved the indigenous name for God’; and ‘Africans responded to Christianity where the indigenous religions were strongest, not weakest’.⁷² ⁶⁶ David B. Barrett, Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary Religious Movements (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 191. ⁶⁷ Roland A. Oliver, The African Experience (London: Pimlico, 1994), p. 207. ⁶⁸ Barrett, Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary Religious Movements, p. 191. ⁶⁹ Brian Stanley, ‘Twentieth Century Christianity: A Perspective from the History of Missions’, in Christianity Reborn: The Global Expansion of Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald M. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2004), p. 64. ⁷⁰ Anderson, ‘A “Failure in Love”? Western Missions and the Emergence of African Initiated Churches in the Twentieth Century’, p. 281; see also, Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 47. ⁷¹ See Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of the Faith, p. 75; Lamin O. Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (New York: Orbis Books, 2009), p. 36. ⁷² Lamin O. Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans Publishers, 2003), pp. 18, 31f. For more on this, see Andrew F. Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), pp. 116–35; Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of the Faith, pp. 79–101; Kwame

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The dominance of European concepts and models in theological discourse and training, though increasingly contested, remained largely intact. But it is difficult to overestimate the role of vernacular translation in fomenting innovation and independency within African Christianity.⁷³ Apprehended through an African worldview, the ‘good news’ of salvation was no longer simply a matter of creedal affirmation and acceptance of foreign customs. The message of redemption from sin retained its unique power; but the insistence that the believer received spiritual power to overcome hostile forces in the traditional religious world gave it greater potency. Such proclamation of the gospel took African spiritual values seriously and exposed the limitations of a ‘rationalistic, Western form of Christianity’ that was antagonistic to African religiosity.⁷⁴ The message of healing from sickness, protection from evil, and deliverance from oppression accounted for African realities and expressed faith in Christ as an African experience.⁷⁵ By so doing, it wrested African Christianity from captivity to hegemonic Western control. The AIC (African independent/instituted church) phenomenon, ‘a massive, organic and indigenous social movement affecting over one-third of the 742 tribes south of the Sahara’,⁷⁶ heralded and propelled this transformation. If we view the Braide and Harris movements as precursors, the emergence of AICs as a continental phenomenon dates to the second and third decades of the twentieth century, in the wake of a worldwide flu epidemic that compounded the massive social upheaval associated with colonialism. Typically led by baptized Christians (male and female), these independent movements circumvented European missionary control and denominational structures and sought to root Christianity more fully in the African religious world (see Chapter 3). Labelled Zionists or Apostolic in southern Africa, Aladura in western Africa, and Abaroho in eastern Africa, they made demonstrations of spiritual power a central feature of African Christianity, often imposed more

Bediako, Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (New York: Orbis Books, 1995); Kwame Bediako, ‘Understanding African Theology in the 20th Century,’ in Issues in African Christian Theology, ed. Samuel Ngewa, Mark Shaw, and Tite Tienou (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1998). ⁷³ Based on a study of 742 tribes, David Barrett concluded that in societies where the New Testament was available in the vernacular there was a 67 per cent chance of ‘independency’; if the whole Bible was translated the probability of the emergence of an African renewal movement rose to 81 per cent: Barrett, Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary Religious Movements, p. 131. ⁷⁴ Anderson, ‘A “Failure in Love”? Western Missions and the Emergence of African Initiated Churches in the Twentieth Century’, p. 283. ⁷⁵ For more in-depth exploration of this issue, see Bediako, Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion, pp. 59–74; also Anderson, ‘A “Failure in Love”? Western Missions and the Emergence of African Initiated Churches in the Twentieth Century’, pp. 282–3. ⁷⁶ Barrett, Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary Religious Movements, p. 191.

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restrictive practices on believers (based on readings of Scripture), and took traditional religious life seriously. Female leadership and participation also took on a notable prominence. There were charlatans aplenty; and many initiatives fizzled as quickly as they sprouted. But there is no denying the uniqueness and extraordinary appeal of the AIC phenomenon, the reform-mindedness of many of its leaders, and its central role in the remarkable growth of Christianity in twentieth-century Africa. These churches spread rapidly and extensively and attracted millions of converts. Yet, assessing these multifarious movements solely in terms of their institutional or numerical growth can obscure their fluidity and reach. AICs were not self-contained systems with carefully regulated processes of affiliation. Countless numbers of African Christians participated in AIC ministries (to address spiritual need) without relinquishing membership in the older, ‘more respectable’, mainline denominations (which conferred social standing). Also, liturgical practices and many hymns or spiritual songs, and even trained clergy, made the transition from one domain to the other. The capacity of African Christians to find congruence in apparently incompatible sources of spiritual life or religious practice is integral to the story. By the 1980s, according to one estimate, AIC adherents numbered about 29 million or 12 per cent of the total African Christian population.⁷⁷ This means that the movements continued to expand long after European missionary or colonial influences had ceased to be a major factor in African Christianity. Indeed, some AICs had expanded internationally by the end of the century.⁷⁸ Still, by the 1980s, the AIC movement had lost momentum and was increasingly eclipsed by the more modernized and middle-class oriented African Pentecostal movements (see Chapter 2). The latter emerged in the 1970s in Africa’s turbulent post-colonial era, spawned by an outbreak of revival among university students in Nigeria, many of whom were involved in British-based evangelical organizations like the Scripture Union and International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. Despite this global element, the movement derived impetus from local dilemmas and indigenous spirituality; evident in a strong emphasis on healing and deliverance. From the 1970s, graduates from Nigeria’s universities established independent Charismatic (parachurch) organizations that expanded to more than 5000 independent groups and churches by 2000.⁷⁹

⁷⁷ Anderson, African Reformation: African Initiated Christianity in the 20th Century, p. 7. ⁷⁸ The Aladura-type Celestial Church of Christ (founded in 1947), for instance, claimed about 4000 parishes worldwide by 1996: Afeosemime U. Adogame, Celestial Church of Christ: The Politics of Cultural Identity in a West African Prophetic-Charismatic Movement (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 32–3. ⁷⁹ Cf. Hutchinson and Wolffe, A Short History of Global Evangelicalism, p. 201.

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How the much AICs and new African Pentecostal churches relate to each other is a complex question that revolves around elements of continuity and discontinuity. Some ‘new’ Pentecostal movements (like Nigeria’s Redeemed Christian Church of God) started life as AICs, while others like the Celestial Church of Christ (of the Aladura movement) successfully straddle both worlds.⁸⁰ Yet, there are sharp differences between the two movements in adaptations of the African cultural heritage and approaches to the African spiritual world. AICs emerged as distinctive alternatives to Europeanized forms of Christianity and incorporated African traditions to a great extent. But the newer movements emerged in connection with European evangelical initiatives like Scripture Union and tend to be more critical of the African religious heritage. AICs were mass movements that attracted adherents mainly from lower socio-economic groups; whereas the new Pentecostal movements emphasize modernity and conspicuously attract middle-class professionals or upwardly mobile groups. They are also more likely to establish global ministries with a strong missionary orientation. All the same, the overlap and strong family resemblance between the two movements is undeniable. The new African Pentecostal ministries and churches are beneficiaries of the radical transformations in African Christianity effected by the AIC phenomenon on the African religious landscape. Both embody the African worldview and epitomize the fundamental African affinity for the charismatic dimensions of the faith. Both share a prominent emphasis on healing and deliverance ministries and a fervent commitment to evangelistic outreach. Most important for our analysis, both emerged outside the domain of mainline denominations and their tremendous appeal exposes the limitations of inherited European Christian forms that fail to take full account of the African religious world.⁸¹ In 2000, according to the World Christian Encyclopedia (2001) there were 83 million ‘independents’ and 126 million ‘Pentecostals/Charismatic’ believers in Africa who together accounted for 20 per cent of all African Christians.⁸² These figures reveal that the vast majority of African Christians maintain adherence to mainline denominations. Again, statistical data provide limited insights into the complexities of religious transformation. The various streams of African Christianity are not disconnected flows. They draw nourishment from similar sources and constantly overlap in symbiotic co-existence. The new Pentecostal-Charismatic churches reflect the pan-African vision and ⁸⁰ For this reason, Afe Adogame describes it as a ‘Prophetic-Charismatic movement’: Adogame, Celestial Church of Christ: The Politics of Cultural Identity in a West African Prophetic-Charismatic Movement. ⁸¹ See Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, ‘ “Born of Water and the Spirit”: Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity in Africa’, in African Christianity: An African Story, ed. U. Kalu Ogbu (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007), p. 354. ⁸² Anderson, African Reformation: African Initiated Christianity in the 20th Century.

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nonconformist paradigm evident in earlier Ethiopian and AIC movements;⁸³ AICs were often founded or led by men and women educated in mission schools and/or trained in European structures; and mainline denominations (the main descendants of foreign missionary initiatives) have been impacted to a considerable extent by the new Pentecostal movements in worship and spiritual practice. More recently, also, some leaders of some new Pentecostal ministries have appropriated the ecclesiastical nomenclature (bishop and archbishop, in particular) and garb of Anglicans and Methodists. Ultimately, the leavening effects of the dissenting tradition, whether mediated through global movements or grounded in indigenous responses, provide a common thread and help to explain why the growth of Christianity in Africa in the twentieth century surpassed that of any other region.

S E L E C T B I BL IO G R A P H Y Anderson, Allan. African Reformation: African Initiated Christianity in the 20th Century (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001). Ayandele, E. A. The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria 1842–1914: A Political and Social Analysis (London: Longmans, 1966). Ayandele, E. A. Holy Johnson, Pioneer of African Nationalism, 1836–1917 (London: Frank Cass, 1970). Ayegboyin, Deji, and S. Ademola Ishola. African Indigenous Churches: An Historical Perspective, ed. Ayegboyin Deji and S. Ademola Ishola (Lagos, Nigeria: Greater Heights Publications, 1997). Barrett, David B. Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary Religious Movements (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1968). Bediako, Kwame. Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (New York: Orbis Books, 1995). Chirenje, J. Mutero. Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883–1916 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). Frenkel, M. Yu. Edward Blyden and African Nationalism (Moscow: African Institute of Academy of Sciences, 1978). Gray, Richard. Black Christians and White Missionaries, ed. Richard Gray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Hanciles, Jehu J. ‘The Legacy of James Johnson.’ International Bulletin of Missionary Research XXI, 4 (Oct., 1997): 162–4, 66–7. Hanciles, Jehu. Euthanasia of a Mission: African Church Autonomy in a Colonial Context (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002).

⁸³ See Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 244–5.

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Hanciles, Jehu J. ‘Back to Africa: White Abolitionists and Black Missionaries.’ In U. Kalu Ogbu, ed., African Christianity: An African Story, 167–88 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007). Hanciles, Jehu J. ‘The Black Atlantic and the Shaping of African Christianity, 1820–1920.’ In Klaus Koschorke and Adrian Hermann, eds, Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity, 29–50 (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2014). Hutchinson, Mark, and John Wolffe. A Short History of Global Evangelicalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Jacobs, Sylvia M. ‘The Historical Role of Afro-Americans in American Missionary Efforts in Africa.’ In Sylvia M. Jacobs, ed., Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, 5–30 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982). Kalu, Ogbu. ‘Introduction: The Shape and Flow of African Christian Historiography.’ In Ogbu Kalu, ed., African Christianity: An African Story, 3–22 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007). Kalu, Ogbu. African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Mackay, D. J. ‘Simon Kimbangu and the B. M. S. Tradition.’ Journal of Religion in Africa XVII, 2 (June, 1987): 113–71. Oliver, Roland A. The African Experience (London: Pimlico, 1994). Owango, Welo. ‘The Impact of the Kimbanguist Church in Central Africa.’ The Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center XVI, 1–2, 1988): 115–36. Peterson, Derek R. Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c.1935 to 1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Sanneh, Lamin. West African Christianity: The Religious Impact (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983). Sanneh, Lamin. Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Sanneh, Lamin. Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans Publishers, 2003). Sanneh, Lamin. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (New York: Orbis Books, 2009). Shank, David A. ‘William Wadé Harris (ca. 1860–1929): God Made His Soul a Soul of Fire.’ In Gerald H. Anderson, Robert T. Coote, Norman A. Horner and James M. Phillips, eds, Mission Legacies: Biographical Studies of Leaders of the Modern Missionary Movement, 155–6, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994). Shepperson, George, and Thomas Price. Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969). Stanley, Brian. The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, UK: Apollos, 1990). Sundkler, Bengt G. M. Bantu Prophets in South Africa. 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). Tasie, G. O. M. Christian Missionary Enterprise in the Niger Delta 1864–1918 (Leiden: Brill, 1978).

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Taylor, John V. The Primal Vision: Christian Presence Amid African Religion (London: SCM Press, 1963). Walls, Andrew F. The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of the Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996). Walls, Andrew F. The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002).

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2 Charismatic Churches and the Pentecostalization of African Christianity Allan Heaton Anderson

DISSENT IN THE PENTECOSTALIZATION OF AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY African Christianity comes in many bewildering shapes and sizes, but is arguably the most vibrant form of Christianity in our contemporary world. This is probably because of its ‘Pentecostalization’, the process by which other, older forms have become ‘pentecostal’ in order to keep up with this new, burgeoning form of Charismatic Christianity. Most forms of Pentecostalism in Africa have emerged from dissenting traditions, and in particular, evangelical ones. However, the entrance and pervading influence of many different kinds of new churches and ‘ministries’ on the African Christian scene now makes it even more difficult, if not impossible, to put African Pentecostalism into types and categories.¹ It is becoming increasingly difficult to define ‘pentecostal’ precisely, and when scholars persist with narrow perceptions of the term, they escape from reality. A limited, rather stereotyped and dogmatic understanding of ‘pentecostal’ in the Western world fails to recognize the great variety of different pentecostal movements globally, many of which arose quite independently of western forms of Pentecostalism. This focus on independence and separation from colonial-era missions is a prominent feature of the pentecostal dissenting tradition. There are many ways of defining Pentecostalism, but for me the simplest definition is the best one, avoiding all the countless exceptions that are made to narrowing the term. Both Pentecostalism and the Charismatic movements are best understood as movements concerned primarily with the experience of ¹ In this article, the nouns ‘Pentecostal’ and ‘Pentecostalism’ are capitalized, but the adjective ‘pentecostal’ is not. ‘Charismatic’ is capitalized to distinguish it from the more general use of ‘charismatic’ (gifted).

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Charismatic Churches and the Pentecostalization of African Christianity 53 the working of the Holy Spirit and the practice of spiritual gifts. In this article, ‘Charismatic’ and ‘pentecostal’ will sometimes be used interchangeably, because it is not always possible to make distinctions.² In this sense, in Africa the terms would include, surprisingly to some, the majority of older African Initiated Churches (AICs),³ those ‘classical’ pentecostals originating in Western pentecostal missions, and those newer independent churches, ‘fellowships’, and ‘ministries’ in Africa which are the focus of this article. It is in this sense that we refer to these various movements as ‘Charismatic Churches’ (CCs) and of course, the term ‘Charismatic’ would also apply to a great number of other, older churches which emphasize the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts in church, or if you like, those that have been ‘Pentecostalized’. The ‘classical’ or ‘denominational’ Pentecostals (like the Assemblies of God and the Church of God) are also a very active and growing phenomenon throughout Africa, and undoubtedly played a significant role in the emergence of some of the newer groups. But as these were founded by missionaries mostly from Britain and North America—although with more African involvement in leadership and financial independence than was the case in most of the older missionary founded churches—these ‘classical’ Pentecostals cannot be regarded primarily as African initiated movements, even though most of their proliferation was due to the untiring efforts of African preachers. It is a moot point today whether there are any churches in Africa that cannot be described as ‘African initiated’, but of course in the light of history, diachronic links will lead back to European missionaries from the colonial era in most of the older Protestant and Catholic cases. Pentecostal churches of Western, mostly North American origins have operated in Africa since almost the beginning of the twentieth century. Most of these churches trace their historical origins to the impetus generated by the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, which sent out missionaries to fifty nations within two years.⁴ Within ten years pentecostal missionaries had reached almost every country in the world. These missionaries were characterized by a fierce independence and dissent with prevailing, older forms of Christianity, and these attitudes affected their African converts.⁵ The connections between this ‘classical’ pentecostal movement and AICs throughout

² Allan H. Anderson, ‘Varieties, Taxonomies, and Definitions’, in Allan Anderson et al., eds, Studying Global Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods (Berkeley, CA, 2010), pp. 13–29. ³ The terms ‘African Independent Church’ and ‘African Indigenous Church’ have been substituted more recently with ‘African Initiated Church’ or ‘African Initiated Church’, all using the now familiar acronym ‘AIC’. ⁴ Walter J. Hollenweger, The Pentecostals (London, 1972), pp. 22–4; Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, MI, 1997 edn), pp. 84–106. ⁵ Allan H. Anderson, Spreading Fires: The Missionary Nature of Early Pentecostalism (Maryknoll, NY; London, 2007), p. 288.

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Africa have been amply demonstrated in several studies, including my own.⁶ Some classical pentecostal churches have become vibrant and rapidly expanding African churches throughout the continent, in particular the Assemblies of God, which operates in most countries of the sub-Sahara. Generally speaking, the AICs of the ‘Spirit’ type (the so-called ‘spiritual churches’) emerged in Africa before the classical pentecostal churches did, and any connections between these two groups are tenuous. Throughout the history of AICs, however, there has been a predominance of pentecostal features and phenomena. Harvey Cox is at least partly correct to refer to the Apostolic/Zionist, Lumpa, and Kimbanguist churches as ‘the African expression of the worldwide Pentecostal movement’, but these churches do not usually define themselves in this way. Not enough attention has been given to the resonance, although Paul Gifford is right to question whether the older AICs can be regarded as paradigmatic of the pentecostal movement in Africa.⁷ The CCs are, like the older AICs before them, an African phenomenon, churches which for the most part have been instituted by Africans for Africans and exhibit dissent with other forms of Christianity. In fact, they may be regarded as ‘modern versions’ of older AICs, although they differ from the classical AICs in that they don’t try as much to offer solutions for traditional problems. Yet they do address the problems faced by AICs, but offer a radical reorientation to a modern and industrial, global society. Kwabena AsamoahGyadu makes the interesting point that one of the basic differences between the older AICs and the CCs lies in the fact that in the spiritual churches, ‘members are the clients of the prophets who may be the custodians of powers to overcome the ills of life’. In the CCs, however, he says that ‘each believer is empowered through the baptism of the Holy Spirit to overcome them’.⁸ This strong emphasis on the authority of the believer places these churches firmly within historic dissenting traditions. It may be argued that in the spiritual churches too, provision is made for any person to become a prophet and therefore to be a custodian of spiritual power, and that the difference might not be as great as imagined. Dissent is often limited however, as some of the new churches move in the direction of single, dominant leaders who are ⁶ Allan H. Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge, 2014 edn), pp. 112–35; Allan H. Anderson and Gerald J. Pillay, ‘The Segregated Spirit: The Pentecostals’, in Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport, eds, Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social and Cultural History (London, 1997), pp. 228–9; Allan H. Anderson, ‘Dangerous Memories for South African Pentecostals’, in Allan Anderson and Walter Hollenweger, eds, Pentecostals after a Century: Global Perspectives on a Movement in Transition (Sheffield, UK, 1999), pp. 88–92. ⁷ Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (London, 1996), p. 246; Paul Gifford, African Christianity: Its Public Role (London, 1998), p. 33. ⁸ J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, ‘The Church in the African State: The Pentecostal/Charismatic Experience in Ghana’, Journal of African Christian Thought I, 2 (1998), p. 56.

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Charismatic Churches and the Pentecostalization of African Christianity 55 custodians of power. The difference is disappearing with the passing of time. Methods employed by the new churches to propagate their faith are very similar to those used by other Pentecostals, but a particular feature of many of these churches in Africa is an emphasis on deliverance from a whole host of demonic forces, most of which are identified with traditional deities and ‘ancestral curses’, also known as ‘generational curses’. Access to modern communications has resulted in the popularization of independent pentecostal ‘televangelists’ from the West, several of whom make regular visits to Africa and broadcast their own television programmes there. The strategies employed by these churches are subject to criticism and leave many ethical questions, but have promoted a form of Christianity that has appealed especially to urban African youth.⁹ Most observers of African Christianity today will agree that not only has it exploded in numbers, but it has also changed in character. Older denominations have had to keep up with this rapidly growing form of Christianity, which has been changing the character of African Christianity in fundamental ways.¹⁰ The CCs, which have only emerged since 1970, are becoming one of the most significant expressions of Christianity on the continent, especially in Africa’s cities. It is affecting all kinds of Christian churches throughout Africa, and the question can rightly be posed as to whether this is the way most forms of African Christianity are heading. We cannot fully understand African Christianity today without also understanding this movement of revival and renewal. Ogbu Kalu called Pentecostalism the ‘third response’ to white cultural domination and power in the church, the former two responses being Ethiopianism and the Aladura/Zionist prophetic churches.¹¹ This newer movement is not fundamentally different from the Holy Spirit movements and so-called ‘prophet-healing’ and ‘spiritual churches’ that preceded it in the AICs, but it is a continuation of them in a different context. The older ‘prophet-healing’ AICs, the older classical Pentecostals, and the newer CCs all respond to the existential needs of the African context. They all offer a personal encounter with God through the power of the Spirit, healing from sickness and deliverance from evil in all its manifestations, spiritual, social, and structural. In a study of Pentecostals in north-east Zimbabwe, David Maxwell points out that

⁹ J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, African Charismatics: Current Developments within Independent Indigenous Pentecostalism in Ghana (Leiden, 2005), p. 96; Birgit Meyer, ‘‘Make a Complete Break with the Past’: Memory and Post-Colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostalist Discourse’, Journal of Religion in Africa XXVIII, 3 (1998), pp. 323–4; Gifford, African Christianity, pp. 97–109. ¹⁰ David J. Maxwell, ‘Witches, Prophets and Avenging Spirits: The Second Christian Movement in North-East Zimbabwe’, Journal of Religion in Africa XXV, 3 (1995), p. 313; Gifford, African Christianity, p. 31; Allan H. Anderson, To the Ends of the Earth: Pentecostalism and the Transformation of World Christianity (Oxford, 2013), pp. 233–43. ¹¹ Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford, 2008), p. 23.

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many Christian movements in Africa (and, in fact, all over the world) have begun as movements of youth and women. Even the male leaders are not usually trained theologically, and this emphasis on the laity, especially young people and women is a further characteristic of dissent. The new churches give opportunities not afforded them by patriarchal and gerontocratic religions that have lost their charismatic power. As Maxwell points out, even the older pentecostal churches ‘can lose their pentecostal vigour’ through a process of bureaucratization and ‘ageing’.¹² In the 1970s independent Charismatic ‘ministries’ began to emerge all over Africa, but especially in Nigeria and Ghana, where they now permeate every facet of society and are strikingly obvious to every visitor. Many of these vigorous movements were influenced by the Charismatic renewal that started in the 1960s, the Word of Faith movement (known by its detractors as the ‘prosperity gospel’), and by established classical pentecostal churches like the Assemblies of God. Largely independent of foreign churches, many of these new ministries arose in the context of interdenominational evangelical campus and school Christian organizations, from which young charismatic leaders emerged with significant followings. Most notably originating in the Scripture Union and the Christian Union in universities and colleges, these groups later became ‘fellowships’ that grew into full-blown denominations often led by former lecturers and teachers. Although they were not consciously formed as movements of dissent, widespread dissatisfaction with existing forms of Christianity was evident from the start. At first they were termed ‘nondenominational’, but as they expanded they developed denominational structures, ‘episcopized’ prominent leaders who became bishops and archbishops (and often received honorary doctorates from their own organizations), and they became international churches. They initially tended to appeal to a younger, more educated and consequently more globally oriented clientele, including young professionals and middle-class urbanites. In leadership structures, theology, and liturgy, these organizations differ quite markedly from the older churches, including pentecostal ones. Their services are usually emotional and enthusiastic, featuring electronic musical instruments, often (especially in the case of the megachurches) with high quality musical groups leading worship. They publish their own literature, have a prominent media focus, and run their own Bible training centres for preachers (both men and women) to further propagate their message. These are all hallmarks of dissent with existing Christianity. Many of these churches encourage the planting of new, independent congregations, and make use of schoolrooms, cinemas, community halls, and hotel conference rooms for their meetings. Some of the most established ones now have enormous auditoriums and self-contained

¹² Maxwell, ‘Witches’, pp. 316–17.

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Charismatic Churches and the Pentecostalization of African Christianity 57 camp grounds catering for many thousands of members. Church leaders travel across the continent and beyond, and produce glossy booklets and broadcast radio and television programmes. They are often linked to wider international networks of independent Charismatic preachers, which are by no means dominated by North Americans.¹³

THE RI S E AND DE VE L OP ME NT OF N EW C HARISMATIC CHU RC HES The new movement has its own momentum in Africa, where hundreds of preachers propagate a gospel of success in impoverished cities. The promotion of the Word of Faith ‘prosperity’ message in Africa has resulted in the rapid growth of a form of Christianity that has appealed especially to the new urbanized generation of Africans. The CCs throughout Africa often focus on success and prosperity but share an emphasis on the power of the Spirit with older churches, including many AICs. Like classical Pentecostals, they teach a personal conversion experience (being ‘born again’); they advocate long periods of individual and communal prayer, including fasting and prayer retreats, prayer for healing and for individualized problems like unemployment and poverty, deliverance from demons and ‘the occult’ (this term often means traditional beliefs and witchcraft); and they support the use of spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues and prophecy. To a lesser or greater degree, these features characterize all these churches, which are also found throughout the rest of the world. In Africa they are essentially local initiatives, churches instituted by Africans for Africans and almost entirely self-governing, selfpropagating, and self-supporting. They seldom have organizational links with foreign churches or denominations, even when they are part of international networks. They try to address the problems faced by Africans, particularly by offering a radical reorientation toward modern, industrial, global society. This new expression of Pentecostalism echoes the popular method of tent evangelism pioneered by North Americans in the 1940s and 1950s and continued with considerable effect by popular South African evangelists Nicholas Bhengu (1909–85) and Richard Ngidi (1921–85), and later by Nigerian Benson Idahosa (1938–98) and German evangelist Reinhard Bonnke (1940–). Idahosa was the earliest of the new CC leaders and his ministry had an enormous impact on the further development of these churches, especially ¹³ Matthews A. Ojo, The End-Time Army: Charismatic Movements in Modern Nigeria (Trenton, NJ, 2006), pp. 23–31; Richard Burgess, Nigeria’s Christian Revolution: The Civil War Revival and Its Pentecostal Progeny (1967–2006) (Oxford, 2008), pp. 67–109; Kalu, African Pentecostalism, pp. 90–4.

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in West Africa, as is outlined below. Bonnke has had a great impact on these African churches with his Christ for All Nations mass evangelism meetings (given the unfortunate misnomer ‘crusades’). With crowds of hundreds of thousands in daily attendance, Nigeria has seen the most of Bonnke and his American successor Daniel Kolenda, who now runs most of the mass meetings. Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa, has one of the most remarkable Charismatic success stories in the world in recent times. Bonnke is reported to have preached to six million Nigerians in Lagos on his return to the country in 2000 after a ten-year ban by a Muslim-dominated Nigerian government for preaching to over a million people in a Muslim stronghold. Kalu observes that the ‘competing fundamentalisms’ and demonization of Islam by Nigerian Pentecostals has caused great harm and hindered conflict resolution in this troubled country.¹⁴

Major Ministries in Nigeria and Ghana But in southern Nigeria and Ghana, CCs, some of which have international profiles, abound in almost every neighbourhood. Commercial television in West Africa today is now full of programmes by African Pentecostal preachers. One of the first and most influential new churches in Africa was the Church of God Mission International of Benson Idahosa, founded in 1972. The church had its headquarters in Benin City, where a ‘Miracle Center’ seating over 10,000 was erected in 1975. Thousands flocked there every week. Idahosa, who became one of the best-known preachers in Africa, briefly attended the Christ for the Nations Institute in 1971, an independent pentecostal college in Dallas, Texas. His stay there was short-lived, however, and he returned to Nigeria after three months with an increased ‘burden’ for his people. He began the first of many mass evangelistic crusades for which he was well known and worked closely with Bonnke during the latter’s first mass meetings in Nigeria. Idahosa received considerable financial support from well-known independent pentecostal preachers in the United States, including his mentor, Gordon Lindsay, the healing evangelist T. L. Osborne, and soonto-be-jailed televangelist Jim Bakker. Idahosa’s church ran the All Nations for Christ Bible Institute, the most popular and influential Bible school in West Africa at the time, from which hundreds of preachers went out into different parts of the region, often to plant new churches. Idahosa became ‘bishop’ in 1981 and later ‘archbishop’, titles now used by scores of CC leaders, most without theological qualifications. Idahosa had informal ties with other CCs throughout Africa—especially in Ghana, where he held his first campaign in ¹⁴ Kalu, African Pentecostalism, pp. 240–1.

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Charismatic Churches and the Pentecostalization of African Christianity 59 1978. After Idahosa’s death in 1998, his wife Margaret Idahosa (b. 1943), who had shared ministry and leadership with her husband since the church began, took his place as head and bishop (later archbishop) of the Church of God Mission. At the time, the church had 300,000 members.¹⁵ Archbishop Margaret Idahosa leads a congregation in a building with a capacity of five thousand, holds several services weekly, and runs a private university, a group of Christian schools and hospitals, and an influential international ministry to encourage women in Christian leadership. One of the Nigerian movements, Deeper Life Bible Church, with branches all over Africa and on other continents, had over half a million members in Nigeria only ten years after its founding in 1982 and became the leading new Nigerian pentecostal denomination. Unlike many of its contemporaries, this is a church with a strict ‘holiness’ rather than a ‘prosperity’ emphasis in the tradition of most historical dissenting movements. William Folorunso Kumuyi (b. 1941), was formerly education lecturer at the University of Lagos and an Anglican, who became a Pentecostal in the Apostolic Faith Church. In 1973 he began a weekly interdenominational Bible study group, Deeper Christian Life Ministry, that spread to other parts of Nigeria. The Apostolic Faith expelled him in 1975—possibly for preaching without ordination—and Kumuyi began holding retreats at Easter and Christmas, emphasizing healing and miracles and living a holy life. His followers distributed thousands of free tracts, evangelized, and established Bible study groups all over south-western Nigeria. The first Sunday service was held in Lagos in 1982, and the following year Kumuyi sent some of his leading pastors to Yonggi Cho’s former megachurch in Seoul, after which a system of ‘house fellowships’ based on the Korean model was instituted. There were 15,000 such fellowships by the end of 1983. Deeper Life emphasizes personal holiness evidenced by rejection of the ‘world’ and the keeping of a strict ethical code— probably evidence of its strong Apostolic Faith roots. The church prides itself in being a wholly African church totally independent of Western links, and here differs from those churches that regularly promote Western televangelists.¹⁶ The most prominent Nigerian pentecostal church in the twenty-first century is the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) led by Enock A. Adeboye (b. 1942), who is also a former university lecturer with a PhD in mathematics and a respected leader in Nigerian Christianity. The RCCG used to be an ethnic Yoruba church that had seceded from the Aladura movement Cherubim and Seraphim in 1958. When its founder, Josiah O. Akindayomi (1909–80) died Adeboye was his designated successor. Adeboye transformed the small Yoruba denomination into a new, multi-ethnic church that by 2010 ¹⁵ Ruthanne Garlock, Fire in His Bones: The Story of Benson Idahosa (South Plainfield, GA, 1981), p. 117. ¹⁶ Ojo, End-Time Army, pp. 148–58.

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was the largest in Nigeria, with meetings in the headquarters ‘Redemption Camp’ on the Lagos–Ibadan highway, that draw over half a million people every month. The church has spread worldwide wherever Nigerians have migrated to and has established large networks of congregations in North America and Britain. In London, the church has some of the largest congregations in the country, including Jesus House in North London. Another prominent Nigerian denomination called ‘Winner’s Chapel’ was started by David Oyedepo, a trained architect, in 1981, and since 2000 has erected a 50,000-seat auditorium called Faith Tabernacle, one of the largest church buildings in the world, in an impressive complex of modern buildings at the 300-acre ‘Canaan Land’ with a Covenant University and an elite private secondary school. Oyedepo, Presiding Bishop of Living Faith World Outreach Center is thought to be Nigeria’s richest preacher, with over 300 congregations in Nigeria and over 400 pastors in forty African nations in 2011.¹⁷ Other prominent Nigerian examples among many others include the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries founded in 1994 by Daniel Kolawole Olukoya, a medical scientist with a PhD from a British university; the Christ Embassy of Chris Oyakhilome; the Household of God of Chris Okotie, threetime unsuccessful Nigerian presidential candidate; and the controversial Synagogue Church of All Nations of Temitope B. Joshua. Joshua had Zambia’s former President Frederick Chiluba as his special guest in November 2000, is a personal friend of Ghanaian President Atta Mills, and has a special appeal for his healing powers in other parts of Africa. But in Nigeria his practices are regarded with some suspicion. In 1986 the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) was formed, an ecumenical association incorporating all the various ‘born again’ movements and one of the most influential church organizations in Nigeria. In 1995, Adeboye was president of the PFN, considered the most powerful voice in the national Christian Association of Nigeria of which it is a part. There were more than 700 churches registered as members of PFN in 1991 in Lagos State alone. In particular, the PFN sees one of its main tasks as that of uniting Christians against the perceived danger of the ‘Islamization’ of Nigeria.¹⁸ Idahosa’s 1978 campaign in Accra resulted in the subsequent formation of the first independent CCs in Ghana. Bishop Nicholas Duncan-Williams, formerly a member of the Church of Pentecost (a classical pentecostal denomination), is leader of the earliest one, Christian Action Faith Ministries, founded in 1980. Trained at Idahosa’s Bible Institute, Duncan-Williams ¹⁷ Asonzeh Ukah, A New Paradigm of Pentecostal Power: A Study of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in Nigeria (Trenton, NJ, 2008); Ruth Marshall-Fratani, ‘Mediating the Global and the Local in Nigerian Pentecostalism’, Journal of Religion in Africa XXVIII, 3 (1998), p. 298; http://www.davidoyedepoministries.org/domi-network/lfcww; I visited these churches in southwestern Nigeria in May 2001. ¹⁸ Burgess, Nigeria’s Christian Revolution, pp. 272–3, 278.

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Charismatic Churches and the Pentecostalization of African Christianity 61 headed an association called the Council of Charismatic Ministers. Fraternization between the CCs in Ghana and the Rawlings government led to a new church– state alliance, particularly as Duncan-Williams became virtually national chaplain to the regime. The largest Ghanaian Charismatic church is the International Central Gospel Church founded in 1984 by former Anglican Mensa Otabil, probably the Ghanaian Charismatic leader who is best-known outside Ghana. Otabil also heads an umbrella organization called Charismatic Ministries Network and in 2000 opened a Christian university, Central University College. Otabil became well-known for his brand of black consciousness and preaching that takes him to different parts of Africa. Other leading churches in Ghana include one that took a stand against the Rawlings government, the Lighthouse Chapel International of Bishop Dag Heward-Mills (a former medical doctor), the Holy Fire Ministries of Bishop Ofori Twumasi, the Royal House Chapel (formerly International Bible Worship Centre) of Sam Korankye-Ankrah, Victory Bible Church of Nii Tackie-Yarboi, and Fountain Gate Chapel (formerly Broken Yoke Foundation) of Eastwood Anaba. The latter is an organization active in the remote and largely rural northeast region of Ghana. The CCs in Ghana also make extensive use of home groups to effectively manage pastoral care.¹⁹ These churches have spread to several other West African countries, including Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire. Bethel World Outreach, founded in 1986 in Monrovia, is another example of the ‘prosperity’ type of church popular in African cities, and in Abidjan a large church organization led by Dion Robert, Église Protestante Baptiste Oeuvres et Mission Internationales, claimed over 70,000 members in 1995, and is based on a well-structured home group system. In May 2011 the church was attacked by the new Côte d’Ivoire government because of its perceived support of the defeated Gbagbo regime.²⁰

The East African Experience During the 1980s, rapidly growing new Charismatic groups began to emerge in East Africa, where they were sometimes seen as a threat by older churches ¹⁹ Mensa Otabil, Beyond the Rivers of Ethiopia: A Biblical Revelation on God’s Purpose for the Black Race (Accra, 1992); Asamoah-Gyadu, African Charismatics, pp. 112–28, 153; Gerrie ter Haar, ‘Standing up for Jesus: A Survey of New Developments in Christianity in Ghana’, Exchange XXIII, 3 (1994), pp. 225–36; Gifford, African Christianity, pp. 76–109. ²⁰ Paul Gifford, Christianity and Politics in Doe’s Liberia (Cambridge, 2002), p. 163; Leslie H. Brickman, Rapid Cell Church Growth and Reproduction: Case Study of Eglise Protestante Baptiste Oeuvres Et Mission Internationale, Abidjan, Cote D’ivoire, DMin Dissertation, Regent University, Virginia Beach, Virginia (2001); Ralph Neighbour, Cell Church in Ivory Coast in Grave Danger!, Neighbourgrams, (2011), http://neighbourgrams.blogspot.com/2011/05/cellchurch-in-ivory-coast-in-grave.html.

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from whom they often gained members. Some of these CCs were directly affected by Nigerians and Ghanaians, as Idahosa, Oyedepo, Duncan-Williams, and Otabil have travelled extensively in Africa. One of the fastest growing churches in Kenya is the Winners Chapel in Nairobi, which dedicated a building in 1998 for its 3500-member congregation after only one year of existence. The media advertising hype for the dedication service in Nairobi gushed, ‘Winners Chapel, Nairobi was built entirely debt free. No loans of bank borrowing and certainly no begging trips to the West!’ This congregation was commenced by Dayo Olutayo from Oyedepo’s church in Nigeria, who arrived in Kenya in 1995 and in 2011 another Nigerian, David Adeoye was the senior pastor with some seventy branches throughout Kenya.²¹ Uganda, dominated by Catholic and Anglican missions over the past century, has been fertile ground for CCs since its emergence from repressive dictatorships in the late 1980s. Paul Gifford speaks of ‘homegrown pentecostal churches . . . mushrooming in luxuriant fashion’ in Uganda. Three of the largest in Kampala are the Watoto Church (formerly Kampala Pentecostal Church) an English-language church founded by a Zimbabwean, Gary Skinner in 1983, with 20,000 members; Namirembe Christian Fellowship founded by Simeon Kayiwa, a preacher known for his healing and miracle ministry; and the Christian Life Church founded by Jackson Senyonga. The new churches in East Africa follow the emphasis of the East African Revival of a personal experience of God through being ‘born again’, to which they add the pentecostal emphasis on the power of the Spirit manifested in healing, speaking in tongues, prophecy, and deliverance from demons, manifestations that the East African Revival later discouraged. It was this that brought tension with the inheritors of the Revival legacy, the Anglicans, and added to the impetus behind the new churches. Occasionally, CCs are founded by women. One of the most remarkable is in Nairobi, Kenya, where Bishop Margaret Wanjiru, born in poverty in 1961, was a street hawker and cleaner before she started her own business. She confesses to having been a witch before her conversion in 1990 and she was for many years a single parent. In 1993 she founded Jesus Alive Ministries, which is now a megachurch in Nairobi that claims 20,000 members and promises its followers prosperity, success, and deliverance from all evil powers. She has travelled to many places in Africa, including South Africa. She was one of the first African pentecostal women to enter politics, becoming a member of parliament for the constituency in which her church is located in 2007. She was appointed Assistant Minister for Housing in 2008, but lost her seat in an election in August 2011. Kenyans were fascinated by the soap opera over her first marriage that played out in the national media in 2007–8, resulting in a ²¹ Charles Ouko, ‘The Triumph of Vision’, The Sunday Nation (15 Feb. 1998); Winners Chapel International Nairobi, http://www.winnersnairobi.org/.

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Charismatic Churches and the Pentecostalization of African Christianity 63 court injunction against her pending marriage to a South African pastor. The drama ended with the even more dramatic death of the man who claimed to be her first husband and the father of her children.²² She never married the South African, and these events engendered enormous respect for Wanjiru as a victim who had overcome a deliberate attempt at character assassination. As the Pentecostals would put it, she had defeated the devil. In Malawi, young preachers in Blantyre in the 1970s propagated a ‘born again’ message in their revival meetings that at first didn’t always result in the formation of new churches. By the 1980s however, the pattern of CCs elsewhere in Africa was emerging. These revival meetings had developed into ‘ministries’ and ‘fellowships’, and inevitably some were further institutionalized into new churches. One of the largest of these was the Living Water Church founded by Stanley Ndovi in 1984. As elsewhere, these Malawian movements focused on young people in schools, colleges, and universities.²³ President Frederick Chiluba (1943–2011), a ‘born again’ Christian with a pentecostal experience, declared Zambia a ‘Christian nation’ two months after his landslide election victory in 1991. He appointed ‘born again’ Christians to government posts, and regularly promoted pentecostal evangelistic crusades and conventions, where he is sometimes featured as a preacher. His VicePresident Godfrey Miyanda attended a pentecostal church, the Jesus Worship Center led by Ernest Chelelwa. Pentecostal churches are now in abundance in Zambia and the Charismatic movement has split some ‘mainline’ churches. A leading preacher in the 1990s who since entered political and diplomatic service and has been a presidential candidate, Nevers Mumba, founded Victory Faith Ministries in 1985, and is another product of Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas.²⁴

Major Ministries in Southern Africa One of the largest denominations in Zimbabwe is the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God Africa (popularly called Zaoga, pronounced ‘zah-oh-jah’), a church with roots in South African Pentecostalism like many other pentecostal churches in ²² Paul Gifford, Christianity, Politics and Public Life in Kenya (London, 2009), pp. 116–18, 163–4; Kalu, African Pentecostalism, pp. 150–1; Jesus is Alive Ministries, http://www.jiam.org/ about_us/bishop_profile.aspx; Wycliffe Muga, ‘Kenya: Star Leader’, The Star (20 Aug. 2011), http://allafrica.com/stories/201108220771.html, accessed 6 Sept. 2011. ²³ Richard A. van Dijk, ‘Young Puritan Preachers in Post-Independence Malawi’, Africa LXII, 2 (1992), pp. 159–81; Paul Gifford, ed. New Dimensions in African Christianity (Ibadan, Nigeria, 1993), pp. 55–65. ²⁴ Richard A. van Dijk, ‘Young Born-Again Preachers in Post-Independence Malawi: The Significance of an Extraneous Identity’, in Paul Gifford, ed., New Dimensions in African Christianity (Nairobi, Kenya, 1992), pp. 55–65; Gifford, African Christianity, pp. 157–68, 197–205, 220, 230, 233.

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this country. Zaoga was born in urban areas of Zimbabwe and is led by Archbishop Ezekiel Guti (b. 1923). In 1959, Guti and a group of young African pastors were expelled from the South African Apostolic Faith Mission after a disagreement with white missionaries. The group joined the South African Assemblies of God of Nicholas Bhengu but separated in 1967 to form the Assemblies of God, Africa (later Zaoga). Guti went to Christ for the Nations Institute in 1971 just as Idahosa had done, and he too received financial and other resources from the US. But Guti resists any attempts to identify his church with the ‘religious right’ in the US or to be controlled by ‘neo-colonial’ interests. In a very pertinent development in 1986, leaders of twelve of the largest pentecostal churches in Zimbabwe, including Guti, wrote a ‘blistering rebuttal’ to a right-wing attack on the Zimbabwean state by a North American Charismatic preacher. Since 1986, Zaoga has also had churches in Britain, Zimbabwean missionaries went to South Africa to plant churches there in 1989, and the church also has branches in seventeen other African countries called ‘Forward in Faith’. Zaoga is a fully-fledged denomination with complex administrative structures headed by Guti. By 2011 it claimed to have over two million members, which if true (and the figure is disputed) makes it the largest denomination in Zimbabwe after the Roman Catholics. Guti’s leadership style and expensive overseas trips were contentious issues, as were the lifestyles of some of his more powerful pastors, and the links between Zaoga and the Mugabe government have also been contentious. The denomination has experienced various splits, one of the earliest led by Guti’s co-founder, Abel Sande. There are several other large pentecostal churches with branches throughout Zimbabwe, such as the Family of God founded by Andrew Wutawunashe (a former Zaoga pastor) and the Glad Tidings Fellowship of Richmond Chiudza.²⁵ CCs may not be as prominent in South Africa as in other parts of Africa, but nevertheless are very significant there. Kenneth Meshoe, leader of the African Christian Democratic Party, which polled enough votes in the 1999 elections to gain seven members of parliament (Meshoe was still a sitting MP in 2016), is a CC pastor of the Hope of Glory Tabernacle east of Johannesburg and was formerly an evangelist in Reinhard Bonnke’s Christ for All Nations organization. Frank Chikane, who was Director General of President Thabo Mbeki’s ‘Office of the President’ until 2008 and a prominent member of the ruling African National Congress, is a ‘classical’ Pentecostal and became VicePresident of the Apostolic Faith Mission in 1996, later to be President of the Apostolic Faith Mission International. Chikane was a person of considerable ²⁵ David Maxwell, ‘‘Delivered from the Spirit of Poverty?’: Pentecostalism, Prosperity and Modernity in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Religion in Africa XXVIII, 3 (1998), pp. 351–2, 357, 366–8, 372; David Maxwell, African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism & the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (Oxford, 2006).

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Charismatic Churches and the Pentecostalization of African Christianity 65 influence in South Africa, having had one of the most powerful executive positions in the ANC government and well placed to speak on behalf of South Africa’s large Christian constituency. He maintains personal relationships with the ruling ANC hierarchy and church leaders across the denominational board from CCs to ecumenical ‘mainline’ churches. He has the unique distinction of having been General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches during apartheid’s final years, the only Pentecostal to occupy that position, and he also spent a while in Bonnke’s organization Christ for All Nations. The largest single Christian congregation in Soweto, South Africa is the Grace Bible Church led by Bishop Mosa Sono, with a new auditorium seating 5000 opened in 2002. This church now has some 11,000 members and has planted new congregations in some major urban areas, including a povertystricken ‘informal settlement’ (slum) area. Sono, born in Soweto in 1961, grew up in the Dutch Reformed Church, and attended the AFM Bible college in Soshanguve before leaving to attend white charismatic leader Ray McCauley’s Rhema Bible Training Centre near Johannesburg. He became pastor of Grace Bible Church in 1984, and became Vice-President of the International Fellowship of Christian Churches in 1996, the formerly white-dominated and largest association of charismatic churches in Southern Africa, whose President was McCauley. Once again, the connection between some of these CCs and North American ‘prosperity’ preachers is apparent, as McCauley’s original inspiration and training came from the father of the ‘faith message’, Kenneth Hagin of Tulsa, Oklahoma. But in spite of this association, Sono is much more cautious in this regard, and has repeatedly sought to distance himself from ‘prosperity theology’ and Western, white domination, and there were signs that his stance had a positive influence on McCauley too.²⁶ Sono was made a bishop in 2003, when he was consecrated into this office by McCauley and Bishop Dag Heward-Mills of Ghana. The networking and influence of other African CCs is apparent in South Africa, where many of the West and East African leaders have made visits. The latest African churches in Europe are these independent Charismatic churches. They have taken Western Europe by storm since the 1980s and now form the majority of African churches there.²⁷ A particularly prominent case is the Kingsway International Christian Centre in London. This church, founded in 1992 by a Nigerian, Matthew Ashimolowo, formerly a minister in the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, had over 5000 members in

²⁶ Allan Anderson, Zion and Pentecost: The Spirituality and Experience of Pentecostal and Zionist/Apostolic Churches in South Africa (Pretoria, 2000), pp. 201–17, 237–55; Gifford, African Christianity, pp. 236–7. ²⁷ Gerrie ter Haar, Halfway to Paradise: African Christians in Europe (Fairwater, Cardiff, 1998), p. 97.

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2002 and had become the largest congregation in Britain, attracting national media attention, especially when there were questions about the charitable status of this seemingly wealthy church. The majority of the members are West Africans, predominantly Nigerians. Large Ghanaian churches like the Church of Pentecost, or other Nigerian ones like the Redeemed Christian Church of God and the Deeper Life Bible Church now have congregations all over Western Europe and in North America. The congregations of the Church of Pentecost are directed from its central headquarters in Accra, through its International Missions Director.

PROSPERITY HERE AND NOW? One of the main criticisms levelled against CCs is that they propagate a ‘prosperity gospel’, associated with the ‘Faith’ or ‘Word’ movement originating in North American independent Charismatic movements, particularly found in the preaching and writings of the late Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland, and to a lesser degree, in the independent writings of David Yonggi Cho in South Korea. Known to its detractors as the ‘health and wealth’ gospel, this sometimes reproduces the worst forms of capitalism in Christian guise. Paul Gifford has become a leading exponent on this subject. He suggests that the biggest single factor in the emergence of these new churches is the collapse of African economies by the 1980s and the subsequent increasing dependence of CCs on the USA. He proposes that it is ‘Americanization’ rather than any ‘African quality’ that is responsible for the growth of these churches. He sees this new phenomenon as a type of neo-colonialism propagated by American ‘prosperity preachers’, a sort of conspiracy theory. ²⁸ But there is another side to this scenario. Gifford’s analysis, which he has modified to some extent more recently,²⁹ has been accepted in many church and academic circles, but it seems to ignore some fundamental features of Pentecostalism—now predominantly a non-Western phenomenon. In the African Pentecostalism experience, practice is at least as important as formal ideology or theology. As Ogbu Kalu points out, the relationship between the African CC pastor and his or her ‘Western patron’ is entirely eclectic, and the ‘dependency’ has actually been mutual. The Western ‘supporters’ often need the African pastor to bolster their own international image and increase their own financial resources. Kalu observes that in the 1990s, since the public disgracing of American televangelists, the mood in Africa changed, and CCs ²⁸ Gifford, Christianity and Politics, pp. 196–9, 294, 314–15. ²⁹ Gifford, African Christianity, pp. 236–44.

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Charismatic Churches and the Pentecostalization of African Christianity 67 are now ‘characterised by independence and an emphasis on the Africanist roots of the ministries’.³⁰ Marthinus Daneel points out that in traditional Africa, ‘wealth and success are naturally signs of the blessing of God’, so it is no wonder that such a message should be uncritically accepted there—and this is as true for the newer CCs as it is for the older AICs.³¹ There are connections between some of the CCs and the American ‘health and wealth’ movement, and it is also true that some of the new African churches reproduce and promote ‘health and wealth’ teaching and literature. But identifying them as a whole with the American ‘prosperity gospel’ is a generalization that particularly fails to appreciate the reconstructions and innovations made by these African movements in adapting to a radically different context, just as the older AICs did some years before. In fact, ascribing this emphasis to sources outside Africa is a simplistic view that fails to appreciate these churches’ own initiatives. As movements of dissent, the CCs present a new challenge to the Christian churches in Africa. To the European mission-founded churches, they are demonstrations of a form of Christianity that appeals to a new generation of Africans, and from which older churches can learn. There are indications that the CCs increase at the expense of all types of older churches, including the prophet-healing AICs.³² To these older AICs, with whom they actually have much in common, they are consequently often a source of tension. As a manifestation of their dissent with existing churches, the CCs preach against ‘tribalism’ and parochial denominationalism. They are often sharply critical of the older AICs, particularly in what they perceive as the African traditional religious component of AIC practices, which are sometimes seen as manifestations of demons needing ‘deliverance’. As a result, older AICs are both offended and threatened by them. In addition, the CCs have to some extent embraced and externalized Western notions of a ‘nuclear family’ and individualized, urban lifestyles. This brings them into further tension with African traditional culture and ethnic ties, thereby enabling members to escape the onerous commitments to the extended family and to achieve success and accumulate possessions independently.³³ Again, in keeping with their dissenting character, the CCs also sometimes castigate ‘mainline’ churches for their dead formalism and traditionalism, so the

³⁰ Ogbu U. Kalu, ‘The Third Response: Pentecostalism and the Reconstruction of Christian Experience in Africa, 1970–1995’, Journal of African Christian Thought I, 2 (1998), p. 8. ³¹ Inus (M. L.) Daneel, Quest for Belonging: Introduction to a Study of African Independent Churches (Gweru, Zimbabwe, 1987), p. 46; Gifford, Christianity and Politics, p. 188. ³² Gifford, African Christianity, pp. 62–3, 95, 233. ³³ Meyer, ‘Make a Complete Break with the Past’, p. 320; Ruth Marshall, ‘Pentecostalism in Southern Nigeria: An Overview’, in Paul Gifford, ed., New Dimensions in African Christianity (Nairobi, Kenya, 1992), pp. 21–2.

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‘mainline’ churches also feel threatened by them. Commenting on this, Kalu makes the salient point: the established churches usually react in three stages: hostility, apologetics and adaptation. Institutionalisation breeds late adoption of innovations. We witnessed this pattern in the response to the Aladura challenge. It is being repeated without any lessons learnt from history.³⁴

Gifford himself is aware of the problems inherent in too simplistic an interpretation of the newer African Pentecostalism. After discussing Christian fundamentalism in America and the ‘rapidly growing sector of African Christianity’ closely related to it, he says that the American groups operating in Africa ‘find themselves functioning in a context considerably different from that in the United States’.³⁵ Gifford may not have reflected enough on this ‘considerably different’ context in his otherwise substantial and informative analyses of the newer Pentecostalism in Africa. The oversimplified and patronizing generalization that ‘prosperity’ churches in Africa are led by unscrupulous manipulators greedy for wealth and power does not account for the increasing popularity of these CCs with educated and responsible people, who continue to give financial support and feel their needs are met there.³⁶ Often, those who are ‘anti-charismatic’ and resent or are threatened by the growth and influence of the newer churches are the source of these criticisms. Kalu says that in the decade after 1985, the CCs ‘blossomed into complex varieties’ and that in their development ‘European influence became more pronounced’. But he points out that that in spite of this, ‘the originators continued to be African, imitating foreigners, eclectically producing foreign theologies but transforming these for immediate contextual purposes’.³⁷ With reference to Zaoga, Maxwell says that this movement’s ‘own dominant prosperity teachings have arisen from predominantly southern African sources and are shaped by Zimbabwean concerns’. He says that the ‘prosperity gospel’ is best explained ‘not in terms of false consciousness or right wing conspiracy but as a means to enable pentecostals to make the best of rapid social change’. Zaoga’s teaching of the ‘Spirit of Poverty’, for instance, ‘resonates with ideas of self-reliance, indigenous business and black empowerment propounded by the ruling party and state controlled media’, while at the same time it ‘successfully explains and exploits popular insecurities’.³⁸ Similarly, Matthews Ojo, who writes extensively on Nigerian CCs, says that they ‘are increasingly responding to the needs and aspirations of Nigerians amid the uncertainty of their political life and the pain of their constant and unending

³⁴ Kalu, ‘Third Response’, p. 3. ³⁵ Gifford, African Christianity, p. 43. ³⁶ Marshall, ‘Pentecostalism’, pp. 8, 24. ³⁷ Kalu, ‘Third Response’, p. 7. ³⁸ Maxwell, ‘Delivered from the Spirit of Poverty?’, pp. 351, 358–9.

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Charismatic Churches and the Pentecostalization of African Christianity 69 economic adjustments’.³⁹ It is clear, then, that CCs are far from being simply an ‘Americanization’ of African Christianity. Like the churches before them, the CCs have a sense of identity as a separated and egalitarian community of non-conformity, with democratic access to spiritual power, whose primary purpose is to promote their cause to those outside. These churches see themselves as the ‘born again’ people of God, with a strong sense of belonging to the community of God’s people, those chosen from out of the world to witness to the new life they experience in the power of the Spirit. The cornerstone of their message is this ‘born again’ conversion experience through repentance of sin and submission to Christ, and this is what identifies them, even to outsiders. Unlike the older AICs, where there tends to be an emphasis on the prophet figure or principal leader as the one dispensing God’s gifts to his or her followers, the CCs usually emphasize the availability and encourage the practice of gifts of the Holy Spirit by all of their members. The phenomenon of growing CCs in Africa indicates that there are unresolved questions facing the church, such as the role of ‘success’ and ‘prosperity’ in God’s economy, enjoying God’s gifts, including healing and material provision, and the holistic dimension of ‘salvation now’. Many Africans see financial success and prosperity as evidence of the blessing of God and the reward for faith in difficult financial circumstances. However, this ‘prosperity’ is also seen as the means for advancing the work of God and for the ability to give generously to the needy. The ‘here-and-now’ problems being addressed by these churches are problems that still challenge the church as a whole.⁴⁰ Asamoah-Gyadu believes that the ‘greatest virtue’ of the ‘health and wealth’ gospel of the CCs lies in ‘the indomitable spirit that believers develop in the face of life’s odds. . . . In essence, misfortune becomes only temporary.’⁴¹ The ‘here-and-now’ problems being addressed by CCs in modern Africa are not unlike those faced by the older AICs decades before, and these problems still challenge the church as a whole today. They remind the church of the age-old conviction of Africa that for any faith to be relevant and enduring, it must also be experienced. Indirectly related to the phenomenon of CCs is a growing ‘charismatic renewal’ in many of the older mission-founded churches in Africa, having a profound effect on all forms of Christianity in the continent. Some of the leaders of this Holy Spirit movement in older churches have seceded in the past to form AICs and more recently, CCs. But there are still a considerable

³⁹ Matthews A. Ojo, ‘The Church in the African State: The Charismatic/Pentecostal Experience in Nigeria’, Journal of African Christian Thought I, 2 (1998), p. 25. ⁴⁰ Allan Anderson, African Reformation: African Initiated Christianity in the 20th Century (Trenton, NJ, 2001), pp. 175–86. ⁴¹ Asamoah-Gyadu, ‘The Church in the African State’, p. 55.

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number of people who have remained in the older churches with a charismatic form of Christianity, expressed in fellowship and prayer groups, Sunday services, and ‘renewal’ conferences—to some extent inspired and encouraged by similar movements in other parts of the world. The older churches have responded to the CCs with innovations that can be described as ‘Charismatic’, where a place is given to gifts of the Holy Spirit in the church. There are many examples of this throughout Africa. One of the best known was the controversial healing ministry of Zambian Roman Catholic Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, who had to step down from his position in 1983 and was removed to Rome thereafter. Milingo was excommunicated in 2006, following his marriage, founding of an organization for married priests, and ‘illegal’ ordination of married priests. Milingo still considered himself Roman Catholic when he retired from active ministry in 2013 at the age of eighty-three. Other African examples are a popular Anglican healing centre in Zimbabwe called the Community of the Gifts of Fire; the Charismatic ‘Legion of Christ’s Witnesses’ (Iviyo) association within South African Anglicanism led by Bishop Alpheus Zulu long before the Charismatic movement began in North America; a thriving Charismatic movement among Catholics in Uganda; one among Lutherans and in the interdenominational ‘Big November’ Crusade in Tanzania; multitudes of Ghanaian Catholic, Methodist, and Presbyterian Charismatics; and the Charismatic movement in Nigerian Anglicanism led by Professor Simeon Onibere.⁴² The list could go on.

CONCLUSIO N The remarkable global growth of Pentecostalism in the midst of incredible economic, political, and natural adversity in Africa, and the corresponding decline in membership among older churches means that there might be something that the new churches are doing from which other Christians can learn. And indeed they have. Many of the features of African Pentecostalism traced in this chapter are characteristics of dissent: the Bible and the Holy ⁴² Emmanuel Milingo, The World in Between: Christian Healing and the Struggle for Spiritual Survival (London, 1984); David J. Maxwell, ‘The Church and Democratisation in Africa: The Case of Zimbabwe’, in Paul Gifford, ed., The Christian Churches and the Democratisation of Africa (Leiden, 1995), p. 126; Stephen Hayes, Black Charismatic Anglicans: The Iviyo Lofakazi Bakakristu and Its Relations with Other Renewal Movements (Pretoria, 1990); Josiah R. Mlahagwa, ‘Contending for the Faith: Spiritual Revival and the Fellowship Church in Tanzania’, in Thomas T. Spear and Isaria N. Kimambo, eds, East African Expressions of Christianity (Oxford, 1999), pp. 296–306; Gifford, African Christianity, pp. 95–6, 154, 227–8, 330; Gifford, Christianity and Politics, pp. 127, 245.

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Charismatic Churches and the Pentecostalization of African Christianity 71 Spirit as independent sources of authority creating what is claimed to be more ‘biblical’ and/or ‘indigenous’ forms of Christianity; lay leaders who hail from older forms of Christianity; the significant role of women and youth; the formation of voluntary associations; the emphasis on reform and renewal, outreach and service in the community; and in many cases, an independent, fully contained educational system that does not depend on an outside organization for its sustenance. What is happening in Africa is happening throughout the world, with new megachurches springing up wherever large cities and relative religious freedom are to be found. A maze of enterprising personalities and events has transformed the shape of contemporary Christianity. Most countries of the world have been affected profoundly by this explosion of Charismatic Christianity. The only exceptions are in those mainly Islamic countries with religious monopolies where religion and state exist in alliance, and in the few remaining vestiges of atheistic Communism—but even here, China is en route to having the most evangelical and pentecostal Christians in the world, and may already have them. The patterns established by the CCs in Africa have become paradigmatic of Pentecostalism in the twenty-first century. Charismatic Christianity today is full of religious entrepreneurs who, like their predecessors in early Pentecostalism, are on a mission to take their message to as many people as possible. They declare a call from God and have an uncanny ability to communicate with crowds of people. Their message of hope and faith attracts the crowds who give of their substance and enable the enterprise to succeed. In countries like Nigeria, Charismatic leaders are among the wealthiest people in the nation. Sometimes these leaders are the only beneficiaries of their prosperity message, which while offering hope of a better life to their followers, does not always achieve this. The successive ‘waves’ of revivalist movements where new ‘moves’ and revelations of the Spirit are promoted and where new Charismatic preachers and religious entrepreneurs emerge are seemingly unstoppable.

S E L E C T B I BL IO G R A P H Y Anderson, Allan. African Reformation: African Initiated Christianity in the 20th Century (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001). Anderson, Allan. To the Ends of the Earth: Pentecostalism and the Transformation of World Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Anderson, Allan. An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 edn). Anderson, Allan. Spirit-Filled World: Religious Dis/Continuity in African Pentecostalism (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

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Anderson, Allan H., and Gerald J. Pillay, ‘The Segregated Spirit: The Pentecostals’, in Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport, eds, Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social & Cultural History (London: James Curry, 1997) Asamoah-Gyadu, J. Kwabena. African Charismatics: Current Developments within Independent Indigenous Pentecostalism in Ghana (Leiden: Brill, 2005). Burgess, Richard. Nigeria’s Christian Revolution: The Civil War Revival and Its Pentecostal Progeny (1967–2006) (Oxford: Regnum, 2008). Cox, Harvey. Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (London: Cassell, 1996). Gifford, Paul. African Christianity: Its Public Role (London: Hurst & Co., 1998). Gifford, Paul. Christianity, Politics and Public Life in Kenya (London: Hurst & Co., 2009). Haar, Gerrie ter. Halfway to Paradise: African Christians in Europe (Cardiff: Cardiff Academic Press, 1998). Kalu, Ogbu. African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Maxwell, David. African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (Oxford: James Currey, 2006). Ojo, Matthews A. The End-Time Army: Charismatic Movements in Modern Nigeria (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2006). Ukah, Asonzeh. A New Paradigm of Pentecostal Power: A Study of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in Nigeria (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2008).

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3 Indigenization, Translation, and Transformation in African Christianity Akintunde E. Akinade

INTRODUCTION: WAVES O F FAITH In the twenty-first century, African Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds. The religious tradition runs the gamut of evangelistic fervour, charismatic renewal, fundamentalism, border-crossing, prosperity gospel, and global partnerships. The story of Christianity in Africa is indeed set in many layers and structures. Each dimension contributes to its lustre and credibility. Its protean character also adds to its appeal and character. The paradoxical nature of African Christianity is expressed by the fact that it has been shaped by both the trappings of empire and indigenous creativity. Forces such as external missionary trends, indigenization, and globalization have shaped African Christianity. It is a movement that moves in different waves and defies simple categorizations. Ogbu Kalu has used the images of waves and the sea to describe the changing trends in world Christianity. According to him: A powerful archetypal imagery of Christianity is drawn from water to express its inner symbol of salvation and its outward expansion. The imagery of ship, anchor, sail, and tidal waves in describing the changing faces of Christianity and evaluating its shape at the end of the second millennium is, therefore, ancient and significant. It is a religion that emphasizes movement and sharing; the whole inhabited earth is its purview.¹

This statement vividly captures the complex processes of local assemblies and global formations within the world Christian movement. In the development of events, Africa has placed its unique stamp of affirmation and interpretation ¹ Ogbu U. Kalu, ‘Changing Tides: Some Currents in World Christianity at the Opening of the Twenty-First Century’, in Ogbu U. Kalu, ed., Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities (Grand Rapids, MI, 2008), p. 3.

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on this religious tradition. The notion that Africans were passive recipients of the Christian faith belongs to a moribund intellectual narrative. At the Edinburgh-Yale seminar in 1992, Andrew Walls remarked that in the history of religions: African Christianity appears in two capacities: first, as a new period in the history of African religion, continuing the story begun in the primal or traditional religions; and second, as a new period in the history of Christianity, in which the tradition is being expressed in the intellectual, social and religious milieus which it has not previously entered.²

This Janus-faced representation of African Christianity underscores its dynamic nature and its innate ability to reinvent itself. Religious traditions are not fixed ethereal phenomena; rather, they are constantly changing and adapting to social, political, cultural, and intellectual circumstances. This paper discusses some of the significant ways that Africa has changed the face of world Christianity. The fact that Africans received Christianity outside of the enlightenment paradigm gave them the incentive to reshape it with their own experience and ethos. On the contrary, the Western (and even black) missionary movement that mediated the encounter in the modern period was shaped by enlightenment assumptions. The strictures and appeal of cogito ego sum did not interfere with the early stages of African Christianity. Consequently, it developed with ample attention to people’s concrete experiences rather than abstract theological or doctrinal impositions. In a context characterized by a keen a priori spiritual discernment and indigenous sagacity, foreign theological and liturgical imposition ultimately failed the test of authenticity. They crumbled like a house of cards because they did not resonate very well with the worldview and experience of the people. Bolaji Idowu in his Selfhood of the Church in Africa alluded to the inevitable demise of prefabricated theologies and liturgies in Africa. One should add that political independence and nationalism contributed to a new renaissance concerning the need for ecclesiastical autonomy and self-reliance. It took both resistance and rebellion to make Western missionaries realize that plunging into the treacherous waters of Africa’s religio-cultural context required structured empathy, tolerance, and guided compromise. The stronger the boat of Christianity in terms of its socio-cultural immersion, the more it will be able to respond to the challenges of its voyage among any other group. Beyond the Constantinian captivity of the Church, African Christianity evolved as a faith energized by deep piety, robust experience, bold creativity, and cautious fidelity to tradition. The shibboleth of faith was unveiled and a new spiritual awakening was unleashed within a context that was already conversant ² Christopher Fyfe and Andrew Walls, eds, Christianity in Africa in the 1990s (Edinburgh, 1996), p. 1.

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Indigenization, Translation, and Transformation in African Christianity 75 with the allure of religious categories, options, and belonging. The aftermath of the wave of religious transformation that swept across sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteenth century was the myriad of independent religious movements all across the region. The seeds of dissent were planted in the late eighteenth century. They developed into full-blown revolt in the nineteenth century.

W H O S E RE LI G I O N I S CH R I ST I A N I T Y ? Lamin Sanneh’s poignant question: ‘whose religion is Christianity?’ is a rhetorical rendition of the fact that Christianity is a world religion and it belongs to all. Christianity in the twenty-first century is a polycentric phenomenon, represented by many models and movements. The various voices that make up Christianity today emerge from many centres and contexts. The faces of world Christianity are shaped by innovative liturgies, creative commitment to the spirit, and indigenous theologies. It flies in the face of the unprecedented explosion of Christianity in non-Western societies. Such a monolithic prescription of faith is a wanton rejection of other ways of encountering the mystery of God. A top-down perspective restricts the complex manifestations of the transcendent. A totalizing construct also contributes to the cultural and historical conditions that prevent people from understanding the credentials of a post-Western Christianity. Contemporary world Christianity vehemently rejects a one-size-fits-all paradigm. The tidal wave of Christian resurgence in non-Western societies challenges secular pretentions and Western antipathy about religion. African Christianity adds unique perspectives to the overall global narratives of the Christian faith. The twin forces of consensus and dissent have shaped African Christianity; this may also be interpreted as acceptance and creativity. In a situation analogous to the experience of Jacob in biblical times, African Christianity wrestles with the tension between tradition and autonomy. It affirms the non-negotiable aspects of Christianity and at the same time, it has produced religious movements that rejected dogmatic prescriptions about how to experience and practice the faith. It has been able to negotiate the ambiguities between authority and autonomy. No doubt, the foundations of African Christianity were laid by committed missionary agents; but it has flourished in the post-colonial era without any rigid hegemonic control and ecclesiastical patrimony. It has been moulded by commitment to tradition and boisterous Charismatic renewal movements. African Christianity exhibits a ‘contrapuntal’³ profile to borrow a term from Edward Said. ³ See Amir Hussain, ‘Life as a Muslim Scholar of Islam in Post-9/11 America’, in Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, ed., Subverting Hatred: The Challenge of Nonviolence in Religious Traditions (Maryknoll, NY, 2007), p. 141.

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This is a concept in music that celebrates multiple dimensions rather than a monolithic tone. African Christianity has many dimensions. It vouchsafes tradition, translation, revival, and renewal.

O N T R A N S L A T ING THE ME S S AGE One of the enduring principles that has contributed to indigenization and the expansion of the Christian movement in Africa is the power of translation. In contrast to Islam which affirms the use of Arabic as the sole language of divine transaction, Christianity affirms and celebrates the use of all languages as a viable vehicle for translating the Christian message. Translation underscores the power of the Gospel to reach the ends of the earth. It affirms that the Spirit that blows where it wills. It also overcomes the restrictions of territoriality and exclusivity. Translation aided the transformation of Christianity from being a provincial religion to a cosmopolitan religion. It is the lifeblood of the Christian missionary movement. Translation provided the impetus for the renewal and the selfhood of the church in Africa. It was the energizing élan that sustained the dissenting drive in African Christianity. The dissenting spirit was given both textual and structure boost by the robust efforts connected to the translation of the Bible to the vernacular. It was a process that flew in the face of reckless authoritarianism and control. Lamin Sanneh poignantly remarked that ‘familiarity breeds faith’.⁴ Language, an important aspect of culture, provided the most compelling benchmark for the seamless connections between autonomy and faith. Translation and revival were the two factors that propelled the engine of religious independency in Africa. The hubris of missionary agents was tempered by the dissenting voices of religious autonomy and freedom. When the chips are down, faith cannot by interpreted in a vacuum. It must be grounded in people’s concrete experience and worldview. Translation provided the substance for indigenization of faith in many cultural contexts in Africa. It provided the impetus for genuine and creative appropriation of the Christian faith. The engine of faith was enabled by the conscious effort to reinterpret and rediscover Christian doctrines, concepts, and formulas in familiar idioms, syntax, and sentences. Translation affirms mission as an agent of change and also privileges the recipient over the foreign missionary agent. The cultural context became an avenue to encounter God’s divine mercy and grace. God’s boundless love is expressed through different cultural norms and forms. The seeds of Christian renewal were sparingly sowed in the formative years of the Christian faith. ⁴ Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY, 2009 edn), pp. 229–51.

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Indigenization, Translation, and Transformation in African Christianity 77 Their germination and growth in later years has and will continue to evoke new models in the cross-cultural understanding of mission. This is a phenomenon that refutes a one-dimensional narrative about the missionary impact on culture. The common post-colonial appraisal of Christian mission is often laced with disparaging accounts of missionary agents and institutions in Africa. These discourses privilege the unmitigated assault on African culture and worldview by these foreign powers. However, copious evidence abounds concerning the dialectical relationship between Christianity and African culture. Nowhere is this more evident than in the use of African languages for encountering the sacred. The translation of the Bible to African languages was a bold affirmation of culture. It also underscores the fact that culture provides a genuine conduit for encountering and experiencing the sacred. The missionary movement has highlighted the importance of the theme of vernacular translation for any understanding of Christianity. At the centre of the Christian faith is the universality of the good news. The great commission has been expressed and received in different languages in various cultural contexts. John Wesley once described Jesus Christ as the general saviour of humankind. This observation connects Jesus with all cultures and all peoples. But we easily overlook the fact that Jesus Christ meets people within the specificity of their culture and history. The Gospel is articulated in diverse languages, and language bears cultural particularity. In light of the missionary movement, we see how translation is always an essential part in the transmission of the Christian message. The story of the incarnation provides a credible affirmation of the place of translation in the Christian story. When God became a human being, divinity was translated into humanity, and this process must always be identified and placed within the specificity of a particular context, within a particular ethnic group, and at a specific place and time. John Carman has described translation as ‘the vintage mark of Christianity’.⁵ The New Testament provides many persuasive narratives that underscore the Gospel’s sensitivity to cultural diversity. Christianity is based on the divine act of translation: ‘the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us’ (John 1:14). Any project on translating the Bible into different languages rests on this a priori condition. The book of Acts talks about the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples and they started speaking in a multiplicity of tongues enabling diverse people to ‘hear the great things that God has done’ in Jesus Christ (Acts 2:11). The Great Commission also makes it imperative to spread the Gospel to all nations and peoples. This is part of the audacity of the Gospel. It is a claim that all flesh must be given the opportunity to become disciples of Christ. The story of the great multitude described in Revelation speaks of people from ‘every nation, from all tribes and peoples and ⁵ John B. Carman, ‘Missions and the Translatable Gospel’, The Christian Century, CVI, 25 (30 Aug.–6 Sept. 1989), p. 786.

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languages, standing before the throne’ (Rev. 7:9). The story accentuates the fact that Christianity is not mono-cultural. Rather, it must be expressed and experienced in different tongues and languages. Thus, right from its beginnings, Christianity valorized the need to translate out of Aramaic and Hebrew languages. This in turn led to the relativization of its Judaic provenance and the affirmation of non-Jewish cultures. Gentile cultures inevitably became part of the growth and transformation of Christianity. Thus, both Judaic and Gentile cultures contributed to the expansion of a new religious dispensation. Early Christianity was baptized into a cross-cultural context right from its formative stages. The indisputable fact is that when first-century Christians translated their sacred texts into Greek, they started a process by which Christian categories were cast in new linguistic patterns. This process affirmed the dignity of the language used in the translation process. The African example presents a compelling case study for understanding translation as an integral part of the transmission of the Christian faith and as an engine of renewal and reform. In fact, one can make the claim that vernacular translation contributed immensely to the transformation of Christianity in Africa. It gave the impetus for the indigenous church movements that emerged all over Africa after colonial rule. In spite of Islam’s longevity in Africa, vernacular languages were considered anathema, unfit for adoption as a scriptural medium. The vernacular was considered unsuitable for devotion and piety. The sacred Arabic became the absolute standard for religious orthodoxy. The exclusive pre-eminence of the sacred Arabic for the dissemination of religious instructions gave other languages a second class status, for they were, for all intents and purposes, relegated to the status of ‘ajami (profane). Christian missionaries and lay people, on the other hand, embarked on ‘the indigenizing project’ of translating the Bible into many African languages. This process, according to Lamin Sanneh, is an indication that Christianity cannot be seen as an imperialistic religion. The fact that Christian missionaries affirmed the importance of African languages is a telling testimony to the fact that they did not stigmatize African culture. This calls for a re-examination of the pervasive notion that the missionary movement and the religious institutions they established were unsympathetic to African culture and worldview. Sanneh believes that both Christian and Muslim mission adhere to the notion of sacred language. However, Muslims consider Arabic a revealed language . . . the medium in which the Qur’an . . . was revealed. . . . The author of the Qur’an who is God, thus came to be associated with its speech, so that the very sounds of the language are believed to originate in heaven. . . . Consequently, Muslims have instituted the sacred Arabic for the canonical devotions . . . (bringing) the sacred Arabic to the level of the ordinary believer.⁶

⁶ Ibid.

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Indigenization, Translation, and Transformation in African Christianity 79 The portrait of missionary agents as self-serving, sanctimonious soul-seekers can be seen as shallow in light of the grand policy of vernacular translation and appropriation all over Africa. Lamin Sanneh has been the most ardent proponent of the centrality of the vernacular in the propagation of the Christian message in Africa. While Islam maintained the peerless character of the Arabic language, Christian missionary agents in Africa engaged in translating the word of God into different African languages. Success in translation correlated with sensitivity to traditional African cultures. For instance, ‘Africans best responded to Christianity where indigenous religions were strongest, not weakest, suggesting a degree of indigenous compatibility with the gospel, and an implicit conflict with colonial priorities.’⁷ The significance of Scripture translation and its dominance in the missionary endeavour in Africa is a ringing affirmation that God was not dismissive of African culture. God communicated to Africans in their local languages. Ultimately, the essential elements of Christian theology such as God, Jesus Christ, Eschatology, Creation, and Salvation were re-interpreted through the idioms of the local culture. Translations gave Africans the opportunity to access and process the basic essentials of Christian revelation through African traditional religious categories and ideas. Through this process, Jesus Christ became inculturated within the African milieu. The medium of mothertongues enabled Africans to embrace and celebrate the Christian faith through the idioms and precepts of their own culture. This pragmatic religious sensibility still provides the basis for theological reflection in Africa. Translation offers the necessary condition for African agency in the transmission and transformation of Christianity. Hearing the Word of God in one’s own language engenders the passion for embracing the Gospel and for reshaping it without diluting its essential message. The movements for theological and liturgical renewal vehemently rejected the tendency to put God in neat theological categories. By allowing the Spirit to blow where it wills, Africans unleashed a process to re-interpret and rediscover theological and liturgical categories. Consequently, a new faith was unveiled and God was encountered in unusual places. This perspective departs from the usual conformist model that African Christianity is often subjected to. Far from such patterns, Africans were active agents in the dynamic process of ‘re-mission’ within various African contexts. Yorubaland offers an instructive example concerning the interrelation of Bible translation, evangelism, and indigenous self-determination. In Yorubaland, mission schools first trained students in the basic rudiments of Yoruba language and then proceeded to reading the Bible in the mother-tongue. Vernacular expression eventually became a sine qua non for liturgy, worship, ⁷ See Lamin O. Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003), p. 18.

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mission, and theology. Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1809–91) and James Johnson (1836–1917) were actively involved in both the Niger and Yoruba Missions.⁸ The Niger Mission was conceived by Thomas Fowell Buxton as one of the projects of the Church Missionary Society (CMS). The CMS was undoubtedly the most conspicuous missionary agency in Yorubaland in the nineteenth century. Crowther was co-opted into this venture through the prodding and encouragement of Henry Venn. Venn’s vision of the ‘euthanasia of mission’ professed that the vernacular principle would enable the Church in Africa to become self-propagating, self-supporting, self-governing, and free from Western hegemonic control.⁹ Crowther was a tireless missionary with a passionate penchant for preaching in Yoruba. He wrote a Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language which became an important tool in the mission field. The patronizing and racist policies of the CMS led to the monumental humiliation of Crowther and his eventual resignation from the Niger Mission. The unsavoury experience had by Crowther further added fuel to the embers of religious independence from foreign control and domination in Yorubaland. One of the enthusiastic supporters of African agency in mission was the indefatigable James Johnson. He was a dyed-in-the-wool nationalist. He advocated for literacy as an essential tool for evangelism and mission. He encouraged his colleagues to be well-versed in three languages: Yoruba, English, and Arabic. He remarked in 1878 that the Bible in the native tongue was the most important accomplishment of the Yoruba Mission. The theme of translation in the missionary project boldly confirms that Christianity is a universal religion. It is culturally translatable. It also has the unique character to be at home in every cultural situation without diminishing its essential character. The diverse cultural manifestations and incarnations of Christianity must also be seen as part of the Missio Dei. God continues to manifest Godself to different people in different cultures without any regard to any hegemonic paradigms or Western possessiveness. The Gospel belongs to everyone. This is what God has demonstrated with the African story of mission and all over the world. Ultimately, it is imperative that ‘all of us hear . . . in our own languages . . . the wonders of God’ (Acts 2:11).

EMBRACING THE I NTERRUPTION The processes involved in the transmission and transformation of African Christianity continue to engender interesting paradigms and models. Scholars offer different insights concerning the various ways Africans have embraced, ⁸ Sanneh, West African Christianity, pp. 169–76.

⁹ Ibid., p. 170.

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Indigenization, Translation, and Transformation in African Christianity 81 reshaped, and propagated the Christian faith. It seems to me that a sound holistic methodology will account for the complex contours of Christian ministry and mission in Africa. This approach will valorize the indigenous appropriation of the Christian message as well as the external forces that have shaped Christianity in Africa. The genius of African Christianity is that it transcends narrow categorizations and permutations. It is a religious tradition that is energized by the contributions of the missionary movement and the strategies of local priests, prophets, catechists, and lay leaders. The grandeur of the Christian faith hinges on creativity, boldness, and cultural affirmation. Its diverse tapestry also affirms divine providence and the propensity of human beings to respond to the signs of the times. Throughout the different junctures in African Christianity, indigenous agents did not leave the faith rudderless. Rather, they used their creative imagination and deep commitment to the faith to steer it across tempestuous storms of inertia and unbridled paternalism. The winds of change and innovation also contributed to the spirit of zeitgeist that produced a contextualized faith. Amidst social, political, and cultural upheavals, especially in the nineteenth century, Christianity in Africa remained resilient in its efforts to reach people. In a season characterized by renewals and revivals, Christianity became an important part of Africa’s pluralistic platform. In this period, political sentiments about equality and dignity also resonated with the quest for religious autonomy. In people’s imagination, religion and politics were the two agents of progress. After all, authentic transformation entails religious commitment and political awareness. In a season that was dominated by nationalistic fervours, religious independency found a formidable ally in political affirmation. Kwame Bediako once remarked that ‘Christianity has been an active participant in the struggle to regain independence in Africa.’¹⁰ Paul Gifford has also proclaimed the public role of Christianity in Africa.¹¹ The charismatic movement led by Garrick Sokari Braide produced several narratives that had political overtones. One can identify some important models in the historical development of African Christianity: mission, conversion, struggles for autonomy, charismatic renewals, and diasporic formations. These models are interrelated. They underscore the novel ways that Africans have received Christianity and reshaped it within the context of their worldview, culture, and experience. Rising like the phoenix from the ashes and ruins of colonial conquest, Christianity soon redefined itself and became a compelling force for self-identity and affirmation. In the nineteenth century, prophets such as Garrick Braide, Prophet Harris, Bishop James Johnson, Bishop Ajayi Crowther, and many charismatic church leaders in the Aladura movement engineered the transmission ¹⁰ Kwame Bediako, Jesus and the Gospel in Africa: History and Experience (Maryknoll, NY, 2004), p. 98. ¹¹ Paul Gifford, African Christianity: Its Public Role (Bloomington, IN, 1998).

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and transformation of the Christian faith in Africa. For all intents and purposes, their unconventional approach to mission unequivocally positioned Africans to become active agents in the expansion of Christianity. Aladura Christianity has an enduring tradition as a grassroots religious experience. It is energized by a credible contextual theology that integrates mind, body, and spirit. Its practice of proximate salvation is a rejection of an antiquarian theology that is anathema to people’s wholeness. It introduced a new grammar of faith into the theological lexicon of African theological engagement. The emergence of Aladura churches contributed to the process of creative ecclesiastical reformation in Africa in the twentieth century. In this period, Aladura, Harrist, Garrick Braide, and Zionist congregations embarked on renewing Christianity with robust flair and imagination. According to Lamin Sanneh, ‘Harris established Christianity on the central primal pillar of its post-Western dispensation, and thereby set it against the terms of metropolitan entitlement. Indeed, he wrestled Christianity from colonial control and compelled missionaries to face a totally different direction if they wished to see the work of God.’¹² Since necessity is the mother of invention; urgent cultural, social, and political concerns were addressed on the platform of piety. The spirit of creative dissent hovers over the transformation of African Christianity. In many contexts, renewal ignited the fire of new initiatives in worship, devotion, civic engagement, and mission. The Aladura church movement that emerged in south-western Nigeria in the twentieth century was a bold African initiative to move the Church within the African continent beyond its Western provenance. It challenged the notion that the Church in Africa was a veritable marionette with its strings in the hands of foreign overloads.¹³ Through indigenous agency and appropriation, Aladura movements such as the Cherubim and Seraphim and the Christ Apostolic Church enabled Africans to claim Christianity as their own and also add their own unique interpretation and understanding to the Christian faith. In contrast to colonial appropriation of faith, Africans proclaimed and experienced a democratic dispensation of the power of God. Translation underscores an active participation in the mystery and wonder of the Ultimate Reality. In the twentieth century, the process of indigenous appropriation of the Christian faith in Africa is manifested as Aladura, Zionist, and Roho congregations in West, South, and East Africa respectively. In an era of political and religious independence, the spirit of self-reliance, which was ubiquitous all over the land, contributed to a new wave of indigenous congregations and movements. The indigenous understanding of faith also engendered the participation of women in spiritual matters in Africa. The spirit of revivalism fostered an ¹² Lamin Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (New York, 2008), p. 201. ¹³ See Bolaji E. Idowu, The Selfhood of the Church in Africa (Lagos, ND), p. 12.

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Indigenization, Translation, and Transformation in African Christianity 83 egalitarian platform in spiritual dispensation. The pivotal role of Christianah Abiodun Akinsowon in the formation and growth of the Cherubim and Seraphim Church Movement in Yorubaland is well documented.¹⁴ The ministry of Moses Orimolade Tunolashe as Baba Aladura, ‘Praying Father’ within this revival movement was well anchored by the support and vision of Christianah Abiodun Akinsowon. In the twentieth century, this revolutionary religious partnership contributed to the rise of other female spiritual leaders in other parts of Africa. One of the early prophetic movements in Africa was established by Alice Lenshina Mulenga (c.1919–78) in Zambia. She founded the Lumpa Church after recovering from a near-death experience. In a message reminiscent of all prophetic movements, she claimed a divine visitation and a spiritual injunction to preach the good news and build a church on ‘a rock’. She studied in the same primary school at the Presbyterian Mission of Lubwa with Kenneth Kaunda, whose father had been its first African minister. Lumpa in Bemba language means the highest, the supreme, or to be superior. The Lumpa Church started within the Presbyterian Church of Zambia, but within two years, Lenshina’s strong anti-witchcraft message and robust millennial impulse led to a radical break with Presbyterianism. Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton has also addressed the issue of gender dynamics within Roho congregations in Western Kenya.¹⁵

CONCLUSION: A NEW REDEMPTION SON G In the twenty-first century, Christianity in Africa is called to re-examine its place in the public square. Its response to urgent issues such as poverty, democratic dispensation, injustice, terror, and interreligious dialogue will determine its relevance within the African continent. At a time when the world is sated with many contentious issues, the Church does not have the luxury to be at the side-lines. African Christians are wary of the Western secular intellectual tradition which is suspicious of crucial social influences of religion. Although African Christians have embraced some of the ideals of democratic pluralism, Western liberal antipathy towards religious sensibilities does not find fertile soil in sub-Saharan Africa. The African experience boldly affirms that Christianity invigorates rather than undermines culture and society. This profile enables African churches to reclaim the prophetic dimension of the Gospel. Dissent is not just about the establishment of indigenous ¹⁴ See J. Akin Omoyajowo, ‘The Cherubim and Seraphim Movement: a Study in Interaction’, Orita: Ibadan Journal of Religious Studies IV, 2 (Dec. 1970), pp. 124–39. ¹⁵ See Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton, Women of Fire and Spirit: History, Faith, and Gender in Roho Religion in Western Kenya (New York, 1996).

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churches and congregations. It also calls for an unequivocal rejection of oppressive ideologies that engender marginalization, poverty, violence, and injustice. It is the power to proclaim the good news with new tongues and to see it with new eyes.

SEL E C T B I B L I OG R A P H Y Ayandele, E. A. The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842–1914 (Burnt Mill: Longman, 1981 edn). Bediako, Kwame. Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (Edinburgh; Maryknoll, NY, Edinburgh University Press; Orbis Books, 1995). Bediako, Kwame. Jesus and the Gospel in Africa: History and Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004). Carman, John B. ‘Missions and the Translatable Gospel.’ The Christian Century CVI, 25 (30 Aug.–6 Sept. 1989): 786–91. Fyfe, Christopher, and Andrew Walls, eds. Christianity in Africa in the 1990s (Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1996). Garvey, Brian. Bembaland Church: Religious and Social Change in South Central Africa, 1891–1964 (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1994). Gifford, Paul. African Christianity: Its Public Role (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998). Gray, Richard. Black Christians and White Missionaries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). Hastings, Adrian. The Church in Africa: 1450–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Hinfelaar, Hugo F. Bemba-Speaking Women of Zambia in a Century of Religious Change (1892–1992) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994). Hoehler-Fatton, Cynthia. Women of Fire and Spirit: History, Faith, and Gender in Roho Religion in Western Kenya (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Hussain, Amir, ‘Life as a Muslim Scholar of Islam in Post-9/11 America’, in Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, ed., Subverting Hatred: The Challenge of Nonviolence in Religious Traditions (Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY, 2007). Idowu, Bolaji E. The Selfhood of the Church in Africa (Lagos: Methodist Church of Nigeria, ND). Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of Christianity in Africa (Grand Rapids, MI: Lawrenceville, NJ: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.; Africa World Press Inc., 1995). Kalu, Ogbu. African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Kalu, Ogbu U., ed. African Christianity: An African Story (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc., 2007). Kalu, Ogbu U., ed. ‘Changing Tides: Some Currents in World Christianity at the Opening of the Twenty-First Century’, in Ogbu U. Kalu, ed., Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, MI, 2008).

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Indigenization, Translation, and Transformation in African Christianity 85 Kalu, Ogbu U., ed. ‘African Traditional Religion and Its Modern Fate’, in Peter B. Clarke and Peter Beyer, eds, The World’s Religions: Continuities and Transformations (Routledge: New York, 2009). Omoyajowo, J. Akin. ‘The Cherubim and Seraphim Movement: a Study in Interaction.’ Orita: Ibadan Journal of Religious Studies IV, 2 (Dec. 1970): 124–39. Rossinow, Doug. ‘Prophecy and Progress: Christianity and Dissent in Modern America.’ Journal of Historical Sociology XXVIII, 1 (March 2015): 90–103. Sanneh, Lamin. West African Christianity: The Religious Impact (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983). Sanneh, Lamin O. Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans Publishers, 2003). Sanneh, Lamin. Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Sanneh, Lamin. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009 edn). Sindima, Harvey J. Drums of Redemption: An Introduction to African Christianity (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994). Sundkler, Bengt, and Christopher Steed. A History of the Church in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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Part II Asia and the Middle East

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4 Protestant Dissenting Traditions in Asia in the Twentieth Century John Roxborogh

TRADITIONS OF FAITH Given the passage of time since Protestant missions appeared in Asia in the eighteenth century, it is not surprising that their traditions have become deeply interwoven with local cultural influences, with each other, and also with the spirituality of Anglican churches which are also widely present. At the same time, it has been observed that the growing edge of Asian Christianity is significantly Pentecostal to the point where Pentecostalism might be taken as representative of Protestantism generally.¹ The related and older tradition of evangelicalism is also a pervasive characteristic of Protestant Christianity in Asia. The influence of international faith missions and para-church agencies is ongoing.² Churches linked historically to English Dissent can also include Fundamentalist, Liberal, and Free Church traditions. No one of these movements—however linked historically—provides a fully reliable marker of British dissenting influence, especially as all traditions continue to diversify in the face of new religious, ethical, and social challenges. Separating out these traditions and their trajectories is difficult. Pentecostalism today includes Anglicans and Catholics. The designation Protestant includes Lutherans and Anglicans, although some Anglicans do not like the word. Methodism arrived in Asia both from Britain and via America, but with distinct traditions. Both owed a debt to Moravian Lutheranism, as did the Protestant missionary movement generally.³ Evangelicals have long included ¹ David H. Lumsdaine, ed., Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Asia (New York, 2009), p. 6. ² Simon Chan, ‘Evangelical Theology in Asian Contexts’, in Timothy Larsen and Daniel J. Treier, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology (Cambridge, 2007), p. 227. ³ Ian M. Randall, ‘Nonconformists and Overseas Mission’, in Robert Pope, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (London, 2013).

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many Anglicans, and by 1967 Anglican evangelicalism was defining the movement in Britain.⁴ Fundamentalism describes mentalities found in religions and ideologies in general. In post-colonial situations, the term ‘free church’ applies to churches generally in the sense of independence from state control, if not freedom from government authority.⁵ However the term is also used by some in Asia to signal their freedom from traditional denominational structures, not just from the state. Asian Christianity is often acutely aware of how terms arising in Western contexts symbolize different aspects of faith and identity, but they are also using them in relation to the needs of their own context. As led by the late Timothy Tow, for example, the Bible Presbyterian Church in Singapore and Malaysia drew inspiration from both the Chinese revivalist John Sung and from the American Fundamentalist, Carl McIntire. It has Presbyterian governance and a separatist theology, yet can also be seen as deeply contextual. Sung himself rejected Western theology, missionaries, and churches, yet he also connected to streams found among Dissenters in the holiness, separatist, Pentecostal, and revivalist traditions.⁶ Dissenting traditions can certainly be identified, but they are mixed with other identity markers and the extent to which they represent an unambiguous legacy from dissenting mission and influence needs to be considered with some care.

ASIAN AGENCY AND DISSENTING L EGACIES While the significance of Western contributions to Asian Christianity has often been overstated, in both classic mission histories and nationalist antiChristian polemics, the need to distance Christian identity from associations of colonialism is important. Asian agency in the complex reception, formation, and reformation of Christian faith, is a proper focus of current historiography in Asia. It also takes note of how many of the traditions which came to Asia were mediated by experience in other contexts, including that of migration within Asia itself.

⁴ Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity: 1920–1990 (London; Philadelphia, PA: 1991 edn), p. 553. ⁵ Julius Bautista and Francis Khek Gee Lim, eds., Christianity and the State in Asia: Complicity and Conflict (London, 2009). Daniel P. S. Goh, ‘State and Social Christianity in Post-Colonial Singapore’, Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia XXV, 1 (2010). ⁶ Timothy Tow, John Sung My Teacher (Singapore, 1985). Michael Nai-Chiu Poon, ‘Interpreting John Sung’s Legacy in Southeast Asia’, Trinity Theological Journal XXI, (2013). Xi Lian, Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (New Haven, CT, 2010), pp. 131–54.

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Nevertheless, legacies from Protestant Dissent remain part of the Asian story. English Protestant Dissent was itself diverse, and in its contact with Asia through trade, empire, mission, and military service, it acquired further layers of complexity. There were different phases and generations. Some came directly from Britain, like the Baptists in India, and the London Missionary Society in Southeast Asia and China; others via the descendants of migrant groups who had taken these traditions to North America and British settlements around the world, like Methodist Episcopalians. Of particular significance in terms of personnel, financial commitment, and institutional development in Asia, were the dissenting traditions which had migrated from Britain to the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.⁷ In those settings, they gained financial and political independence, were subject to new theological emphases and fashions, experienced different social environments, and shared in the missionary movement which felt itself drawn to Asia through the nineteenth century and beyond. North Americans, particularly Methodists, enjoyed unprecedented freedoms, challenges, and opportunities for entrepreneurial religious ventures which unleashed energy, a confidence born of pragmatism, successful business skills, and a sense of manifest destiny which was ready to take on the world, including Asia, for Christ.⁸ The importance of this was heightened for churches in the United States by a sense of Asia’s economic potential and military threat, particularly as posed by Japan, Communist China, and the war in Vietnam. Churches in Asia themselves contributed to this mediated and interactive inter-generational development through the migration of Chinese Christians from South China to Southeast Asia and Indian Christians from India to British Malaya. These included families and communities who resettled and formed new churches, as well as visiting evangelists, revivalists, pastors, business people, and politicians—of whom the first president of the Chinese Republic, the Congregationalist Sun Yat-sen, is probably the most notable. Often influenced by their experience of mission school education, many sought to be part of a new future for their countries, and saw Protestantism and its confidence in dealing with a modern scientific world as having something to offer for this life as well as for the life to come. Many were acutely aware that the faith they embraced was contested, yet their commitment had depth and resilience despite the many political and social convulsions of the twentieth century. Missionary involvement peaked ⁷ Ian Breward, A History of the Churches in Australasia (Oxford, 2001). William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago, IL, 1987). Hugh Morrison, Pushing Boundaries: New Zealand Protestants and Overseas Missions 1827–1939 (Dunedin, New Zealand, 2016). ⁸ David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven, CT, 2005). Darrell L. Whiteman and Gerald H. Anderson, eds., World Mission in the Wesleyan Spirit (Franklin, TN, 2009).

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and fell and power was transferred to the local church, albeit in fits and starts. Political independence and new ideologies brought challenges for those who owed an allegiance to Jesus Christ which transcended national and cultural boundaries. Whether it was noticed or not, the political realities surrounding the history of Dissent in Britain were often reflected in the political circumstances which framed the experience of Christianity in post-independence Asia. Forms and practices found in English Dissent, by force of circumstance, can nevertheless carry either similar or quite different symbolic and social meaning. Sometimes this is unconscious, but there are Asian church leaders who themselves reflect on and adapt traditions which they explicitly own as part of their heritage. Asian Methodism still seeks to spread scriptural holiness. Illustrations from John Wesley’s life and teaching remain part of the currency of Methodist sermons. A study of revivals by Bishop Robert Solomon of the Methodist Church in Singapore, including of the Welsh revival of 1904, provides a context for understanding parallel Asian Christian experiences including in Korea, parts of China, India, and through the influence of Pandita Ramabai.⁹

ORIGINS, TRACES, AND P ARALLELS Although Christianity in Asia predates European contact, and Roman Catholics were active long before Protestants, English Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians were pioneers of Protestant missions in India, China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. The faith and traditions of English Dissent were mediated by missionaries and church leaders, colonial officials, soldiers, merchants, and their families. They were owned and shaped by Asian converts and migrants in successive generations who found in the faith and narratives of Protestant Dissent validations of their own religious and social experience, and aspirations. India was an early focus of British missionary interest, particularly inspired by William Carey, and his influence on Bible translations is not the least of his contributions. Adoniram Judson’s translation remains important in Myanmar. British Methodists arrived in Ceylon in 1814, expanding to India, China, and Burma. The goal of reaching China became possible from 1842, after the first Opium War. By 1900, Christian missions, including those influenced by English Dissent, were active in most of Asia except Vietnam. American missions worked wherever they could get access, including in British controlled areas as well as Korea, Japan, and, from 1898, the Philippines. ⁹ Robert M. Solomon and Michael Nai-Chiu Poon, Understanding Christian Revivals (Singapore, 2012), pp. 64–77.

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Open Brethren missionaries in India and Malaya established patterns which proved influential, and millennial teachings, revivalist movements, the dispensationalism of the Scofield Bible, and a sense of being a bounded elect community, have had their own trajectories among Chinese Christians, including Watchman Nee’s Little Flock. North Americans committed substantial evangelistic, educational, and medical resources to Asia through Baptists in Burma, the Methodist Episcopal Church in India, China, and island Southeast Asia, and Presbyterians in Korea, China, Japan, and Thailand.¹⁰ American Unitarians had influence in Japan¹¹ and on the founders of the Philippine Independent Church.¹² Australian and New Zealand Brethren, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist missionaries contributed to church and social development, ecumenical networks such as the Christian Conference of Asia, and theological education in India, China, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Indonesia. The Keswick movement brought Anglicans and others together, helping sustain the cultivation of an intense, mission-focused, prayerful, and apolitical piety across denominational boundaries and their resilience in times of persecution has been striking. The CIM connected with this and further developed the links between those from nonconformist churches and evangelical Anglicans. The last China Inland Mission (CIM) Director based in China prior to the communist revolution, was an Anglican bishop, Bishop Houghton. From the late nineteenth century resources were increasingly allocated to education and medicine. In China, the Welsh Baptist Timothy Richard and the CIM founder Hudson Taylor represent diverse responses; Richard addressing social needs and Taylor maintaining evangelistic priorities. Millennialism and holiness concerns influenced differences in piety and theology. Yet medical needs could not be completely ignored by either tradition and the provision of education appealed to constituencies at home as well as in Asia. Despite being successful pioneers of higher education in India, in Asia generally, Scottish Presbyterians were outshone by American Methodists in their commitment to higher education as a form of mission. Yet most Presbyterians believed in an educated leadership as essential for self-governing churches. Some rejoiced at this more holistic sense of mission, but others, like John Nevius, saw the foundation of a self-supporting church in disciplined Bible study and learning to pray. His method was hugely influential in Korea, and its influence continues. Others discerned that what was holistic in terms of the ¹⁰ G. Thompson Brown, Earthen Vessels and Transcendent Power: American Presbyterians in China, 1837–1952 (Maryknoll, NY, 1997). Scott W. Sunquist and Caroline N. Long, eds., A History of Presbyterian Missions, 1944–2007 (Louisville, KY, 2008). ¹¹ Michel Mohr, Buddhism, Unitarianism, and the Meiji Competition for Universality (Cambridge, MA, 2014). ¹² Peter G. Gowing, Islands under the Cross: The Story of the Church in the Philippines (Manila, 1967), pp. 139–40, 64–6.

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range of God’s concerns for humankind could also be imperialistic, expensive, and unsustainable. As some sensed, a wider vision of mission also ‘reflected a waning of confidence in traditional evangelism’ and mission schools contributed leaders to the forces of nationalism as much as to the churches themselves. A later perspective might consider that both approaches were part of the contribution of dissenting traditions to China. Taylor’s intense spirituality, and the stories of his answered prayers, at first translated more directly into an indigenized independent Chinese Christianity. Richards was hardly lacking in piety himself, but his wider vision of Christian responsibility is perhaps only more recently gaining a more secure acceptance. No tradition is static. The experience of other cultures and religions and their changing political contexts reshaped and enriched theologies already diversifying into liberal and conservative streams and a more complex understanding of mission in engagement with massive social needs. The ambiguities of association with empire, and first-hand encounters with the sophistication of Hinduism, Chinese religions, and Islam, affected the self-understanding of many missionaries, as did the collapse of British credibility at the hands of Japan. Many had their faith enlarged—Lesslie Newbigin drew heavily on his experience in India during his ministry through the International Missionary Council and Presbyterian Church of England, later the United Reformed Church.¹³ However, there were also those who lost their faith.¹⁴

C H R I S T IA N IT Y I N A S I A I N T H E TW E N T I E T H CENTURY During the twentieth century Christianity in Asia increased in numbers and significance, survived the trauma of wars, distanced itself from its ambiguous linkages and associations with Western colonialism, rediscovered its preEuropean history, took responsibility for its own future, and asserted its presence among the major cultural blocks of world Christianity. At the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910, some of the only speeches still remembered are those from Indian, Japanese, and Chinese delegates who rejected missionary paternalism and Western denominationalism. The alliance between Protestantism and modernization which seemed so promising at the time, later dissolved in the debacle of World War I and the shift in perception in China in particular that Christianity was a superstitious foreign religion and a cloak for imperialism. Although growth continued, the ¹³ Michael W. Goheen, ‘As the Father Has Sent Me, I Am Sending You’: J.E. Lesslie Newbigin’s Missionary Ecclesiology (Zoetermeer, Netherlands, 2000). ¹⁴ Xi Lian, The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932 (University Park, PA, 1997). John Hersey, The Call (New York, 1985).

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missionary movement faltered and Christianity in Asia seemed to stall in the face of Islamic resilience, Hindu nationalism, diverse Buddhist traditions, the tacky associations of Western colonialism, the suffering and dislocation caused by Japanese expansion, and the conflict between nationalist and communist forces in China. The 1938 gathering of the International Missionary Council (IMC) at Madras Christian College at Tambaram in India brought Asia and world Christianity together on the verge of a new European conflict. Protestants had become divided over mission to other faiths and participation in social movements, especially when these took the form of independence struggles. The IMC drew strong leadership from Methodist, Congregationalist, and British Baptist traditions and its impact in Asia through the encouragement of local councils of churches and schemes for church union was considerable. As the century progressed, churches in Asia associated with British Baptist, London Missionary Society, English Presbyterian, and British Methodist missions frequently merged into larger union entities. Presbyterians and Congregationalists proved easier to unite than other traditions and in India formed the South India United Church in 1910 and the United Church of North India in 1924. In 1934 the Church of Christ in Thailand brought together congregations founded by American Presbyterians, the British Churches of Christ, and some Baptists and Lutherans. In India, the Church of South India (CSI) came into existence in late 1947 just before Independence, and the Church of North India (CNI) in 1971, both bringing Anglican churches into union with dissenting traditions. While some remnants of the old antipathy between Anglicans and Dissent resurfaced, particularly in England, Indian church leaders saw it as more important to be part of national Christian churches than to maintain divisions from another era in another world. The ecumenical movement was also strongly supportive of local theological education and leadership development. Through church unions and shared experiences in training for ministry, significant parts of mainstream Dissent were reconnecting with the Anglican communion; though both also had the result that distinctives of the dissenting traditions were muted. After 1947, the story of the London Missionary Society (LMS) missions in India became the story of the new dioceses of the CSI more than that of ongoing Congregationalist influence. The World Council of Churches (WCC) was formed in 1948 and in 1961 met in New Delhi, further reconnecting world Christianity with Asia at the height of what many referred to as an Asian revolution. The meeting brought the IMC within the umbrella of the WCC, but the more vision of the ecumenical movement in the 1960s was problematic for many Asian churches, no matter how much they were fully aware of the issues facing churches in an era of decolonization and cold war. Yet in Korea and elsewhere the forces of nationalism which created problems in some areas were making Christianity relevant in new ways in others. In parts of the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma,

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Northeast India, and among untouchable Dalit classes or tribal groups who sought to reject a nationalist religion they did not share (Hinduism in India, Islam in Malaysia, Indonesia, and West Papua), Christian faith contributed to social identities of political significance. It was important that local not Western leadership shaped responses to these changes. Indigenous leadership demonstrated decisively that the church would not disappear with the departing Europeans. As Asia grew in importance, economically and politically, so did the church, not only in weight of numbers, but also through the critical reflections needed for examining how contextualized expressions gave space for Asian autonomy. The historical surprise was the return of Christian faith as both a popular and an intellectual option in China following the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. By 2000 Asian Christianity was numerous, diverse, populist, and articulate; fundamentally a believing tradition in a vast part of the world which never much lost its sense of the spiritual. Pentecostalism has found a resonance with Asian worldviews and aspirations across a wide range of personal, social, and economic circumstances¹⁵ spreading from many sources including through the Ceylon Pentecostal Mission from 1923, and the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship from the 1970s. The success of the Charismatic movement within most Protestant groups helped Pentecostalism to become a normative Asian spirituality. Pentecostalism can be both fiercely evangelistic and deeply syncretistic in its contextualiation, but it is also bringing a new acceptance of the sacramental in Protestant spirituality.¹⁶ At the same time, corporate business models, both Asian and Western, sometimes carry a new clericalism, whatever its teaching about spiritual gifts empowering all believers. Christianity in Asia today faces pressures in many places, but it is the majority faith in the Philippines and East Timor, and has the allegiance of some 30 per cent of the population in South Korea. In China it is commonly estimated that some 2–3 per cent are Christian, amounting to some 30 to 40 million people, 80 per cent of whom are believed to be Protestant.¹⁷ The number of Christians in India reported in the 2011 census was 27.8 million, or 2.3 per cent of the total population.¹⁸ One compilation suggests that some 26 per cent of Christians ¹⁵ Allan Anderson and Edmond Tang, eds., Asian and Pentecostal: The Charismatic Face of Christianity in Asia (Oxford, 2005). ¹⁶ Simon Chan, Grassroots Asian Theology (Downers Grove, IL, 2014). ¹⁷ The Wikipedia entry ‘Christianity in China’ includes summaries from a range of independent surveys. The 2012 figures of 1.9 per cent of the total population being Protestant and 0.4 per cent Roman Catholic are based on surveys associated with Peking University and are reasonably consistent with other surveys, though some would double these figures. Wikipedia, Christianity in China, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_China#Demographics_and_geography, (accessed 31 Jan. 2018). ¹⁸ India Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, C-1 Population by Religious Community, http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011census/C-01.html, (accessed 31 Jan. 2018).

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are Protestants other than Lutherans (3.2 per cent), or members of the CNI and CSI (16 per cent).¹⁹ The Salvation Army has work in most Asian countries. Quakers remain less common, but were quietly influential in post-war Japan and had the credibility to be welcome in Communist China in 1955. The YMCA, founded by the English Congregationalist George Williams in 1844, was by the year 2000 active in eighteen Asian countries. Dissenters in England in their day included many successful businessmen and numbers came to Asia as managers in factories and plantations, founders of industry,²⁰ and retailers.²¹ Asian Christians in business, including Pentecostals, have become a phenomenon in themselves in China, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, standing in a tradition in which entrepreneurial ability combined with an overt religious faith can create opportunities, even for those otherwise marginalized by political establishments.²² It is no accident that there is now a literature in Chinese and English which includes training for ‘Entrepreneurs with Christian Values’.²³ That this can also involve renegotiation of the place of Christianity in public political spaces cannot be surprising.²⁴

CHURCH AND S TATE In many Asian contexts there are churches which have experienced constraints in their public role and who then modify their mission to find points of contact ¹⁹ Calculations derived from an undated compilation on Wikipedia, Christianity in India, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_India, (accessed 31 Jan. 2018). ²⁰ Eric Selby Little (1864–1939) was converted under D. L. Moody at Cambridge, became a China missionary with the Methodist Episcopal Church in California, and later resigned to develop the company which became ICI China. Patrick Brodie, Crescent over Cathay: China and ICI 1898–1956 (Hong Kong; Oxford, 1990). ²¹ Jason Lim, ‘Assumptions and Evidence: The Case of Philip Robinson (1830–1886)’, Brethren Archivists and Historians Network Review III, (2004). Robinson was a Particular Baptist in England who migrated to Melbourne Australia, then Singapore where he was a founder of the company which bore his name, and also of the Open Brethren Assembly, Bethesda Chapel. ²² Joy Kooi-Chin Tong, Overseas Chinese Christian Entrepreneurs in Modern China: A Case Study of the Influence of Christian Ethics on Business Life (London; New York, 2012); Edmund Terence Gomez and others, ‘Introduction: Religion, Business and Contestation in Malaysia and Singapore’, Pacific Affairs LXXXVIII, 2 (June 2015). Juliette Koning, ‘Singing Yourself into Existence: Chinese Indonesian Entrepreneurs, Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity and the Indonesian Nation State’, in Julius Bautista and Francis Khek Gee Lim, eds., Christianity and the State in Asia: Complicity and Conflict (London, 2009). ²³ Christoph Stückelberger et al., Entrepreneurs with Christian Values: Training Handbook for 12 Modules, Vol. III (Geneva, 2016). ²⁴ Daniel P. S. Goh, ‘Pluralist Secularism and the Displacements of Christian Proselytizing in Singapore’, in Juliana Finucane and R. Michael Feener, eds., Proselytizing and the Limits of Religious Pluralism in Contemporary Asia (New York, 2013).

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rather than conflict with government policy. Others remain in relationships of confrontation and repression. Whatever constitutional declarations of religious freedom may exist, there are religions and ideologies with the political or social power to restrict freedoms of association, belief, and worship in ways which parallel the repression of Dissent in England. It is not irrelevant to note how in a context of toleration and economic success, Victorian dissenting traditions experienced both the power of moral influence and the temptations of nationalism. Although the Victorian ‘Nonconformist Conscience’ had mixed feelings about the legitimacy of empire, a belief in God’s providence helped the acceptance of its values and assumptions.²⁵ It could both oppose opium trading between India and China and thank God for the opportunities that the Opium Wars provided for evangelism. If accommodation to the dominant culture at home contributed to both the success and subsequent decline of the dissenting traditions, it also raises questions about the importance of distinctiveness not just cultural acceptance as elements in the dissenting legacy. The colonial era in particular highlighted the ambiguity of being viewed as a government religion even if dissenting missions did not see themselves that way. In China, Fuzhou the Episcopal Methodist mission, the Congregationalist American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) from America, and the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) were among the dominant missions. Their theology was similar, but in situations of conflict it was the Anglican CMS which was the more willing to accept protection from the British government.²⁶ When compensation was offered to victims of the Boxer rebellion, it was the CIM with its dissenting ethos which refused to accept government money. Awareness of these issues and responses is important today, including for those living with state and cultural Hinduism in India and Nepal, Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and to some extent Thailand; Islam in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Southern Philippines, and Malaysia; Shinto in Japan, and Communism in China, Vietnam, and North Korea. Early attitudes between Anglican and dissenting missions varied widely, but by the mid-twentieth century were generally beginning to thaw. The Japanese occupation brought shared experiences of suffering. Post-colonial Asian experiences of navigating relationships with the state also brought Anglicans and other churches together in a common cause, one in which a critical understanding of their more distant and distinct heritages may be helpful for exploring options for a constructive role in society. ²⁵ Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA, 1999). ²⁶ Ryan Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857–1927 (New Haven, CT, 2001).

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Today, Singapore churches see themselves as offering a model of respectful citizenship of value in other Asian contexts including Vietnam and China where governments see few boundaries to their concern for the beliefs and values of their people.²⁷ In Hong Kong, Anglicans and Protestant churches generally have taken an active though not always united role in issues of democracy and religious freedom.²⁸ Weber and Troeltsch’s church–sect typology²⁹ highlights the importance of individual commitment and social marginality in religious identity. The category of ‘sect’ (not to be confused with sectarian) suggests mentalities expected of any minority group. For Christians this may include an emphasis on social differentiation and conversion more than nurture and assimilation as the framework for initiation and enculturation in the church. Arguably, it is not primarily the influence of Baptists which has led to the widespread provision of adult baptisteries in Methodist and Anglican churches, including the CSI in India, and among some other paedo-baptist traditions, as much as it is living in a context in which a primary need is to signal one’s allegiance to Christ over against the outside world. Nevertheless, some groups draw the boundary between Jesus and other traditions in ways which deliberately connect with the religion of their communities.³⁰ Some of these reflect Catholic more than Protestant traits, but Protestants have also seen their faith as the fulfilment of other religious aspirations such as those in the Bhakti traditions of Hinduism. Both syncretism and antisyncretism, for instance, represent trajectories of Protestant Christianity.³¹ The Asian sense of navigating multiple identities—ethnic, national, and religious—is common.³² Christianity in Asia can never ignore its relationship with the state. The sense of being outsiders to power and having to negotiate one’s place in society are points of long-standing continuity with dissenting traditions. The

²⁷ Michael Nai-Chiu Poon, ed., Pilgrims and Citizens: Christian Social Engagement in East Asia Today (Adelaide, South Australia, 2006). ²⁸ Beatrice Leung and Shun-hing Chan, Changing Church and State Relations in Hong Kong, 1950–2000 (Hong Kong, 2003). Rose Wu, A Dissenting Church (Hong Kong, 2003). ²⁹ Lorne L. Dawson, ‘Church–Sect–Cult: Constructing Typologies of Religious Groups’, in Peter B. Clarke, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion (Oxford, 2009). ³⁰ Jonas Adelin Jørgensen, ‘Indigenization, Syncretism and the Assumed Boundedness of Christianity: A Critique’, in Afe Adogame and Shobana Shankar, eds., Religion on the Move!: New Dynamics of Religious Expansion in a Globalizing World (Leiden, 2013); Jonas Adelin Jørgensen, Jesus Imandars and Christ Bhaktas: Two Case Studies of Interreligious Hermeneutics and Identity in Global Christianity (Frankfurt am Main, 2008). ³¹ Edwin Zehner, ‘Orthodox Hybridities: Anti-Syncretism and Localization in the Evangelical Christianity of Thailand’, Anthropological Quarterly LXXVIII, 3 (Summer 2005). ³² Kang-San Tan, ‘Can Christians Belong to More Than One Religious Tradition?’, Evangelical Review of Theology XXXIV, 3 (2010). Albertus Bagus Laksana, ‘Multiple Religious Belonging or Complex Identity?: An Asian Way of Being Religious’, in Felix Wilfred, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Christianity in Asia (New York, 2014).

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social and religious pressures experienced by Indian Dalits who turned to Christianity in mass movements in large numbers parallels the historic oppression of Dissenters in England. For both it added to a sense of God’s hand in difficult circumstances. A sense of social and religious difference has also reinforced the Christian identity of hill tribes in Northeast India, Karen and Chin tribes in Myanmar, Hmong Evangelicals in Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, Miao in China,³³ and (despite their economic power) Chinese Pentecostals in Indonesia. Dissent in the background of Protestant missions may have been more important as an indicator that church–state relations are intrinsically fraught than as a guarantor of whether particular groups are likely to favour cooperation with the state or leave the things of Caesar to Caesar. In Thailand in the 1920s, American Presbyterian missionaries valued their close personal ties with royalty.³⁴ In Korea, Methodist and Presbyterian resistance to Japanese Shinto helped identify Christianity with Korean nationalism. During the communist Emergency in British Malaya, Protestant missions tried to avoid being seen as ‘running dogs of Imperialists’. Individuals could however change sides. Chen Chonggui, an evangelical who had links to the CIM, was one who later joined the Three Self Patriotic Movement.³⁵ Although many found it hard to understand how faith in Christ could lead to diametrically opposed reactions to the demands of a totalitarian state, it is an indication that a particular heritage guarantees little in terms of how new challenges to faith may be judged by different people in different generations.

PERSISTENT M ARKERS During the twentieth century, as Christianity in Asia became increasingly determined by its contexts and agency, a number of markers of Dissent could still readily be identified. The place of the Bible in worship and in personal devotional life continues to reflect a dissenting heritage. Issues of biblical hermeneutics appear more likely to arise where there has been a dissenting influence and the burden of interpretation, say in regard to the

³³ John Pritchard, Methodists and Their Missionary Societies 1900–1996 (Farnham, 2014), pp. 67–71. ³⁴ George Bradley McFarland, ed., Historical Sketch of Protestant Missions in Siam, 1828–1928. Introduction, Commentary and Bibliography by Herbert R. Swanson (Bangkok, 1999). ³⁵ Daniel H. Bays, ‘Foreign Missions and Indigenous Protestant Leaders in China, 1920–1955: Identity and Loyalty in an Age of Powerful Nationalism’, in Brian Stanley, ed., Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003).

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Protestant Dissenting Traditions in Asia in the Twentieth Century 101 place of women in leadership, is placed on local churches.³⁶ A preference for extemporary prayer over scripted liturgies is common, though not universal. A distaste for clerical robes might be taken as a commonality with dissenting traditions, except that Methodist clergy often robe. If some new clerical identity markers may be taken from the mores of the business world, including conspicuous consumption, business suits, and smart cars, others are more modest. An anthropological study of a Salvation Army mission in Indonesia provides an example of how ritual actions can shift their symbolic meaning even as they appear indicators of continuity.³⁷ Some codes can survive seemingly intact. In 1986, years after New Zealand missionary families had left, a New Zealand visitor staying with us attended an Open Brethren chapel in Kuala Lumpur. He recognized immediately the subtle tones, emphases, and pauses of the unwritten liturgy, and knew precisely when it was appropriate for him to speak. The names given to congregations can also reflect historic links. Saints are left to Anglicans and Catholics with a few older Presbyterian churches identifying with St Andrew. An occasional long-dead donor is still rewarded with their name on the building. Moore Memorial Church in Shanghai, was named after an American Methodist donor in 1900.³⁸ Masland Methodist Church in Sibu, Sarawak, is also an important Chinese congregation. Despite common moves towards congregational designation by location, or aspiration (Hope, Dream), or theology (Trinity, Grace), the names Baptist, Brethren, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Wesley—though seldom Congregational or LMS and never ABCFM—are still in use. Antipathy to Roman Catholicism as a mark of Dissent was long common, and the sense of rivalry could be bitter, yet these attitudes were never quite universal.³⁹ Catholics were themselves Dissenters in Anglican England, and criticism of Catholicism has faded as a defining trait of Protestantism. This has been aided by the impact of Vatican II, personal friendships, and shared experiences in mission and through the charismatic renewal which did a lot to break the power of stereotypes. It has deepened through movements for spiritual formation and direction including the influence of Ignatian spirituality. Sometimes political leaders have required Catholics and Protestants to

³⁶ Chloë Starr, ed., Reading Christian Scriptures in China (London, 2008). ³⁷ Lorraine V. Aragon, Fields of the Lord: Animism, Christian Minorities, and State Development in Indonesia (Honolulu, Hawai’i, 2000). ³⁸ John Craig William Keating, A Protestant Church in Communist China: Moore Memorial Church Shanghai, 1949–1989 (Bethlehem, PA, 2012). ³⁹ Robert Morrison acknowledged his debt to Catholic translators. In 1907, the China Centenary Missionary Conference in Shanghai commended ‘several books issued by the Romanists’. China Centenary Missionary Conference, China Centenary Missionary Conference Records. Report of the Great Conference Held at Shanghai, April 5th [Read 25th] to May 8th, 1907 (New York, 1907), p. 198.

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work together negotiating with government agencies; nevertheless in Indonesia, Catholicism and Protestantism are officially classed as different religions and they are often seen this way in other countries as well. In Presbyterian churches it can still be common to drop the word ‘Catholic’ from the Apostles Creed to avoid the possibility of confessing belief in Roman Catholicism. At a popular level, attitudes can be mixed. A Filipina Baptist in Singapore informed me that she used to be a Catholic, ‘but now I am a Christian’. In a slip of the tongue, a Catholic friend told me of a tribal area in Northeast India where ‘half the people are Presbyterians’ and ‘the other half are Christian’. Puritan classics continue to attract Asian interest. In the 1840s, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was translated into Khasi in India by Welsh Calvinistic Methodists. It is found in many translations including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Tamil, Burmese, Bengali, Malay, Thai, Sinhalese, Malayalam, and Vietnamese.⁴⁰ Writings by Richard Baxter, John Owen, and Matthew Henry appear in Korean and Chinese. The Congregationalist theologian P. T. Forsyth is a source of serious theological engagement in Japan through a P. T. Forsyth Society, and studies and translations of his work can be found in Japanese and Korean.⁴¹ Apart from Methodists, early Protestant missionaries, including Baptists, may have been moderate Calvinists theologically, yet until quite recently Calvin’s name was seldom invoked. That interest in his life and theology has become a growing phenomenon, is an example of a parallel to non-Methodist Dissent rather than a direct trajectory from it.⁴² Recognizable patterns of Dissent are detectable in attitudes which run in contrary directions as in both social concern and political diffidence, commitment to church union and opposition to it, and in styles of worship from the liturgically casual and symbolically sparse to the overwhelming sensationalism of pop culture revivalism. A certain kind of rationality that is fascinated with prophecy is easily recognizable. Expectations of the miraculous and the experiential in which the problems of theodicy are simply ignored are found both in many dissenting traditions and in Asian folk religion. Religious architecture still marks a point of difference from Anglican and Catholic sensibilities, though gothic features can be found in some Methodist and Presbyterian churches. House churches and commercial buildings adapted for worship are commonly Protestant. Mega-churches are usually Pentecostal, often using event-centres modelled on theatres and entertainment ⁴⁰ David N. Dixon, ‘The Second Text: Missionary Publishing and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research XXXVI, 2 (April 2012). Although Dixon’s focus is Africa rather than Asia, his analysis is broadly applicable. ⁴¹ Searches on OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Worldcat, http://www.worldcat.org/, (accessed 29 Oct. 2015); Jason Goroncy, P T Forsyth in Japan (24 Nov. 2011), http:// jasongoroncy.com/?s=forsyth, (accessed 20 Sep. 2018). ⁴² Bruce Gordon, John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography (Princeton, NJ, 2016), pp. 183–97.

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Protestant Dissenting Traditions in Asia in the Twentieth Century 103 venues as part of an intentional strategy. One cannot imagine Anglicans, even in Singapore, removing every item of religious symbolism and then investing in multi-media to fill the gaps with dynamic images and sounds. City Harvest megachurch in Singapore is only one example of an embrace of business and pop culture using sophisticated marketing and event management skills.⁴³

N EW S Y N T H E S E S Popular Asian spirituality continues to represent a chaotic energy and diversity reminiscent of religion in Cromwell’s England.⁴⁴ It has at times evoked policies of containment, repression, and conformity. The internal responses of ghettoization, engagement, or compliance can also be found, but what are needed are other models of pluralism and identity, including those which move beyond competitive religious versions of economic neo-liberalism. As older ecclesial links became distant, by the end of the millennium, new forms of economic and cultural globalization were seeing Asian Christians with dissenting associations in positions of international influence through a mobile Asian diaspora of church, academic, business, and theological leadership. Scholars from Dissenting, Reformed and Pentecostal traditions include Wonsuk Ma and Simon Chan (Theology and Pentecostalism), Polly Ha (Early English Presbyterianism), C. S. Song (Reformed Theology), Hwa Yung, and Robert Solomon (Methodism). The Sri Lankan Methodist, D. T. Niles was an international ecumenist, missiologist, and hymn writer. India has produced notable theologians with backgrounds in the CSI or CNI, including P. D. Devandandan.⁴⁵ A growing body of believers across the countries of Asia together with new generations of missionaries and migrants from Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and India, have brought into being an Asian face of new translocations of dissenting Christianity. It is also significant that in 1977 the London Missionary Society, formerly the missionary society of English congregationalism, restructured itself to become an international partnership, known since 1980 as the Council for ⁴³ Joy Kooi Chin Tong, ‘Mcdonaldization and the Mega-Churches: A Case Study of City Harvest Church in Singapore’, in Pattana Kitiarsa, ed., Religious Commodifications in Asia: Marketing Gods (New York, 2008). Jeaney Yip and Susan Ainsworth, ‘ “Do Business Till He Comes”: The Business of Housing God in Singapore Megachurches’, Pacific Affairs LXXXVIII, 2 (June 2015). ⁴⁴ Andrew Bradstock, Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England: A Concise History from the English Civil War to the End of the Commonwealth (London, 2011). ⁴⁵ See also William A. Dyrness and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, eds., Global Dictionary of Theology: A Resource for the Worldwide Church (Nottingham, 2008); John C. England, ed., Asian Christian Theologies: A Research Guide to Authors, Movements, Sources, 3 vols., vols I–III (Maryknoll, NY, 2002–4).

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World Mission. In 2012 its secretariat was relocated, and is now in Singapore. Singapore is also the home for the international headquarters of the OMF, formerly the CIM. The Christian Conference of Asia, inheritor of the ecumenical and social visions of Protestant mission in Asia was based in Singapore until 1987 and is now in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Together with the churches and people of faith they represent and serve, each of these represents important elements of the Protestant heritage and its missionary vision which are now located within Asia itself.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Allan, and Edmond Tang, eds., Asian and Pentecostal: The Charismatic Face of Christianity in Asia (Oxford: Regnum Books International, 2005). Bautista, Julius, and Francis Khek Gee Lim, eds., Christianity and the State in Asia: Complicity and Conflict (London: Routledge, 2009). Bays, Daniel H., ‘Foreign Missions and Indigenous Protestant Leaders in China, 1920–1955: Identity and Loyalty in an Age of Powerful Nationalism’, in Brian Stanley, ed., Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003). Brown, G. Thompson, Earthen Vessels and Transcendent Power: American Presbyterians in China, 1837–1952 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997). Chan, Simon. Grassroots Asian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014). Dixon, David N., ‘The Second Text: Missionary Publishing and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.’ International Bulletin of Missionary Research XXXVI, 2 (April 2012): 86–90. Dunch, Ryan, Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857–1927 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). England, John C., ed., Asian Christian Theologies: A Research Guide to Authors, Movements, Sources 3 vols. Vols I–III (Maryknoll, NY: ISPCK/Claretian Publishers/ Orbis Books, 2002–2004). Goh, Daniel P. S., ‘State and Social Christianity in Post-Colonial Singapore.’ Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia XXV, 1 (2010): 54–89. Goh, Daniel P. S., ‘Pluralist Secularism and the Displacements of Christian Proselytizing in Singapore’, in Juliana Finucane and R. Michael Feener, eds, Proselytizing and the Limits of Religious Pluralism in Contemporary Asia (New York: Springer, 2013). Gomez, Edmund Terence, Robert Hunt, and John Roxborogh, ‘Introduction: Religion, Business and Contestation in Malaysia and Singapore.’ Pacific Affairs LXXXVIII, 2 (June 2015): 153–71. Hempton, David, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

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Protestant Dissenting Traditions in Asia in the Twentieth Century 105 Hersey, John, The Call (New York: Knopf, 1985). Jørgensen, Jonas Adelin. Jesus Imandars and Christ Bhaktas: Two Case Studies of Interreligious Hermeneutics and Identity in Global Christianity (Frankfurt AM Main: Peter Lang, 2008). Laksana, Albertus Bagus, ‘Multiple Religious Belonging or Complex Identity?: An Asian Way of Being Religious’, in Felix Wilfred, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Christianity in Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Leung, Beatrice, and Shun-hing Chan, Changing Church and State Relations in Hong Kong, 1950–2000 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003). Lian, Xi, The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). Lian, Xi, Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Mohr, Michel, Buddhism, Unitarianism, and the Meiji Competition for Universality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014). Morrison, Hugh, Pushing Boundaries: New Zealand Protestants and Overseas Missions 1827–1939 (Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University Press, 2016). Poon, Michael Nai-Chiu, ‘Interpreting John Sung’s Legacy in Southeast Asia.’ Trinity Theological Journal XXI (2013): 133–57. Poon, Michael Nai-Chiu. ed., Pilgrims and Citizens: Christian Social Engagement in East Asia Today (Adelaide, South Australia: ATF Press, 2006). Pritchard, John, Methodists and Their Missionary Societies 1900–1996 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). Randall, Ian M., ‘Nonconformists and Overseas Mission’, in Robert Pope, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (London: T & T Clark, 2013). Solomon, Robert M., and Michael Nai-Chiu Poon eds., Understanding Christian Revivals (Singapore: Trinity Theological College, 2012). Starr, Chloë, ed. Reading Christian Scriptures in China (London: T&T Clark, 2008). Sunquist, Scott W., and Caroline N. Long, eds., A History of Presbyterian Missions, 1944–2007 (Louisville, KY: Geneva Press, 2008). Tan, Kang-San, ‘Can Christians Belong to More Than One Religious Tradition?’. Evangelical Review of Theology XXXIV, 3 (2010): 250–64. Thorne, Susan, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). Tong, Joy Kooi Chin, ‘Mcdonaldization and the Mega-Churches: A Case Study of City Harvest Church in Singapore’, in Pattana Kitiarsa, ed., Religious Commodifications in Asia: Marketing Gods (New York: Routledge, 2008). Tong, Joy Kooi-Chin, Overseas Chinese Christian Entrepreneurs in Modern China: A Case Study of the Influence of Christian Ethics on Business Life (London; New York: Anthem Press, 2012). Zehner, Edwin, ‘Orthodox Hybridities: Anti-Syncretism and Localization in the Evangelical Christianity of Thailand.’ Anthropological Quarterly LXXVIII, 3 (Summer 2005): 585–617.

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5 Megachurches in Asia and the Dissenting Movement The Case of Yoido Full Gospel Church Wonsuk Ma

INTRODUCTION As in any social reality, in the context of a mainstream or predominant Christian tradition, various forms of counter- or even anti-establishment streams appear at any given time. It is particularly true when the dominating forms of Christianity wield not only ecclesiastical, but also political power. In British settings, various dissenting movements were birthed to challenge or renew the dominant Anglican Christianity: among these, the Salvation Army, the Brethren, Methodism, and Baptist traditions. Often critical of the dominant religious power, they refused to conform to many of its institutional beliefs and practices. For this reason, they were also called nonconformists. This notion of centre vs periphery is an issue of power: who sets the rules, who controls power, and who is subject to it. In a way, this dissenting or ‘protestant’ impulse is part of the longstanding legacy of Christendom.¹ However, the dynamic involved in this relationship is more complex than a simple subject–object dichotomy. The dissenting movement may appear in diverse forms depending on its socio-religious context. Since the sixteenthcentury Reformation, Christendom has evolved into a number of smaller, national Christendoms found in Europe. Although the predominant universal form of Christendom in the Middle Ages no longer continued, the new, mostly Protestant forms still continued the church–state alliance as the base of its

¹ Stuart Murray, Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange World (Milton Keynes, 2006) surveys this counter movement from the fourth century. His study includes major counter-Christendom movements in each period.

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controlling power. As in the former periods, dissenting movements continued to rise to counter the dominant religious powers. Murray argues that the Anabaptist movement is one good example, challenging the Catholics and the Protestants alike, and yet marginalized and persecuted by both.² Now fast-forward history to the modern day, and move to a radically different social setting from the usual Christian heartlands. Applying the idea of dissenting to today’s Asia (or more specifically Korea) has several immediate challenges. First, to a twenty-first-century Korean Pentecostal, Christianity has never attained a mainstream status in society throughout Asia, except in the Philippines. In fact, in most Asian countries, Christianity has been the latest addition to the competing religious markets in this vast and complex continent. Therefore, the concept of dissenting is extremely foreign to most Asian Christians. Furthermore, Christianity has been generally perceived as a ‘foreign’ or ‘Western’ religion, quite different to Asian minds. In this socio-religious context, the rise of the independent Charismatic movement in the early 1980s may be viewed as the closest comparison to a dissenting initiative. Second, if our understanding of ‘dissenting’ is borrowed from English usage, it is then helpful to assess the spread of Anglicanism in Asia. Understandably, in former colonies of the British Empire, Anglicanism is quite visible. They include India, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. In these places with some exceptions, Christianity (or more specifically Anglicanism) was viewed as part of the dominant political and social power. The same perception is also observed in many sub-Saharan former British colonies. However, in most historically non-English colonies in Asia, Anglicanism is less prominent among Christian churches except perhaps in some parts of China, and almost unnoticed by secular societies. They are Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (once colonized by France), Korea and China (by Japan), the Philippines and Guam (by Spain and later the United States), and Indonesia (by the Netherlands). This contextual reality is important because ‘dissenting’ has to be re-interpreted from the original English into the new Asian context. What is useful, furthermore, is to see if any similar space exists with comparable characteristics and functions in the given context.

‘Dissenting’ in Asia This study investigates whether the megachurch phenomenon in Asia can be placed alongside the historic dissenting groups initially developed in the West.³ The concept of dissenting is a reactionary impulse against the ² Ibid., pp. 150–77. ³ Although its definition is shaped by the social context where a large congregation exists, in Korea, one with more than 10,000 registered members is classified as a megachurch. See

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dominant social and religious forces. Therefore, it is primarily a contextual phenomenon. Considering that the megachurch movement is a relatively recent development, from the 1970s, its emergence needs to be studied in the context of existing Christianity in a given society. This development coincides with the surge of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity in Asia. The shape of this form of Christianity took varied forms in different socioreligious and Christian contexts, and the majority of megachurches may be Pentecostal-Charismatic in their ethos and beliefs. Therefore, it is inevitable that attention should be given to this link. At the same time, the very nature of Pentecostal/charismatic Christianity includes a high level of individual autonomy and counter-cultural impetus, and this includes how a congregation behaves in its context. The birth of a large congregation may be motivated by various forces. One may be termed as a ‘natural’ route: the growth of a large church as an outcome of a social change (e.g., a war, urbanization, etc.) or as part of the general expansion of Christianity. The other may be termed ‘intentional’ in that a congregation or its leader has an intention to numerically grow its congregation. For all practical purposes, the latter is the promising case to examine whether the megachurch movement is motivated by a dissenting spirit. Then the motivation, process, and outcome of such intention become the focal point of our investigation.

The Megachurch Movement in Korea The megachurch movement in Korea in the second half of the twentieth century (that is, after the independence of the nation [1945]) can be presented in three stages of development. The decades assigned to each era do not mean that one type of megachurches ceased to exist by the conclusion, but indicates the appearance of a new type of megachurches. The first era began from the independence through the 1960s, when North Korean refugees who fled the Communist occupation of the north and later during the Korean War, settled in the south. They formed mirror churches of the north in the south. During the war, refugees opened many congregations; for example, over fifteen in Busan during the war years. When the war ended, and hope for returning to their places of origin in the north was frustrated, they recreated churches and Christian schools at the new home. One of them is Youngnak Presbyterian Church, which was the largest congregation in the country until the appearance of Yoido Full Gospel Church. The leaders of these congregations, regardless of their size, were refugees themselves. Many Young-gi Hong, ‘The Backgrounds and Characteristics of the Charismatic Mega-Churches in Korea’, Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies, III, 1 (2000), p. 100.

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had been land and business owners; and they reflected their deep Presbyterian roots in the north with great emphasis on higher education. Some churches grew large and became influential. Megachurches were born out of such unusual social circumstances, with a tendency to draw people of similar social backgrounds and strata. Their emergence often took place in a relatively short period of time, often aided by influential charismatic leaders and rapid social changes, which result in the rise of the numbers of socially marginalized. Sociologically speaking, they provided a spiritual and social haven for the migrant Christians and tended to be strongly anti-Communist. After the rise of the post-war megachurches, David Yonggi Cho occupied a central stage of the second era of megachurches, now well into the 1970s and 1980s. Through this study, much will be discussed of his megachurch movement. If the war was the main social context of the first era, it is poverty that dominated the second social context. Two characteristics may be sufficient to mention for this era. The first is intentionality. Cho desired, planned, and executed church growth from the very beginning. Second, his movement was and still is unapologetically Pentecostal, where healing, exorcism, prayer, blessing, speaking in tongues, and baptism in the Holy Spirit are prominent elements of the lifestyle and ministry of Cho and his church. This initially created megachurches through his apprenticeship, while he spread widely his church growth experience and principles. The third is the rise of a new group of megachurches from the 1980s. Four influential churches in Seoul represent this era: Onnuri Community Church (Yongjo Hah), Sarang Community Church (Han-eum Oak), Global Baptist Church (Dong-won Lee), and Nam Seoul Church (Jung-gil Hong). Although of different denominations, four leaders were post-war ministers with exposure to Western education and formation. Their churches were opened among the middle-class urbanites. Their emphases were different, and yet, they demonstrated an incredible spirit of cooperation. They were equally committed to mission (as the Korean church began to send out their missionaries from the late 1970s). All their churches grew large to become megachurches. Among the four, only one exhibits Pentecostal spirituality,⁴ although others were open to the spiritual gifts.

Cho as the Case Par Excellence My decision to focus my study on David Yonggi Cho (1936–), the founder of Yoido Full Gospel Church, Seoul Korea was motivated by four important ⁴ For Onnuri’s case, see Wonsuk Ma, ‘Asian Pentecostalism in Context: A Challenging Portrait’, in Cecil M. Robeck, Jr and Amos Yong, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism (New York, 2014), pp. 152–72.

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reasons: 1) The church is perhaps the mother of all megachurches in the world in our day, having maintained the unchallenged title of the ‘largest single congregation’ in the world; 2) Cho has consistently promoted globally the church growth movement through his extensive pastor’s seminars, prolific writings, and the Church Growth International; 3) He has been responsible for the birth of a host of megachurches in Korea, in Asia, and throughout the world; and 4) My own personal familiarity with the Yoido Full Gospel Church, although I was never part of it.

The Study This study will begin with a critical description of the church and Cho. His life stories have been published and widely read. However, I will attempt to identify major motivations for his church growth ambitions. This is where his socio-religious and Christian contexts play an important role. This will also require a reconstruction of his life and church in the early 1970s, when his church began to grow exponentially. After the motivations are recognized, the process that Cho developed and employed will be explored, both theological and practical in his pastoral ministry. The last component to investigate is the outcome of the motivations and processes. This discussion includes his contributions to society and Christianity, as well as unintended but critical challenges we observe from hindsight. At the end, I will return to the ‘dissenting’ agenda: how his church growth movement is a response to, or reaction against, the social and Christian contexts where he found himself and his church. Only as a secondary matter will I pay attention to the larger inquiry: does the megachurch movement in Asia have any historical or theological connection with the dissenting movements developed in Great Britain? Two small matters: In this study, ‘megachurch’ and ‘large church’ are used interchangeably as the definition of a megachurch is debatable. For example, in the Korean setting, Hong defines a megachurch as having over 10,000 registered members.⁵ That means large congregations with thousands of members may not have the recognition and influence as that of megachurches. However, elsewhere in Asia, the membership of the largest congregation in a given country may be less than a thousand. In this particular context, the largest church influences the society and overall Christianity, and the general public and Christian communities in the country may view this as the ‘megachurch’. Considering this relative reality, I may use the term loosely, but definitely thinking of a congregation of at least several thousand. Second, ⁵ Hong, ‘The Backgrounds and Characteristics of the Charismatic Mega-Churches in Korea’, p. 100.

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I will frequently use ‘Pentecostal’ or ‘Pentecostal-Charismatic’ throughout the study. This usage is not by ecclesiastical affiliation or by formal theology, but by ‘practiced’ theology and ethos, often expressed in messages and worship. Although Yoido Full Gospel Church is a member of the Korean Assemblies of God, a classical Pentecostal denomination, all other megachurches in Hong’s study are denominationally non-Pentecostal. Nonetheless, he concludes that nine out of fifteen megachurches practised many aspects of PentecostalCharismatic beliefs and church life.⁶ Hence, the terms are used more generically to refer to certain traits of beliefs and behaviours, often characteristics widely observed in modern Pentecostal or Charismatic Christianity in their globally diverse forms. For more discussion, see the ‘Process’ discussion below.

DA VID YONGGI CHO AND CHURCH GROWTH

Cho and His World David Yonggi Cho’s life story is well known through a good number of biographies including a few autobiographies.⁷ This section will not repeat his full life story, but highlight several key periods that reveal the context, motivation, process, and goal of his church growth movement. Cho experienced the most dramatic and turbulent part of the modern history of Korea. His public education was under the harsh Japanese control, towards the closure of the Pacific War (part of World War II). The systematic efforts of the Japanese colonial government included the prohibition of Korean, both in speech and writing in schools. At the height of this denationalization policy, the Japanese forced Korean names to be changed into Japanese ones. After liberation (1945), the Korean War (1950–3) devastated the peninsula. Although Cho’s home province was less affected than the rest of the country, the deadly tuberculosis disease left this teenager on his death bed. Then came his dramatic conversion to Christianity and his subsequent divine healing. This series of events took place in the broader context of hopelessness and grinding poverty that affected every Korean of that period. This almost traumatic experience seriously affected the formation of his spirituality, theology, and ministry praxis. ⁶ Ibid., p. 101. I would personally consider Onnuri in the Charismatic category as well. ⁷ For example, Karen Hurston, Growing the World’s Largest Church (Springfield, Missouri, 1994). I am using David Yonggi Cho, 45 Years of Ministry of Hope [in Korean] (Seoul, 2004). Although there is an updated version to mark the fiftieth year, and also available in English (David Yonggi Cho, Dr David Yonggi Cho: Ministering Hope for 50 Years (Alachua, Florida, 2008), I prefer the former, particularly as Cho was still active in his church leadership. The latter appears to have brought a perspective of his retirement (in 2008) from pastoral duties.

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His decision to pursue a ministerial path did not come easy, as he aspired to be a physician to help others and, equally importantly, to escape the chronic cycle of poverty. His hard work and diligence, however, worked against this desire of his, and he eventually chose the ministerial route. Even then, his idea was to pursue further study in the United States and become a theologian, presumably to lead a poverty-free and respectful life. His language ability was wonderfully coupled with his passion for God’s ‘touch’ on suffering people, and he was the number-one choice as an interpreter for American missionaries and visiting evangelists. This close work with Pentecostal missionaries, evangelists, and teachers opened a constant stream of Pentecostal theological knowledge to his mind that was already open and even thirsty. If the social context prominently shaped his theology of blessing, this experience, augmented by pastoral realities, formed his theology of healing.

Yoido Full Gospel Church The history of Yoido Full Gospel Church (as it is now called) is divided into three periods, corresponding to the three locations in Seoul where the church existed.

The Tent Church (1958–61) The church was called ‘Daejo Full Gospel Church’ after the name of the fringe section northwest of downtown Seoul where a public cemetery was once located. This period is important in the study of Cho’s theology and church growth thinking. Poverty The reality of poverty dominated his life, ministry, and theology. Thus, this church was a ‘church of the poor’. The ministers (Cho and Revd Jashil Choi, his ministry partner, classmate, and future mother-in-law), the people in the area, and the church itself wrestled with poverty each day. Although everyone struggled with this reality in post-war Korea, Cho’s church was an extreme symbol of the life of the time. The torn-tent church with straw-bags on the floor best epitomized it. Blessing, therefore, was a firm theological (or divine) response to the reality. Cho’s first sermon included this declaration: ‘Jesus came to destroy the work of the devil . . . Believe in Jesus Christ . . . Your heart will change, poverty and sickness will disappear, and the devil will be cast out.’⁸ This indicates that his ⁸ Cho, 45 Years of Ministry of Hope, p. 24. The italics are mine.

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formative theology put human suffering to be primarily spiritual in nature: the curse implicated by the devil. Equally important is an observation that he was developing a wholistic understanding of human life and the gospel. Thus, ‘full gospel’ has become the trademark of his unique kind of message. Later, this wholistic understanding was theologized into the Three-fold Blessing and Five-fold Salvation. Healing Equally prominent in the life and social context of his first ministry was sickness. In the general context of poverty, sickness hit the poorest of the poor as the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Widespread shamanistic practices (with some shamans right in the neighbourhood) worsened the situation. At the same time, healing through prayer attracted striking attention both from the community and the existing churches. The religious and spiritual effects of healing are well demonstrated in the first healing instance of a paralytic woman. Inspired by the teaching and healing ministries of the Western missionaries and traveling evangelists, Cho and Choi were determined to bring healing to her. Cho also concluded that most of Jesus’ ministry focused on healing.⁹ Their persistent prayer for three days and three nights, both at her home and at the church, brought a remarkable healing experience to the woman. Their prayer was a combination of rebuking the evil spirit, reciting the promise of God, and pleading God’s mercy. Her healing was sealed with the baptism in the Holy Spirit, with its sign of speaking in tongues.¹⁰ Soon the tent church became widely known for its healing ministry, and this resulted in numerical growth.¹¹ The same emphasis on supernatural healing was controversial to the mainline denominations in Korea (historically part of the dissenting tradition and established by Western missionaries), and evoked charges of ‘heresy’ from the very beginning.¹² Meanwhile, because of this particular healing incident, local shamans, who had previously intimidated and thwarted the church, began to fear the ministers and their Christian God, confirming Cho’s narrative of spiritual warfare.¹³ Church Growth Evangelization of the suffering community was, for Cho, the raison d’être of the church. The growth of his congregation was rather a natural consequence of the proclamation and demonstration of God’s good news of salvation, healing, and blessing. From the very beginning, he also exhibited a strong desire to ⁹ Ibid., p. 28. ¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 28–31. ¹¹ This emphasis is also found in Cho’s selection of the first sermon at the tent church: ‘Signs for Believers’, based on Mark 16:17. Ibid., pp. 23–4. ¹² Ibid., p. 42. ¹³ Ibid., p. 31.

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pastor a large church. He recalls his first preaching: ‘I was seeing hundreds of people in the tent church, instead of just five.’¹⁴ This was affirmed by God’s voice he heard in a street car: ‘Do you see that Dong-yang Cinema? . . . I plan to give you a church building that is bigger than that.’¹⁵ His tent church grew to a membership of 600 in three years. His strong passion for church growth was shaped in this period.

Full Gospel Central Church (1961–73) The second era was the beginning of Cho’s urban ministry, with a church building much taller than the Dong-yang Cinema. Although there were several other large churches in South Korea, Cho’s was simply phenomenal. In three years, the church grew to 2400, and to 18,000 by the time he moved his ministry to Yoido in 1973. Continuing Drive for Church Growth By then, Cho had already set a goal to grow the largest church in Korea.¹⁶ Through the continuing ministry of healing, the powerful preaching of God’s goodness, strategic goal-setting, and his hard work, the church grew to a membership of 2400 in three years (by 1964). Then Cho’s health totally deteriorated, caused by his extreme hard work. This period of illness was crucial in identifying two serious flaws in his drive for church growth. The first is his ‘obsession with success’,¹⁷ as a reaction to the struggles he had gone through. He disclosed that the ‘goal of ministry hidden deep in his heart was always “success”,’ thus, he was ‘very selfish, expecting God to do everything he wanted’.¹⁸ The second discovery was his own self at the heart of church growth. Although it sounds like an exaggeration, he admits, ‘I believe I am a specially chosen vessel, and God can bless my people only through me.’¹⁹ Cell Group System The situation prompted by Cho’s failing health was compounded by the continuing growth of the church and corresponding ministry demands. In this context of crisis, the most important and practical ‘wheels’ to church growth thinking and practice emerged: namely, the cell group system. His circumstances and a search of the scriptures led Cho to discover important correctives to his theology of ministry and church. First, various offices/gifts in ¹⁴ Ibid., p. 23. ¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 44–5. ¹⁶ Elsewhere, Cho states that from the beginning of his ministry, he developed a ‘burning desire’ to build the largest church in Korea: David Yonggi Cho, The Fourth Dimension (Seoul, 1996 edn), p. 31. ¹⁷ Cho, 45 Years of Ministry of Hope, p. 60. ¹⁸ Ibid., p. 61. ¹⁹ Ibid., p. 62.

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the church are tasked to prepare every saint (or laity) for the work of ministry (Eph 4:12). Second, the church is not a building but the people of God. Third, the early church was a network of home churches, as evidenced by examining the Gospel Acts. Fourth, the deacons of the early Jerusalem church, originally elected to ‘serve’ (at least some of them) later assumed a preaching role (e.g., Stephen and Philip). He practically turned each home into a church under a lay leader’s ministry (in this case, a woman). This revolutionary idea, however, faced two steep obstacles. The first was the male-dominant Korean culture, where a woman simply loses her personal identity by being so-and-so’s wife or mother. The second was the understanding of ministry: only trained clergy was to carry out public ministry. On both counts, Mrs Jashil Choi, Cho’s close associate, functioned as an important role model. The cell system was born with the assurance that: 1) the women leaders would work under Cho’s authority, 2) they would be properly trained, and 3) they would be treated as his closest ministry partners. Through a continuing process of development and refinement, the cell system became the backbone of church ministry and growth. Through a chain of multiplication (one cell group was divided into two, once it reached fifteen families), the church grew even faster.²⁰ Also, full ministry and pastoral care took place at home cell units, including teaching, praying, evangelizing, and supporting one another. Members also have ‘opportunities to exercise various spiritual gifts, such as prophecy, tongues and its interpretation, word of knowledge, and word of wisdom. They also pray for healing.’²¹ This marks the starting point of Cho’s megachurch type of church growth, making him the church growth expert in theory and practice. As noted earlier, by the time the church made its next move in 1973, the membership had reached 18,000!

Yoido Full Gospel Church (1973–2008) When Cho announced a move to Yoido, almost half of his congregation (some 8000 members) decided to remain in the old church building, thus, still leaving a ‘megachurch’ behind. This era, for the present study, is until 2008 when Cho concluded his active role in the church. At least two developments characterize this era. Flowering of Church Growth After the first two foundational stages, Cho’s church growth ministry began to flower in the Yoido era. The cell system continued to be the structural spine of the movement, while the message of healing and blessing continued as the ²⁰ Cho considers the cell group system fundamental to church growth: ibid., p. 122. ²¹ Ibid., p. 110.

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philosophical bedrock. Almost every year, the church broke a new record through its numerical growth. The twenty cells in the beginning multiplied to 40,000 cells by the end of the 1990s, and its membership grew from its initial 10,000 to 750,000 by 2008.²² Through new communication technologies and increasing travel, this message and the growth of the church was widely spread throughout the world. The church began to plant local churches within Korea, starting with two large churches in 1981 and 1983. Soon others followed in provinces and other parts of the metropolis. Also churches were planted in the United States, Europe, and Japan among Korean immigrants, although in Japan, churches are normally bilingual. There are several large or megachurches among them. Then in 2008 when Cho retired from his active pastoral responsibility, twenty branch chapels, mostly in Seoul and its suburbs, became independent from Yoido Full Gospel Church. This series of moves gave birth to a dozen megachurches. Church Growth as a Global Phenomenon The global spread of the church growth movement was marked by the establishment of church growth studies at Fuller Seminary in California. At the same time, Cho, as the father of church growth in both practice and theory, became an authoritative and passionate ‘evangelist’ of church growth movement. He selected two avenues to do this. The first was through his ever-growing international ministries. As a rule, he conducted day-time pastors’ seminars, in addition to the nightly mass gatherings. This was where his experience and principles of church growth were passionately shared. His impact on the Australian Assemblies of God church was well documented. When Cho conducted his first church growth seminar in Australia, the church’s annual growth was a mere 2 per cent. After implementing his church growth strategy, the denomination achieved a 100 per cent church growth in three years.²³ This is but one of countless testimonies of church growth through Cho’s inspiration and teaching. Cho also established the Church Growth International in 1976 to systematically develop and propagate church growth movement. This institution has served several important functions: 1) promoting church growth by offering teachings and seminars to younger pastors; 2) producing and disseminating resource materials for church growth; and equally importantly, 3) building a network of megachurch pastors and leaders.²⁴ At its large international

²² In the same year, its membership decreased to 430,000 as the branch chapels were made independent. By 2013, it claims to have reached the combined total of 820,000. ²³ Cho, 45 Years of Ministry of Hope, p. 126. ²⁴ The latest list of the Board of Directors of the Church Growth International contains fifty megachurch leaders in the world (such as Kong Hee of Singapore and Prince Guneratnam of Malaysia) and twelve Honorary board members including Jack Hayford and C. Peter Wagner.

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conferences, other megachurch leaders share their experiences (based on implementing Cho’s church growth principles) with participants. The photos of the October 2014 Conference on its website suggest the large size of the gathering with a wide variety of speakers. Considering the testimonies printed in the magazine, its impact in promoting church growth is significant.²⁵

MEGACHURCH AND DISSENTING: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS This section will provide a critical assessment of the megachurch movement, focusing on Cho’s model. The four areas of this discussion follow the four key elements of Cho’s church growth movement.²⁶ Through the process, a question will be asked: Is any key value of the dissenting movement of England present here, albeit any doubtful historical link? Before going into several specific areas for discussion, it will be helpful to mention that Cho’s Pentecostalism was introduced by North American Pentecostal missionaries, which traced its root in the Holiness Movement of the nineteenth century. This, in turn, was a development of Methodism, which began as a dissenting movement within the Anglican Church in England in the eighteenth century. Therefore, historically and theologically, Cho’s theology has an influence from a historical dissenting movement.

The Church and State The most distinct feature of Christendom is the church–state relationship. If we borrow a formula used elsewhere, the relationship can be: either the church above the state, the church below the state, the church along with the state, or the church is the state. Regardless of the exact nature of the relationship, the close proximity between the two changed the nature of the church and its mission once and for all;²⁷ and at the centre of this relationship was the issue of See its quarterly magazine, Church Growth (Winter 2014), accessed on 24 Feb. 2015, http:// chgrint.homestead.com/Winter_2014_1_.pdf ²⁵ Church Growth International, Church Growth (Winter 2014), accessed on 24 Feb. 2015, http://chgrint.homestead.com. ²⁶ See, for example, seven key areas are: leadership, the role of the Holy Spirit, prayer, sermon, cell groups, mass media, and the kingdom of God. Sung-Hoon Myung and Young-gi Hong, eds, Charis and Charisma: David Yonggi Cho and the Growth of Yoido Full Gospel Church (Oxford, 2003). ²⁷ See Wonsuk Ma, ‘ “Life” in Theological Education and Missional Formation: A Reflection for a New Christian Era’, Transformation, XXXIII, 1 (Jan. 2016).

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power. In the English scene, almost all the dissenting movements challenged at least some aspects of the powerful position that the mainstream church occupied. In a radically different Korean setting, the church went through a series of varying relationships with the state. In the late eighteenth century when Catholicism was introduced, the Confucian-based Joseon Dynasty imposed state persecution resulting in a bloody period of Christian history. The introduction of Protestant Christianity in the late nineteenth century was soon met by the Japanese annexation of the nation (1910), turning Christianity into a home for nationalist movements. This attracted heavy persecution from the colonial authorities. A short post-liberation period until the Korean War (1945–50), especially in the south, put the church close to the political powers as the US-backed government fostered a vision of a Christian Korea. In fact, all the top government posts were occupied by Protestants, including President Rhee and the Vice President. The war years (1950–3) again put the church in the most vulnerable place. The northern Communist People’s Army placed Christian ministers and lay leaders on the top hit list, and many were imprisoned, tortured, killed, or taken to the north as they retreated. Cho’s congregation, until its size began to make its presence felt, was far from any power centre, as his was a ‘church of the poor’. Besides, his Pentecostal church was not part of mainstream Christianity, that is, either Presbyterian or Methodist. It had much to do with the socio-economic level of Cho’s members, vis-à-vis Presbyterians, the majority of whom were refugees from the north, who were better educated, conservative, and economically better established and/or landlords (or proletariats in the sight of the Communist authorities). In recent decades after full democratization, the nation had three Christian presidents out of six: two Presbyterian elders and one Catholic. In fact, until recently, in spite of the huge size of his congregation, and thus his influence both within and without, Cho was under a constant charge of ‘heresy’ by mainline churches. His ‘unorthodox’ way of ‘doing church’ and doctrinal issues contributed to this controversy. At the same time, the social locus of his members, thus, of his church, also played a role. However, the situation changed in recent decades, as the political potential of the sheer number of his members was soon noticed by politicians. They, including presidential candidates, regardless of their religious affiliation, regularly visit large churches. This illustrates the social influence of megachurches in religiously pluralistic countries like Korea. This suddenly moves his church (or any megachurch) from the margins toward the centre.²⁸ The recent promotional video of Yoido Full Gospel Church includes the visit of the

²⁸ This is a fundamental element of the Christendom shift: Murray, Post-Christendom, p. 83.

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former presidents Park and Lee participating in the national prayer breakfast, while Park is featured as visiting the church.²⁹ Elsewhere, in Asia and Latin America, there are cases where megachurch leaders themselves try to harness this potential political power by running for public offices, including the presidency, for example. At least, the growing recognition of a megachurch’s influence can be harnessed to form a useful alliance among megachurches to promote moral values, for example, by boycotting corrupt candidates for public offices. Although the nature of the relationship between a megachurch and the state in a pluralistic setting is complex and delicate, how it stewards its social and even political influence is a test of authentic Christianity. There are a growing number of studies on the church’s potential in community transformation, regardless of their size.³⁰ On the other hand, when the church or its leader loses its moral ground, it can leave a negative effect on society, due to its size and influence. In the history of Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, there are many ‘fallen stars’, and Cho has also been in various moral controversies. Here is a traditional saying: ‘If the fire is too close, it burns you!’

Leadership Almost all the megachurches in Asia, Korea included, were established and led by strong leaders. Their leadership type is often called ‘charismatic’. Cho exemplifies this type of leadership that envisions church growth, lays a philosophical foundation (more than theological), executes the goal, mobilizes human and organization resources, theorizes it, and finally advocates it by creating a disseminating mechanism. Although Cho seldom speaks about the role of leadership, all researchers agree that at the centre of the Yoido Church phenomenon is Cho and his leadership.³¹ The significance of his leadership can also be understood in the general Confucian influence in Korean society, which promotes unquestioned respect and obedience to a leader. A Holiness historian observes Cho’s leadership as the first and foremost component of his extraordinary ministry. Myung-soo Park finds his charismatic leadership effective in two particular aspects. First, while people identify

²⁹ Introducing Yoido Full Gospel Church, (Nov. 2013), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= i2zHb-QpRGk. ³⁰ For cases of Pentecostal churches in the global South, see Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley, CA, 2007). ³¹ For example, C. Peter Wagner, ‘Leadership and Communication: Interview with Dr. Peter Wagner’, in Sung-Hoon Myung and Young-gi Hong, eds, Charis and Charisma: David Yonggi Cho and the Growth of Yoido Full Gospel Church (Oxford, 2003), pp. 21–6.

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themselves with the suffering of Cho, they also dream of his success story as being their own. Second, the presence of divine power in his life plays a key role: the true nature of [his] leadership is that he is a messenger of the spiritual power that God is working through him. [He] led the divine healing assemblies from the beginning and it became a trademark for his assembly. To many people, Reverend Cho Yonggi was known as an ‘empowered pastor’, and this perception was the main reason for people to come to his church from all over. Literally, people thought that God’s charisma is conveyed through him. This perception again distinguished Reverend Cho Yonggi from other common persons, and it acted as the main driving force to overcome hardships in his church.³²

This is exactly how Max Weber characterized charismatic leadership: a perception that the leader has a divine linkage that affects others. I reckon that the social distance between the leader and the follower in charismatic leadership is the largest among various leadership types. This is further accentuated by Korean (or also Confucian) cultural forces which put the leader further away from the rest. Questioning anything about the leader’s decision, work, and life is perceived as a challenge to the authority. In Cho’s case, this already formidable followership is further enhanced by the leader’s sacrificial work on behalf of the followers, and more importantly by the demonstration of God’s power through miraculous healing. Only this strong leadership and its outcome (that is, the growth of his church) could weather a steady stream of criticisms lodged by mainline churches in Korea. The areas of criticism range from his theology of blessing, healing ministry, and church growth advocacy, to clapping hands and loud unison prayer, especially during Sunday morning (or ‘grand’ in the Korean language) worship. He constantly challenged established norms of church life. In fact, he advocates a ‘church growth type of lifestyle’: 1) to avoid traditional thinking patterns, 2) to incorporate new ideas, 3) to maintain an attitude to try out first courageously, and 4) to march forward continuously. This type of leadership is regularly observed in various dissenting movements. Often a courageous leader rises within the established fold to challenge the status quo of the institutional church, to commend gatherings, and to begin a new movement. When the new movement grows beyond the control of the established ecclesial institution, it gains its separate identity. John Wesley of Methodism is a good example. Cho was successful in changing the landscape of Korean Christianity and its presence in society. And now his variety of Christianity has been firmly established.

³² Myung-soo Park, ‘A Study of Rev. Cho and the Growth of Yoido Full Gospel Church’, in Sung-Hoon Myung and Young-gi Hong, eds, Charis and Charisma: David Yonggi Cho and the Growth of Yoido Full Gospel Church (Oxford, 2003), p. 181.

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In the past, against the well-established church hierarchy of Christendom, dissenting groups were often organized around courageous voices which challenged power generated by the institutionalized church hierarchy. In Korea, like many Asian countries, Christianity is not a dominant religion, and the church can make its presence felt in pluralistic societies in various ways. And the presence of a large church is definitely one sure way. In Korea, for example, the effect of the voice of Cardinal Soo-hwan Kim against human rights violations of the military dictatorship was well known. Although his influence did not primarily come from the size of Myungdong Cathedral in Seoul, it is agreed that the influence of the Christian voice is felt through significant leaders. Many megachurch leaders possess almost unchallengeable authority and power over their members. Due to the Confucian foundation of Korean ethics, this concentration of power is close to absolute, and this can easily make the leaders morally vulnerable. The fall of popular ‘Charismatic stars’ in North America is not an isolated scenario. A good number of Asian megachurch leaders have been subject to charges of ethical wrongdoings, and Cho has also been subject to charges and criticisms. The megachurch movement has been possible because of strong and able leadership. This may stand as a contrast to the institutional leadership and power of state churches. At the same time, the charismatic megachurch leadership shows the same tendency to abuse of power.

Message of Healing and Blessing Cho’s heavy focus on healing has remained constant from the very beginning of his ministry through the decades. As elaborated above, this theological orientation was a combination of his own experience of sickness and healing, the Pentecostal theology, especially through healing evangelists and missionaries from the United States, and not least, the social context his ministry found itself in: the destitute, the poor, and the sick. His first published book was also on divine healing.³³ For him, the message and practice of healing is the theological core of church growth: ‘Divine healing is a direct and supernatural work of God, and as such, it is an essential element for church growth.’³⁴ Although the cell system is often credited to his church growth, for him, it is only a structure through which the ministry of healing flows: ‘if we did not act on the divine healing by faith in the Name of Jesus, the cell

³³ Cho, 45 Years of Ministry of Hope, p. 72. ³⁴ David Yonggi Cho, ‘Church Growth and the Holy Spirit’, in Sung-Hoon Myung and Young-gi Hong, eds, Charis and Charisma: David Yonggi Cho and the Growth of Yoido Full Gospel Church (Oxford, 2003), p. 57.

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organization would have lost most of its evangelizing power’.³⁵ Although some observers feel that Cho’s emphasis on material blessing eventually replaced divine healing as his priority focus,³⁶ healing continued to hold its privileged place in Cho’s ministry. Even to date, in his retirement, his Sunday sermon concludes, without exception, with a prayer for healing, sometimes followed by the proclamation of healing of various diseases (presumably) through the gift of knowledge. His emphasis on God’s blessing is similarly motivated by his own experience of poverty, the social context, and influences of Charismatic preachers such as Oral Roberts. Cho first revised the typical ‘fourfold gospel’ of the Assemblies of God by adding the element of blessing.³⁷ Cho applied the same theological logic as the Pentecostal grounding of healing on the atoning work of Christ. Poverty is a result of the curse through sin, and the atoning work of Christ has now cancelled the curse. Therefore, poverty has to be rebuked and refused by children of God: blessing is now an entitlement for believers. Later, he developed ‘threefold blessing’, a wholistic concept of God’s blessing, encompassing spiritual, physical, and material dimensions, based on 3 John 2. This teaching has attracted both praise and criticism. The effect of such spiritual and mental orientation toward upward social and economic mobility has been studied among Pentecostal churches.³⁸ In fact, most megachurches in Korea (and also elsewhere) commonly preach a message of blessing. This message of God’s blessing and healing also served in Korea as a theological corrective against the other-worldly orientation of evangelical Christianity. In spite of the forceful charge of the shamanizing of Korean Christianity, Cho made a theological legitimation of this-worldly concerns, and even as a sign of God’s favour.³⁹ The net result was the growth of churches and the spread of Christianity as seen, for example, in Africa. On the other hand, some simply dismiss Cho as a prosperity preacher, along with Kenneth Hagin. Still others call this gibok sinang (literally ‘faith in the prayer of blessing’) and linking him with traditional shamanistic beliefs of material blessing.⁴⁰ Others also insist

³⁵ Ibid., p. 57. ³⁶ Sebastian C. H. Kim and Kirsteen Kim, A History of Korean Christianity (New York, 2015), p. 228. ³⁷ ‘Christ the Saviour, Christ the Baptiser, Christ the Healer, and Christ the Coming King’. Cho added ‘Christ the Blesser’. See Wonsuk Ma, ‘David Yonggi Cho’s Theology of Blessing: Basis, Legitimacy, and Limitations’, Evangelical Review of Theology, XXXV, 2 (April 2011), pp. 140–1. ³⁸ Kim and Kim, A History of Korean Christianity, pp. 227–8. For an attitude and behaviour change that is brought about by this message, see Wonsuk Ma, ‘Blessing in Pentecostal Theology and Mission’, in Wonsuk Ma et al., eds, Pentecostal Mission and Global Christianity (Oxford, 2014), pp. 272–91. ³⁹ Kim and Kim, A History of Korean Christianity, p. 229. ⁴⁰ Walter J. Hollenweger, Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide (Peabody, MA, 1997), p. 100, n. 2.

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that this type of Christianity has contributed to a lack of social participation. It is true that most megachurches remained silent about human rights abuses and violations during the military rule. At the same time, megachurches in Korea have served the public in various ways: caring for the marginalized, establishing educational institutions, relief work both within and without the country, leading large projects in North Korea (such as Yonggi Cho Heart Hospital by Yoido Church [in progress] and Pyongyang University of Science and Technology by another megachurch in Seoul), and many more. Criticism also includes the excesses and sometimes unethical behaviours in handling material wealth, authority over members, and social influences. Lastly, but equally importantly, theological distortion is a serious concern as the message of blessing can plant a notion that health and wealth are proofs of God’s blessings and his approval of one’s faith, while poverty is a curse.⁴¹ Recently an interesting observation was made: the criticisms clearly revealed the tension between the ‘paternal’ spirituality or Bible Christianity of the elite on the one hand and the ‘material’ faith and gibok sinang of the masses on the other. The critics appeared to be condemning the traditional religiosity of the people, and those who, by and large, enjoyed material blessing, were criticising those who aspire to it.⁴²

Cell Structure: Mobilization of the Laity The genius of the cell group system is the mobilization of the laity for the ministry of the church. As observed, it initially was explored as a structural response to cope with the growth of the church, on the one hand, and the sick pastor, on the other. Soon this system emerged as a powerful and effective organizational breakthrough, in spite of a long process of refinement, persuasion, training, and implementation. It is quite evident that, to Cho, the cell group leaders, mostly women, are his closest ministry partners, considering the prominent place which he gave them in public recognition and training. However, from the beginning, the concept faced serious cultural and theological biases, as observed previously. The male-dominant Confucian worldview has been a social foundation for the Korean society, especially from the Yi Dynasty. Although Christianity brought much improvement to women’s place in education, church, and society, for any leadership and teaching role, men were expected to hold such positions. This gender bias has been well reflected in the church. Even to date, Korean churches in general struggle to accept women’s ordination for ministry, for example. The Korean Assemblies of God, to which Cho and Yoido Church belong, is one of a few exceptions. From its ⁴¹ Kim and Kim, A History of Korean Christianity, p. 229.

⁴² Ibid., p. 230.

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early days, women have been ordained, although additional qualifications were required in the beginning. And this is part of the Pentecostal tradition which exercises gender equality in ministry. Jashil Choi was the first woman to be ordained. Moreover, her role in the development of the church was significant, and Cho openly and appreciatively acknowledged her critical contribution. Her example had a positive impact on the mobilization of women in ministry through the cell system. The challenge within the church was equally prominent. In addition to the cultural pressure, the long-standing clergy–laity divide was pervasive. Church hierarchy well developed through the Christendom process had a strong effect on Korean Christianity. When I grew up in a Pentecostal church in a southern city of Korea, before the woman pastor was finally ordained, the church was not able to have a normal church experience, namely baptism, communion, and blessing. The pastor was only ‘licensed’ to preach; and only ordained ministers were to administer the two sacraments and the pronouncement of blessing at the end of Sunday morning worship. The revolutionary idea of the cell system was possible due to the ‘women-centred’ nature of actual activities. Most of the participants in cell groups were expected to be women, over which a male ‘minister’ would still be expected to lead. But a woman leader, sanctioned by the church leadership, was an acceptable solution. The challenge of lay leadership was resolved by detailed guidelines provided by the church for the management of cells. The cell group manuals included a rather detailed guideline of how to organize a new cell group and how to structure it, with the order of a cell group meeting, a list of to-do’s and not-to-do’s, how to handle difficult situations of members, weekly reporting, etc. The church also provided Bible study material for cell leaders, so that the entire system used the same material for each cell group meeting. This also allows a planned spiritual formation for the entire church, as the material is carefully structured to promote such growth. In a practical sense, this demonstrates the ‘priesthood of all believers’, or as some Pentecostal scholars label it, the ‘prophethood of all believers’ through the empowering work of the Holy Spirit. Hailed as a decisive move to challenge the long-standing cultural burden and equally problematic clergy–laity divide, a question remains: Has the mobilization of women/laity at Yoido Full Gospel Church catalysed a theological paradigm shift? Or, does the system simply supply a useful foot troop while decisions and authorities all remain in the hands of a few? One critique contends that, due to the limitations of the lay ministry in scope and nature, the megachurch simply ‘perpetuates . . . the “priesthood of a few” (that is, the clergy) rather than . . . the “priesthood of all believers”’.⁴³ Probing questions ⁴³ David S. Lim, ‘A Missiological Evaluation of David Yonggi Cho’s Church Growth’, in Wonsuk Ma et al., eds, David Yonggi Cho: A Close Look at His Theology and Ministry (Baguio City, Phillippines, 2004), p. 201.

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may be asked: What degree of ministerial freedom do they have beyond what has been given as instruction? Do the cell leaders rise to the level of responsibility and accountability to oversee other cell leaders? Are they involved in constructing the cell curriculum? Are there lay leaders who occupy any decision-making upper-level cell leadership? If the answer to most of the above questions at the YFGC system is a ‘no’, then a further question is: Has the system been robust enough to cause a theological paradigm shift towards the full ‘minister-hood of all believers’? To bring the question to the context of the present study, then the question can be: What are useful dissenting models in effecting the liberalization of ministry from the hand of a few ‘elites’ to the whole people of God, and what are their theological explorations?

CO NCLUSION As suspected from the beginning, any attempt to establish a meaningful connection between the megachurch movement in Asia and the dissenting movement in the West has proved to be challenging. Its multi-religious social context places the church in a fundamentally different position in society. As a result, elements of ‘dissenting’ are either altered to suit the context or the dissenting paradigm is simply limited in existence. Although historically speaking, Cho’s Pentecostal congregation can trace its roots to the Wesleyan movement of the eighteenth century, what is more evident has been the ‘spirit of the dissenters’. The most important contribution of megachurches in Asia is just being big. Cho’s church from its second stage on has made a significant statement for Christianity in society. This is repeated in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and India. Societies and governments take the influence of a megachurch, let’s say, of 10,000 more seriously than, let’s say, hundreds more congregations of one hundred members each. The large resources concentrated in one structure enables it to undertake programmes and projects requiring a significant amount of resources. Also, their size translates into influence. When Cho began a Friday overnight prayer programme (first, to stay until the night curfew ends), eventually other churches in Korea followed. At the same time, we also observed that more power means an increasing possibility of ‘corrupted power’. Unfortunately, rumours of moral failure among megachurch leaders in Asia have been more than an isolated few. Thus, the influence can be both positive and destructive. If each dissenting group began to provide a prophetic voice, often silenced under the weight of institutionalization and close affinity between the church and the state, the most challenging call for megachurches is how to carry out and maintain a prophetic role in society, at least utilizing their sheer numbers (that translates into a voting power).

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Cho, David Yonggi. The Fourth Dimension (Seoul: Seoul Logos, 1996 edn.). Cho, David Yonggi. ‘Church Growth and the Holy Spirit’, in Sung-Hoon Myung and Young-gi Hong, eds, Charis and Charisma: David Yonggi Cho and the Growth of Yoido Full Gospel Church (Oxford: Regnum Books, 2003). Cho, David Yonggi. Dr David Yonggi Cho: Ministering Hope for 50 Years (Alachua, FL: Bridge-Logos Foundation, 2008). Hollenweger, Walter J. Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997). Hong, Young-gi. ‘The Backgrounds and Characteristics of the Charismatic MegaChurches in Korea.’ Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies III, 1 (2000): 99–118. Hurston, Karen. Growing the World’s Largest Church (Springfield, MO: Chrism, 1994). ‘Introducing Yoido Full Gospel Church.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= i2zHb-QpRGk. Kim, Sebastian C. H., and Kirsteen Kim. A History of Korean Christianity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Lim, David S., ‘A Missiological Evaluation of David Yonggi Cho’s Church Growth’, in Wonsuk Ma, William W. Menzies, and Bae Hyeon-sung, eds, David Yonggi Cho: A Close Look at His Theology and Ministry (Baguio City, Philippines: APTS Press, 2004). Ma, Wonsuk, ‘David Yonggi Cho’s Theology of Blessing: Basis, Legitimacy, and Limitations.’ Evangelical Review of Theology XXXV, 2 (April 2011): 140–59. Ma, Wonsuk, ‘Asian Pentecostalism in Context: A Challenging Portrait’, in Cecil M. Robeck, Jr and Amos Yong, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Ma, Wonsuk, ‘Blessing in Pentecostal Theology and Mission’, in Wonsuk Ma, VeliMatti Kärkkäinen, and J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, eds, Pentecostal Mission and Global Christianity (Oxford: Regnum Books, 2014). Ma, Wonsuk, ‘ “Life” in Theological Education and Missional Formation: A Reflection for a New Christian Era.’ Transformation XXXIII, 1 (Jan. 2016): 1–15. Miller, Donald E., and Tetsunao Yamamori. Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). Murray, Stuart. Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange World (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006). Myung, Sung-Hoon, and Young-gi Hong, eds. Charis and Charisma: David Yonggi Cho and the Growth of Yoido Full Gospel Church (Oxford: Regnum Books, 2003). Park, Myung-soo, ‘A Study of Rev. Cho and the Growth of Yoido Full Gospel Church’, in Sung-Hoon Myung and Young-gi Hong, eds, Charis and Charisma: David Yonggi Cho and the Growth of Yoido Full Gospel Church (Oxford: Regnum Books, 2003). Wagner, C. Peter, ‘Leadership and Communication: Interview with Dr. Peter Wagner’, in Sung-Hoon Myung and Young-gi Hong, eds, Charis and Charisma: David Yonggi Cho and the Growth of Yoido Full Gospel Church (Oxford: Regnum Books, 2003).

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6 Dissenting Traditions and Indigenous Christianity The Case in China Peter Tze Ming NG

INTRODUCTION: TWO STAGES OF DISSENTING TRADITIONS IN CHINA There were two stages of the development of Protestant dissenting traditions in China. The first stage appeared at the turn of the twentieth century when Chinese Christians sought to separate themselves from the Protestant mainline, denominational traditions brought by the foreign missionaries. The second stage came in the early 1950s when the Chinese Communist government pushed forward the Three-Self Patriotic Movement to keep Protestant churches under State control. There were some Chinese churches which sought to resist the dominant control by the Chinese government which turned out to be another form of dissenting movements in the country. Both of the dissenting traditions were found to be closely related to the indigenous Christian movements in China. Hence, in this chapter, attempts are made to study the development of both the dissenting traditions and indigenous Christian movements in China, and to account for their relationships in China’s past century. The first stage of dissenting traditions came out in China by the turn of the twentieth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Protestant missionary movement was dominated by organized missionary societies, most of which (with the exception of the China Inland Mission) were agencies of mainline, denominational churches in North America and Europe, such as the Anglican (Episcopalian), Lutheran, Reformed, Presbyterian, Congregational,

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Baptist, and Methodist.¹ However, after 1900, there was a great increase in the local, independent missionary work done by Chinese Christians. Scholars of Christian mission in China had been paying much attention to the development of denominational Christianity in China that those of the indigenous, dissenting traditions had been overlooked. It was only in the last couple of decades that scholars began to develop greater interests in the development of indigenous Christian movements in China, especially on the work of Yu Guozhen, Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng), Jing Dianying (Jesus Family), and Wang Mingdao in early and mid-twentieth-century China.² In his book of 1996, Daniel Bays reported: ‘the number of Protestant Christian church members grew rapidly, from 37,000 in 1889 to 178,000 in 1906’.³ He added: ‘Yet, in retrospect, the most important feature of this period was the growth of the spirit of independence in Chinese Protestant churches. This had hardly begun in the nineteenth century, but it was a prominent theme after 1900.’⁴ The indigenous movements among the Chinese Protestant churches turned out to be dissenting movements when they were turning against the mainline, denominational Protestant traditions brought by the foreign missionaries in the last century; and in addition, the indigenous movements in the 1950s turned to become dissenting and nonconformist traditions against the State control ‘Three-Self Patriotic Movement’ in China in the later part of the century. In the following paragraphs, I shall report briefly the rise of indigenous movements both in the 1900s and in the 1950s and account for the growth of dissenting and nonconformist traditions there from in China.

¹ As John Briggs described, the term ‘dissenting’ refers to ‘those Christians who in conscience dissented from the teaching of the Established church’. See e.g. John H. Y. Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity, 1662–2000’, in Robert Pope, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (London, 2013), pp. 3–26. In the case of China, ‘the established church’ was represented by the Protestant mainline, denominational churches brought by the Western missionaries in the nineteenth century. ² See, e.g. Daniel H. Bays, ed. Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford, CA: 1996); Jessie G. Lutz and Rolland Ray Lutz, Hakka Chinese Confront Protestant Christianity, 1850–1900: With the Autobiographies of Eight Hakka Christians, and Commentary (Armonk, New York, 1998); Thomas Alan Harvey, Acquainted with Grief: Wang Mingdao’s Stand for the Persecuted Church in China (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002); and Joseph TseHei Lee, ‘Watchman Nee and the Little Flock Movement in Maoist China’, Church History, LXXIV, 1 (2005). Daniel Bays once remarked, ‘In almost all cases, the relevant historical materials concerning these organizations and individuals are in Chinese. That is one reason why they have often been overlooked by historians of Christianity in China, who have tended to remain fixed on the foreign missionary presence and the English-language materials that document it.’ See Bays, Christianity in China, p. 310. ³ See Daniel H. Bays, ‘The Growth of Independent Christianity, 1900–1937’, in Daniel H. Bays, ed., Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford, CA, 1996), p. 308. ⁴ See ibid.

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FACTORS GI VING RISE TO TH E FI RST S TAGE OF DISSENTING TRADITIO NS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF IN DIGENO US MOVEMENTS S INCE THE 1900S Indigenous movements in China became ‘dissenting traditions’ because Chinese Christians wanted to distinguish themselves from the Protestant traditions brought by foreign missionaries which were characterized as the mainline and denominational Christianity. There were some contextual, socio-political factors which gave rise to the development of indigenous, dissenting movements in China at the turn of the twentieth century. The year 1900 marked a turning point for the development of indigenous Christian movements in China. The Boxer Uprisings in 1900 gave birth to a very strong, immediate desire among Chinese Christians to strive for independence. Chinese Christians had been accused of believing in Christianity as a ‘foreign’ religion (洋教 yang jiao).⁵ They were criticized for their being protected by Western missionaries and foreigners, and for a number of privileges over the religious court cases (教案 jiaoan).⁶ In most of the court cases, the missionaries often stood up to protect their converts even though their converts had committed crimes. And there was a popular saying among the Chinese in those days, i.e. ‘one more Christian one less Chinese’, meaning that if a Chinese was converted to Christianity he would no longer be a Chinese, or he would no longer obey the Chinese laws. In order to get rid of those accusations, there was a new consciousness among Chinese Christians to seeking a new form of Christianity which could be freed from the dominance of the foreign missionaries. Chinese Christians, including C.Y. Cheng (誠靜怡, 1881–1939) and others, were seeking for a new form of Chinese independent churches so that they would no longer be seen as the ‘babies’ of the Western missionaries, and the Church in China would no longer be under the control of the Western Churches, but rather be ‘the truly Chinese Churches’.⁷ Chinese Christians wanted to develop a truly independent Christianity which could be freed ⁵ ‘The Christian religion is the only one of the religions of foreign origin for which the Chinese reserve the designation “foreign religion.” The foreign taste of Christianity is perhaps too strong for the Chinese people to like it.’ These were precisely the remarks by C.Y. Cheng in his article ‘The Development of an Indigenous Church in China’, International Review of Missions, XII, (1923), p. 371. ⁶ ‘Jiaoan’ were religious incidents involving Chinese Christians or missionaries that became legal and diplomatic issues in late nineteenth-century China. Reports of Jiaoan can be found in Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860–1870 (Cambridge, MA, 1963); and Joseph Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley, CA, 1987). ⁷ For instance, it was reported that Cheng Ching-yi and his family had had shocking experiences during the Boxer uprisings which would have great impact on his desire to work for the indigenization of the Chinese church in his later years. See e.g. ‘Dr. Cheng Ching-Yi– Resolution–Reminiscences’, Chinese Recorder, LXX, 12 (Dec. 1939), pp. 689–98.

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from foreign funds (i.e. ‘self-support’), from foreign mission direction (i.e. ‘self-government’), and from foreign preaching and theology (i.e. ‘selfpropagation’). In other words, they wanted to be ‘Three-Self ’.⁸ As early as in 1902, two years after the Boxer incident, pastor Guozhen Yu (俞國楨, 1852–1932) and some Chinese Christians met in Shanghai and they formed an all-Chinese Christian organization called the ‘Chinese Christian Union’ (中華基督徒會, Zhonghua jidutuhui). Realizing the utmost importance of the development of independent Christian churches, they started a quarterly magazine in 1903, The Chinese Christian (中國基督徒報, Zhongguo Jidutubao) ⁹, and in 1906 Yu formed an independent, all-Chinese organisation in Central China and in the South, calling themselves the ‘Chinese Christian Independent Church’ (中華耶穌教自立會, Zhonghua Yesujiao zilihui). It was stated clearly in its constitution that the independent church was to be separated from any foreign missionary societies, in order to demonstrate to the Chinese people that they could run their own churches, hence becoming truly indigenous and fully ‘self-governing’, ‘self-supporting’ and ‘selfpropagating’. By the year 1924, there were already more than 330 member branches registered with the Zhonghua Yesujiao zilihui, spreading over sixteen provinces in China, and with over 20,000 Chinese Christians joining the indigenous movement under this name.¹⁰ Likewise, in 1910, a notable movement was started and a comparable federation of independent churches was formed in North China, again called ‘Chinese Christian Independent Church’ (with a different Chinese name: 中國基督教自立會, Zhongguo Jidujiao zilihui), where Chang Po Ling was appointed President.¹¹ The federation was composed of Chinese Christians who did not give up their allegiance to the denominational churches of which they were already members, but they associated themselves merely for the

⁸ For the discussion of ‘Three-Self ’ movements in China, see Peter Tze Ming Ng, ‘The Other Side of 1910: The Development of Chinese Indigenous Movements before and after the Edinburgh Conference’, Chinese Christianity: An Interplay between Global and Local Perspectives (Boston, 2012), pp. 67–90. ⁹ There was much discussion among Chinese Christians and their opinions were all expressed in this magazine. A full set of the magazine (nos. 2–60, from 1904–15) are kept in the Shanghai Municipal Archives for reference. ¹⁰ See Qi Duan, ‘Ershi Shiji Chu Zhongguo Jidujiao Bensehua Yundong De Fazhan’, Zhongguo Jidujiao Bensehua Shigao (Taiwan, 2005), pp. 127–32. ¹¹ It should also be noted that C.Y. Cheng had been working in Beijing for two years before he attended the Edinburgh conference in 1910 and he would definitely be involved and influenced by this independence movement while serving as an assistant pastor at the Mi-shi Hutong (米市胡同) Church in Beijing. Hence, his strong appeal on behalf of the Chinese Christians at the Edinburgh conference. The formation of a ‘Chinese Christian Independent Church’ accorded with C.Y. Cheng’s impressive article which concluded: ‘Thus union with Christ, union of all denominations, and union of all nationalities form a three-fold cord which is not easily broken.’ See C.Y. Cheng, ‘What Federation Can Accomplish for the Chinese Church’, Chinese Recorder, XLI, 2 (Feb. 1910), p. 160.

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purpose of giving a new identity of ‘Chinese Christian Independent Church’ and presenting the gospel message to ‘many (Chinese) who were otherwise unreached’.¹² The federation centred in Beijing and Tianjin, and was soon joined by independent Chinese churches from all over Shandong and Shanxi provinces, including Tsingdao (1911), Jinan (1912), and Yantai (1919). Such movements of the independent churches had laid a substantial groundwork for a series of regional conferences throughout China in 1912–13 and hence the first national conference of the China Continuation Committee in Shanghai in 1913 after the return of Cheng Ching-yi (C.Y. Cheng) from the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference of 1910, and the later development of the National Church of Christ in China established in Shanghai in 1927.¹³ A dynamic, Pentecostal movement emerged also by the efforts of Chinese Christians in Beijing since 1908. The founder was Paul Enbo Wei (魏保羅, 1877–1919) and the movement was called the ‘True Jesus Church Movement’ (真耶穌教會 Zhen Yesu jiaohui). Paul originally joined a church run by the London Missionary Society in Beijing in 1902, but he was later attracted to the Pentecostal movement, the so-called ‘Spiritual Gifts Movement’ in North China. Pentecostalism turned out to be the best means towards indigenization in China as Wei founded his own church—the ‘True Jesus Church’ in Beijing in 1917, one that could be contextualized and became truly Chinese which was independent of any foreign missionary societies. Though Wei died in 1919, the work was succeeded by his son, Issac Wei, who continued the practice of ‘selfpropagating’ the Christian gospel by Chinese Christians, especially the spirit of the ‘True Jesus Church’ throughout China and Taiwan. Their work was so successful that it finally reached Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Hawaii, with a membership of over 100,000.¹⁴ One charismatic figure among the indigenous church leaders was Mingdao Wang (王明道 1900–91).¹⁵ Wang attended a church school run by London Missionary Society at the age of nine and was baptized at the age of fourteen. Yet at the age of twenty (in 1920), he ventured into a Spiritual Gifts Movement and decided to be baptized again, by immersion, and prayed for the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Wang had the utmost regard for the Bible as the revealed Word of God, and he started preaching repentance, conversion, holiness of living, purity, and truth from the Bible. He later became both conservative and evangelical, and was hostile to the missionary churches which upheld liberalism and modernism. This was what he declared to believe, namely: ‘I accept all ¹² See Charles E. Ewing, ‘The Chinese Christian Church in Tientsin (Tianjin)’, Chinese Recorder, LXIII, 5 (May 1912), pp. 282–5. ¹³ See Zhixin Wang, Zhongguo Jidujiao Shigang (Hong Kong, 1959), pp. 255–7. ¹⁴ See George N. Patterson, Christianity in Communist China (Waco, Texas, 1969), pp. 71–3. ¹⁵ For a full biography of the life of Wang, see Wang Ming-dao, Wushi Nian Lai (Hong Kong, 1950; repr., 2005); also Stephen C. H. Wang, Wang Ming-Dao: the Last Forty Years (Scarborough, Ontario, 2010).

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that is written in the Scriptures and what I cannot find there I shall leave aside. I believe all the Truth that is written in the Scriptures and am unwilling to accept any reasoning that are not found in Scripture.’¹⁶ Later he set up a church of his own and called it ‘The Christian Tabernacle’ (基督徒會堂 Jidutu huitang), running it freely in his own way.¹⁷ His church began in a household gathering where a few people came for Bible study, prayer, and fellowship. There were no traditional liturgy, no choir, no offering bags, and no celebration of Christmas. Wang became a powerful preacher and teacher, and a rather stern and dogmatic man. He was critical of the missionary work and was not happy with the Western spirit of denominationalism. And in seeking after indigenous Christianity in China, he stood firmly to be outside the mainline, denominational churches, and ran his own church as an independent, non-denominational church in Beijing. Hence, it became a church which was dissenting from the ‘missionary established church’ traditions in China.¹⁸ Whereas other ‘Three-Self ’ movements emphasized the priority of ‘self-financing’ or ‘self-governing’, Wang gave more emphasis to ‘selfpropagating’, especially to running evangelistic meetings at homes. Wang became a very popular and influential preacher and attracted many followers throughout China.¹⁹ Another charismatic leader was Dianying Jing (敬奠瀛 1890–1957), the founder of the ‘Jesus Family’ (耶穌家庭 Yesu jiating) which began in Ma Zhuang of Taian County in Shandong Province. Jing came from an educated and well-off family. His upbringing incorporated various religious traditions including Methodist, Daoist mysticism, Confucian ethics, and Buddhism. He was converted to Christianity under the influence of a female Methodist missionary, Nora Dillenbeck, whom he was teaching Chinese. Later in 1920, Jing was connected to the Assemblies of God and being greatly influenced by the Pentecostal movement prevalent of the time in Shandong Province, he sought after the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Then in 1927, Jing transformed the Christian gospel into a new form of Chinese Christianity. It differed from the denominational churches, in regard to doctrines, rites, and government, and it had nothing to do with the mainline Protestant traditions brought by the foreign missionaries. Jing began by organizing a cooperative store which had clothing, food, and silk. He donated the land he had inherited, to establish a farm and build a chapel for Christian believers, inviting them to live out the ideal life as Jesus taught, hence living together in a communal life under the direction of Jing as the ‘family head’ (jiazhang), in which the father-figure was very Chinese in nature, hence a very indigenous form of Christianity in China. ¹⁶ See Leslie T. Lyall, Three of China’s Mighty Men (London, 1973), p. 110f. ¹⁷ See Wing Hung Lam (林榮洪), Wang Ming Dao Yu Zhongguo Jiaohui (Hong Kong, 1982), pp. 62–4; also Harvey, Acquainted with Grief. ¹⁸ See (林榮洪), Wang Ming Dao Yu Zhongguo Jiaohui. ¹⁹ See ibid., p. 79.

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The community was later renamed the ‘Jesus Family’. The ‘Jesus Family’ was a self-sufficient commune, a typically indigenous Christian church which followed the ‘Three-Self ’ principles. It was ‘self-propagating’, by running evangelistic meetings in the homes of families; ‘self-governing’, by running families under the leadership of a jiazhang; ‘self-financing’, by living together and sharing property in a communal life. Members of the Jesus Family lived and worked together, and they attended religious meetings in prayer, singing, fellowship, and interpretation of dreams. Jing also conducted several evangelistic tours in the province of Shandong and in Northern China in the 1930s and by 1940s there were 140 such ‘families’ in eight provinces, with a total of 6000 members joining in these families’ communal life.²⁰ There was still another form of the ‘Three-Self ’, indigenous group started in South China. It was founded by Tuosheng Ni (Watchman Nee, 倪柝聲 1903–72) in Fuzhou in 1922. Watchman Nee was the name commonly known by the West. At the age of thirteen, Nee entered a school run by the Church Missionary Society in Fuzhou. His conversion experience came when he was seventeen, after he attended a gospel meeting of Dora Yu (余慈度 1873–1931), a Chinese Methodist evangelist. Having been disenchanted with Anglican doctrine and liturgy, Nee spent a year at Yu’s Bible school in Shanghai where he received basic training in Christian living. Later, he was brought into close contact with Margaret E. Barber (1866–1930) who became his teacher and mentor. Barber was initially a CMS missionary but later turned to become an independent, ‘dissenting’ missionary from CMS and developed her informal ties with the Plymouth Brethren in England. Nee attended Bible classes from Barber and it was through Barber as a mentor that Nee was introduced to the Holiness and the Brethren movements through the writings of D. M. Panton, Robert Govett, Samuel Govett, G. H. Pember, Jessie PennLewis, T. Austin-Sparks, and others.²¹ Through the inspiration of Barber, Nee learned much about Christian spiritual life, especially the ‘Pre-millennial Second Coming of Jesus’ and ‘Holiness in the Presence of the Lord’. At the age of twenty-five, Nee had a serious illness and he began to write his famous book, The Spiritual Man, an exhaustive analysis of human psychology from a biblical perspective which sought to explain the whole process of spiritual formation. Nee later became an inspiring preacher and compelling teacher in Fuzhou. While the indigenous Christian movement was gaining momentum in China in the 1920s, Nee joined the movement and attempted to develop an

²⁰ See e.g. China Group, ‘Jesus Family’, in Scott W. Sunquist, ed., A Dictionary of Asian Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI, 2001), p. 418. ²¹ See James Reetzke, M. E. Barber: A Seed Sown in China (Chicago, IL, 2005), also online from Margaret E. Barber, http://mebarber.ccws.org/. In addition, Nee began to read books from Plymouth Brethren teachers like John Nelson Darby, William Kelly, and C. H. Mackintosh.

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independent, non-denominational church acceptable to the socio-political demands of the Chinese people of his time. To the Three-Self principles which were promoted by the indigenous movement, Nee added one more, hence the ‘principle of locality’, meaning that ‘there is only one true church in each city’. In other words, he was advocating the principle of ‘one church, one locality’.²² As the Bible had not mentioned anything about denominational churches, Nee was critical of the practice of denominational churches in the West, and thought that they were ‘unbiblical’. He preferred the biblical way of addressing churches by their localities, such as the ‘Church of Jerusalem’, the ‘Church of Ephesus’, and the ‘Church of Corinth’. He did not give any names for the churches he established, but simply called them by their localities. However, these Christian groups were later called by others as ‘Assembly Halls’ (聚會處 / 聚會所 Juhuichu or Juhuisuo, meaning ‘the meeting place’) or the ‘Little Flock’ (小群 Xiaoqun), which was derived from their hymn book entitled: The Hymns for the Little Flock.²³ The more significant fact was that these Christian groups were found to be so popular throughout China that there were recorded more than 700 churches built, and with over 70,000 followers recruited in the 1940s. All these activities signified the great concern and desires among the Chinese Christians in attempting to separate themselves from the ‘established churches’ set up by foreign missionaries in order to create their own independent, indigenous Christianity in China in the early twentieth century. Whereas the Western missionaries were mostly concerned with ‘selffinancing’ by the native Christians, the Chinese Christians were attempting ‘self-propagating’ and ‘self-governing’ as key elements for the development of independent, indigenous churches. There were groups of Chinese Christians such as Mingdao Wang, Dianying Jing, and Watchman Nee and others who wanted to realize independence by ‘self-propagation’. Their work was so successful that the growth of Chinese Christianity was phenomenal and outstanding in the early twentieth century. There were also some Chinese Christians such as Guozhen Yu and others who made great efforts to develop ‘self-governing’ Chinese churches, to save Christianity from being accused as a ‘foreign religion’, to distinguish Chinese Christianity from its ‘Western’ faces or from being under the direction and governance of Western mission boards, and most important of all, to make it clear that Christianity had nothing to do with ‘Western imperialism’. In order that Christianity might appeal to the minds and hearts of the Chinese people and win their growing national consciousness for the service of Christ, it was of utmost importance for ²² Nee says, ‘God establishes one church in one locality’. See, e.g. Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Church Life, 4th edn 1975 (Hong Kong, 1970), p. 125; and also Watchman Nee, The Orthodoxy of the Church (Los Angeles, CA, 1970; repr., 1991). ²³ See Lyall, Three of China’s Mighty Men, p. 64f.

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these indigenous churches to be so developed that the Chinese themselves would recognize them as having become truly indigenous. Hence, in this first stage of dissenting movements, the dissenting traditions emerged were found closely related with the development of indigenous Christianity in China.

FA CTORS GIVING RISE TO THE SECOND STAGE OF DISSENTING TRADITIO NS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF IN DIGENO US MOVEMENTS S INCE THE 1950S The second stage of dissenting traditions in China came in the early 1950s when the Chinese Communist government launched the Three-Self Patriotic Movement to keep Protestant churches under State control. The ‘Three-Self ’ principle had been formulated by Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson in the mid-nineteenth century, and there had been some successful attempts made by the collaboration between the missionaries and Chinese Christians in the later part of the nineteenth century.²⁴ However, the development of Three-Self indigenous movement was brought to a new phase when China came into a new era after 1949. With the full support of the Chinese Communist government, Wu Yaozong (吳耀宗, 1893–1979) became the founding chairman of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement in China and he brought the Chinese indigenous movement up to a new horizon, with the aim to ‘lead Christians to love the nation and the Church, to safeguard the independence of the Church, and to strengthen unity within the Church’.²⁵ According to Wu, the best and most efficient way to achieve a truly ‘Three-Self ’ Christian Church in China was by means of political power. Hence, instead of being under the control of Western denominational churches or the foreign mission boards in China, the Chinese churches were now brought to be under State protection by the Communist government. However, there were still some Chinese churches which sought to resist the dominant control by the Chinese government, on the basis of the Three-Self principles of ‘self-government’, ‘selfsupport’, and ‘self-propagation’. It turned out to be another form of dissenting movements in the country. Those churches which resisted being under the government control turned out to be ‘nonconformists’, ‘un-registered’, or ²⁴ See e.g. the reports by George A. Hood, Mission Accomplished? The English Presbyterian Mission in Lingtung, South China: A Study of the Interplay between Mission Methods and Their Historical Context (Frankfurt am Main, 1986); and David Cheung, Christianity in Modern China: The Making of the First Native Protestant Church (Leiden, 2004); and also the discussions in Ng, ‘The Other Side of 1910’, pp. 67–90. ²⁵ See discussions in Peter Tze Ming Ng, ‘Y.T. Wu: A New Understanding of “Three-Self ” Development in Chinese Christianity’, Chinese Christianity: An Interplay between Global and Local Perspectives (Boston, 2012), pp. 201–20.

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become ‘underground’, ‘house’ churches in China.²⁶ They became another group of dissenting traditions in Chinese Christianity. Wang Ming-dao [bio dates? 王明道 1900–91] was a prominent Christian leader in Beijing. He was best known in the West, not only for the indigenous church he had set up in China, but also for his fundamentalist theology and his public resistance to the Japanese and Chinese governments during the Japanese invasion in 1940s and the Communist rule in the 1950s.²⁷ He was a typical example of the second stage of the ‘nonconforming’ or dissenting stream in Chinese Christianity. During the Japanese occupation in the 1940s, the Japanese government set up a puppet organization, ‘The Society for the Support of the Christian Churches of Peking’, to keep all Christian churches under government control and all religious activities under proper supervision in the city. Wang was invited to join the society but he refused to do so, on the ground that his church was already an indigenous church and was not of any foreign origin. The chairman of the society had visited him and sent representatives to urge him several times, but Wang replied by quoting the words of II Corinthians 6:14, saying: ‘Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers’. His answer was simply: ‘We will not join the new union of churches.’ And he also added: ‘As I obey the Lord whom I have served and as I keep the Truth which I believed, I will not obey any man’s command that goes against the will of God.’²⁸ Hence, the Japanese government could not do anything but had to leave him alone. Wang interpreted it as a divine protection which confirmed his view of political non-involvement and prepared him for the coming crisis in the 1950s. Under the guidance of the Communist government, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) started in the 1950s to mobilize Chinese churches to unite in denouncing Western imperialism. Wang was under great pressure again, yet he also refused to obey the government, on the same ground that his church had never had any connection with Western missionaries.²⁹ He continued to stay away from politics and refused to give in. Such a nonconformist response was hardly acceptable to the Chinese government which led to his imprisonment in the summer of 1955. Wang was accused of refusing to join

²⁶ As John Briggs described, the term ‘nonconforming’ refers to ‘those Christians who were unwilling to conform to the style or the practice of the totality of the national church’. See e.g. Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity, 1662–2000’, pp. 3–26. Hence, the term ‘nonconformity’ may be used in this case of China, in which ‘the national church’ was best represented by the Three-Self Patriotic Movement which was sponsored by the State government. ²⁷ See Ming-dao, Wushi Nian Lai; also Wang, Wang Ming-Dao- the Last Forty Years. ²⁸ See Lyall, Three of China’s Mighty Men, pp. 118–21. ²⁹ See Lian Xi, Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (New Haven, CT, 2010).

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the TSPM and failure to support the government. He was released in the following year after the signing of a confession. But afterward, Wang regretted his confession and he thought that he had betrayed the Lord. He revoked the previous confession and was put in jail again till December 1979, when Deng Xiaoping put forward a more tolerant religious policy which brought about his final release. During 1980s, Wang and his wife lived in Shanghai, welcomed visitors to their home and shared their experiences of suffering for Christ. And he remained firm in holding his Christian faith till his death on 28 July 1991.³⁰ The central doctrine of Wang’s theology was re-generation in Christ, upon which Christianity stands and falls. Whereas the liberal Christians preached an earthly kingdom of God to be established through human efforts, and the Communists envisioned a utopia through revolution, Wang affirmed that only a changed person through genuine rebirth in Christ could change society. This teaching has significantly affected the Chinese churches then and even today. Wang has been influential throughout the century, especially among the fundamentalist churches and the house churches in China. His legacy lives on in the lives of millions of Chinese Christians who see him as an example of ‘political dissent’, by upholding Bible-truths and holding firm the Christian faith despite persecution and suffering. He has even been called the ‘Dean of the House Churches in China’.³¹ Watchman Nee was the founder of another indigenous Christian group, ‘The Assembly Hall’ (Juhuichu), which was also known as the ‘Little Flock’ (Xiaoqun). The indigenous church was started in Fuzhou, Shanghai and became widespread throughout China in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1949, Nee had already established a total of 700 churches with a membership of 700,000 throughout China.³² Nee was also known for his firm Christian belief, and his dissension toward the government policy of keeping Protestant churches under State control. In 1950, during a visit in Hong Kong, Nee was advised not to return to Shanghai but he refused and said: ‘What shall we do with so many churches on the mainland? I must return to take care of them and stand with them for the Lord’s testimony.’ ‘I do not care for my own life. If the house is crashing down, I have children inside and I must protect them.’³³ Nee’s love for God and his churches surpassed that for his own life. Hence, in the early 1950s when the Christian churches were struggling for their survival in China, Nee was arrested in Manchuria in April 1952 on the charges of corrupt business practices. Four years later, he was put on a public trial in Shanghai and was declared guilty on grounds of political and moral reasons. Nee was ³⁰ See Stephen Wang, The Long Road to Freedom: The Story of Wang Mingdao, trans. Ma Min (Tonbridge, Sovereign World, 2002), p. 10. ³¹ See e.g. Harvey, Acquainted with Grief, pp. 7–9. ³² See Lyall, Three of China’s Mighty Men, p. 64. ³³ See Watchman Nee’s Life and Ministry, Watchman Nee, http://www.watchmannee.org/lifeministry.html.

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sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Consequently, some of his churches joined the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and some went underground.

DRIVING F ORCES OF ‘ DISSENTING TRADITIONS ’ I N C H I N A One may ask: what were the driving forces behind the indigenous dissenting movements in China in the past century? Besides the social and political contexts which gave rise to the indigenous and dissenting traditions in China, there were also some religious factors which pushed forward these strong movements in China. The main theological driving forces for the indigenous movements in China were found to be Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, and the Holiness Movement traditions which were emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in European Christianity, and were brought to China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.³⁴ First, it was Pentecostalism which emphasized the baptism and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. It was brought from the West to Asia, especially to China in the early twentieth century, around 1906–7 in North China.³⁵ The belief in the baptism of Holy Spirit as an experience separated from conversion enabled Chinese Christians to seek a Holy Spirit-filled and empowered life. With the emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit, the Pentecostal movement opened up more diversity of beliefs and practices in Asia and was found to be the best means to contextualization, hence giving a great impetus to the life and mission of the various indigenous groups in China, such as the founding of the True Jesus Church in Beijing in 1917. Its founder, Paul Wei (1877–1919) got in touch with the Pentecostal, ‘Spiritual Gifts Movement’ in North China in 1908. Wei had been miraculously cured from his dreadful illness by the laying of hands of a church elder of the Apostolic Faith Mission, and later he also received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and started experiencing ‘glossolalia’ (speaking in tongues). In 1917, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, he was led to a river where he knelt down and prayed. Suddenly, a clear and loud voice spoke to him, saying: ‘You are to be baptized facing downwards’, so Wei did accordingly and felt that his soul was cleansed. He resolved to offer himself into the Lord’s service. After fasting for thirty-nine days, the Holy ³⁴ See also Ng, Peter Tze Ming, ‘Theological Roots of Contemporary Chinese Christianity: A Historical Review’, Journal of Asian Evangelical Theology, 19.2 (2005), pp. 59–71. ³⁵ The first Pentecostal agency to send missionaries to China was the Pentecostal Missionary Union founded in the United Kingdom in 1909, under the leadership of Cecil H. Polhill which modelled after the China Inland Mission. Later agencies included the Assemblies of God from the United States in 1914.

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Spirit told him that he should form a new church and name it, the ‘True Jesus Church’. Pentecostalism turned out to be the best means towards indigenization as Wei could found his own church—the ‘True Jesus Church’ in Beijing in 1917, one that could be contextualized by the work of the Holy Spirit and became truly Chinese and independent of any foreign missionary societies. Though Wei died in 1919, the work was succeeded by his son, Issac Wei, who continued developing his own ‘Three-Self ’ church, especially with the spirit of the ‘True Jesus Church’ throughout China and Taiwan.³⁶ Second, it was Evangelicalism which emphasized the centrality of the conversion or ‘born again’ experience in receiving salvation; evangelical Christians believe in the authority of the Bible as God’s revelation to humanity and have a strong commitment to evangelism or sharing the Christian message. It had gained great momentum in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the emergence of Methodism and the Great Awakenings in Britain and North America, and it was brought to China by the missionaries throughout the nineteenth century. It had provided the driving forces for the spread of the Christian gospel, and the motivation of self-propagation among the indigenous groups in China. Chinese Christians were eager to take up their responsibility to preach the gospel to their native people. The emphasis on the Bible was found significant to the Chinese people as they were fond of teachings of the Book. It was so easy for Chinese people to accept the authority of the Bible as the sacred texts and follow closely the teachings of the Bible. Most of the Chinese indigenous groups emphasized the need of confession, repentance on the part of the believers, and the belief in the Reformed doctrine of salvation by grace through faith alone. In addition to the emphasis on the adherence to the Bible and the living of Christian life according to the Bible, Christian believers would be empowered with the right to dissent from the ‘established church’. The most prominent group was led by Wang Mingdao. Wang had claimed that he did not have any association with the Western missionaries, that he had learnt Christian theology from his own experiences, including studying his own Bible, praying for the gifts of the Holy Spirit, believing the Bible as the revealed Word of God, and seeking to live a life of Christian holiness.³⁷ When he reached the age of twenty in 1920, Wang adopted a new name ‘Ming-dao’ (meaning ‘Testifying the Truth’), and ventured into true spiritual experiences. He decided to be re-baptized by immersion in order to receive full assurance of forgiveness, and pray for the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including speaking in tongues. And he determined to devote himself to live a life of holiness. Later, he spent much of his time in prayer and in the study of the Bible. He had utmost regard for the Bible as the revealed Word of God. His message was ³⁶ See Patterson, Christianity in Communist China, pp. 71–3. ³⁷ See Ming-dao, Wushi Nian Lai.

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firmly grounded in the Bible, emphasizing repentance, conversion, holiness, purity, and truth. So in working as an independent evangelist in Peking (Beijing), he set himself to hate evil and to demand from every professing Christian the fruits of justification in holiness of Christian living. Holding firmly his evangelical and conservative faith, he was hostile to liberalism and modernism in the Church. And in seeking after indigenous Christianity in China, he claimed to be dissenting against the ‘established’, mainline denominational church traditions.³⁸ Again, with full confidence in the recognition from God, Wang turned to justify his political claims to dissent from the ‘state-sponsored’ Three-Self Patriotic Movement on his own theological and biblical grounds. He turned out to be a charismatic-Pentecostal preacher of the time, being honoured as the ‘Dean of the House Churches in China’.³⁹ Besides the two theological driving forces of Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism, there was also the Holiness Movement which emphasized the experience of ‘re-generation’ and ‘sanctification’ which enabled Christians to live a holy life. The Holiness Movement had emerged from nineteenth-century Methodism which continued the interests in Christian holiness started from the time of John Wesley (1703–91) in England. It was brought to China in the mid- to late-nineteenth century by some missionaries, but more significantly there were some Chinese Christians who had their first-hand experiences in the West. A typical example was Watchman Nee’s connections with the holiness adherents in England in the 1930s. Watchman Nee had his personal contact with the Holiness movement in England during his visit in 1938. He attended the Keswick convention and met the leaders, including T. Austin Sparks there. He learnt of the history of the Keswick Conference and understood its significance for the promotion of Christian holiness, especially regarding the work of the Holy Spirit and that ‘holiness’ could be attained by the exercise of faith alone.⁴⁰ These had all become important elements in Nee’s indigenous theology that he developed in China. It was through his teacher and mentor, Margaret E. Barber in Fuzhou that Nee was introduced to the holiness movement of the Keswick convention and the writings of the Welsh holiness revival such as Jessie Penn-Lewis and others.⁴¹ And it was by the invitation of the Plymouth Brethren that Nee could visit England and America in 1933. After his return to China, Nee had a chance to learn about the Pentecostal movement through an English missionary, Elizabeth Fischbacher from the China Inland Mission. He was impressed by her work in Yantai of Shandong Province, especially the experience of ³⁸ See Wang, Wang Ming-Dao- the Last Forty Years. ³⁹ See e.g. Harvey, Acquainted with Grief. ⁴⁰ See e.g. David Bebbington, ‘The Wesleyan Tradition’, Holiness in Nineteenth-Century England (Carlisle, Cumbria, UK, 2000); also Charles W. Price and Ian M. Randall, Transforming Keswick (Carlisle, Cumbria, UK, 2000), pp. 14f. ⁴¹ See Reetzke, M. E. Barber, also online from Margaret E. Barber, http://mebarber.ccws.org/.

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speaking in tongues and singing spiritual songs during the revival meetings she conducted. And it was through the introduction of Elizabeth Fischbacher that Nee could come into personal contact with T. Austin-Sparks, an Open Brethren during his second visit to England in 1938. Nee stayed with Sparks in England for some months and he was taken to attend the Keswick convention and learnt more about the holiness movement in England. Nee learnt much of the teaching of Adventism from the Keswick Conference he attended during his second visit to England in 1938. Fischbacher even accompanied Nee to attend a revival meeting in Denmark. Besides, there was also the belief in a pre-millennial second advent of Christ, i.e. the imminent return of Christ to the earth. Nee had also learned from the Plymouth Brethren how to lead charismatic prayers and praises in seeking the Lord’s presence and a new tradition of heavy biblical teaching in Sunday worship, plus ‘a simpler, more flexible pattern of church fellowship’.⁴² Watchman Nee’s best known books are The Spiritual Man (1928) and The Normal Christian Life (1957).⁴³ His life and work continued to influence millions of Protestant Christians in China even after his death in 1972. Now, there are more than 3000 churches of the ‘Little Flock’ outside of China, including several hundred in the United States, and many of them still honour Watchman Nee as their spiritual and theological founder. Whereas most scholars were interested in the exploration of Watchman Nee’s theology of spiritual man and his development of ‘local churches’ in China, few were interested to explore Nee’s relations with his Christian friends in England and how Nee had adopted the Pentecostal, holiness traditions from European Christianity for the formulation of his indigenous theology in China. With his strong belief in the Bible and the conviction of the guidance of the Holy Spirit, Nee ventured to his rightful claims to be dissenting from both the established, denominational traditions and the later ‘State-sponsored’ ThreeSelf Patriotic Movement traditions.⁴⁴ These theological driving forces were ‘dissenting traditions’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe that provided the impetus for indigenous, and dissenting movements in early twentieth-century China. In short, besides the social and political contexts which gave rise to the dissenting and nonconformity traditions in China, there were three major theological forces which had helped further the processes of contextualization and indigenization of Christianity in twentieth-century China. They were ⁴² They are close to what is known as the ‘Evangelical Churches’ in modern times. See also 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. 131. ⁴³ See Reetzke, M. E. Barber. As appeared online from Margaret E. Barber, http://mebarber. ccws.org/ ⁴⁴ See Watchman Nee’s Life and Ministry, http://www.watchmannee.org/life-ministry.html.

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namely: Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, and the Holiness Movement. As discussed in the above paragraphs, the three driving forces were found to have provided significant impetus to the growth of indigenous movements. More significantly, it was the Pentecostal faith in the work of the Holy Spirit and the Evangelical belief in the authority of the Bible; plus the recognition of individual’s experience of ‘re-generation’ which enabled Christians to live a holy life, hence ‘Sanctified by God’, that Christian believers turned out to be empowered with the right to their honest dissent from any ‘established church’ traditions or any external establishments other than God. These were the driving forces both for the development of indigenous movements and the dissenting or nonconformity traditions in twentieth-century China.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: THE CHINESE LEG ACY As it was said at the beginning of this chapter, there were two stages of the development of dissenting traditions in China. The first stage appeared at the turn of the twentieth century when Chinese Christians were developing their indigenous Christianity in China, they sought to separate themselves from the Protestant mainline, denominational traditions brought by the foreign missionaries. The Three-Self principles implied their separation from the foreign control in which the ‘established church’ was represented by the Western mission boards. The second stage came in the early 1950s when the Chinese Communist government pushed forward the political Three-Self Patriotic Movement which aimed to keep Protestant churches under State control. In this stage, some indigenous churches turned out to be ‘dissenting’ and ‘nonconformist’, and sought to separate themselves from the control of the Communist government. In both of the two stages, dissenting traditions were closely related with the development of indigenous movements in China. The Three-Self principles, namely ‘self-government’, ‘self-support’, and ‘selfpropagation’, plus the theological driving forces of Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, and the Holiness Movement, all provided the impetus for Chinese Christians to demand separation in the first stage from foreign missionary control, and in the second stage from the control of the Chinese government. It would be interesting to note that the indigenous Christian movements in China were found to have close connections with those ‘dissenting traditions’ which were found in Western Christianity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As found in this chapter, the dissenting traditions from European Christianity, namely Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, and the Holiness Movements turned out to be the theological driving forces for the development of indigenous Christianity and the dissenting traditions in China throughout the century. This was perhaps part of the legacy of Chinese Christianity.

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The Chinese case reveals also the fact that these dissenting traditions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of European Christianity were found to receive more recognition in China in the later centuries, as they were also welcome and accepted by countries in Latin America, Africa, and other parts of Asia. These dissenting traditions turned out to be the driving forces for the Christian World Movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries outside Europe and America. The relationships between ‘dissenting traditions’ and ‘indigenous Christianity’ or the ‘essential theology of Christianity’ are yet to be explored.⁴⁵

S E L E C T B I BL IO G R A P H Y Bays, Daniel H., ed. Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 1996). Bebbington, David, ‘The Wesleyan Tradition’, Holiness in Nineteenth-Century England (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000). Briggs, John H. Y. ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity, 1662–2000’, in Robert Pope, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Cheng, C.Y. ‘What Federation Can Accomplish for the Chinese Church.’ Chinese Recorder XLI, 2 (Feb. 1910): 155–60. Cheng, C.Y. ‘The Development of an Indigenous Church in China.’ International Review of Missions XII (1923): 368–88. Cheung, David. Christianity in Modern China: The Making of the First Native Protestant Church (Leiden: Brill, 2004). Cohen, Paul A. China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). Esherick, Joseph. The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987). Harvey, Thomas Alan. Acquainted with Grief: Wang Mingdao’s Stand for the Persecuted Church in China (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2002). Hood, George A. Mission Accomplished? The English Presbyterian Mission in Lingtung, South China: A Study of the Interplay between Mission Methods and Their Historical Context (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Land, 1986). Lee, Joseph Tse-Hei. ‘Watchman Nee and the Little Flock Movement in Maoist China.’ Church History LXXIV, 1 (2005): 68–96. Lian, Xi. Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (New Haven, CT:, Yale University Press, 2010).

⁴⁵ See also Ng, Peter Tze Ming, ‘Theological Roots of Contemporary Chinese Christianity: A Historical Review’, Journal of Asian Evangelical Theology, 19:2, (2005), pp. 59–71.

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Lutz, Jessie G., and Rolland Ray Lutz. Hakka Chinese Confront Protestant Christianity, 1850–1900: With the Autobiographies of Eight Hakka Christians, and Commentary (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998). Lyall, Leslie T. Three of China’s Mighty Men (London: Overseas Missionary Fellowship Books, 1973). Nee, Watchman. The Normal Christian Church Life. 4th edn. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Book Room, 1970). Nee, Watchman. The Orthodoxy of the Church (Los Angeles, CA: The Stream, 1970). Ng, Peter Tze Ming, ‘Theological Roots of Contemporary Chinese Christianity: A Historical Review’, Journal of Asian Evangelical Theology 19, 2 (2005), 59–71. Ng, Peter Tze Ming, ‘The Other Side of 1910: The Development of Chinese Indigenous Movements before and after the Edinburgh Conference’, Chinese Christianity: An Interplay between Global and Local Perspectives (Boston: Brill, 2012). Price, Charles W., and Ian M. Randall. Transforming Keswick (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2000). Reetzke, James, and M. E. Barber. A Seed Sown in China (Chicago, IL: Chicago Bibles & Books, 2005). Wang, Ming-dao. Wushi Nian Lai [The Fifty Years] (Hong Kong: Bellman House, 1950). Wang, Stephen. The Long Road to Freedom: The Story of Wang Mingdao. Trans.Ma Min (Tonbridge: Sovereign World, 2002). Wang, Stephen C. H. Wang Ming-Dao: the Last Forty Years (Scarborough, Ontario: Gospel Publishing House, Inc., 2010).

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7 ‘Crying for Help and Reformation’ Dissenting Protestants in Ottoman Syria Deanna Ferree Womack

For the American Syria Mission, the early twentieth century brought a changing of the guard. This first Protestant mission in the Middle East was established in the 1820s by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), a non-denominational society that supported Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and other missionaries of the Reformed tradition. In 1870, the Syria Mission came under management of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (BFM), and three decades later, veterans of this Presbyterian enterprise were nearing retirement. Thus, in 1903, Franklin E. Hoskins took the place of long-time missionary Henry Harris Jessup as head of the Beirut station, the institutional centre of the mission that operated throughout the north-western region of Ottoman Syria (present day Lebanon and western Syria). The turn of the century was also a time of transition for the Arabic-speaking Protestants who had partnered with the American missionaries to found Syrian Evangelical Churches in their homeland. Hoskins took the reins in the aftermath of a church controversy that prompted several leading members to secede from the Evangelical Church of Beirut in 1892 to form a new congregation independent of missionary oversight. In 1902 the founders of this new congregation, characterized by Hoskins as a ‘dissenting faction’, printed an anti-missionary pamphlet in English that voiced resistance to American missionary control over ‘native’ church affairs.¹ Hoskins’ effort to manage this public outcry took two forms: he demanded a recantation of the pamphlet, but he also sought to explain the roots of this native resistance that dated back to 1870, when the Americans voted to ¹ Franklin E. Hoskins [Untitled] Timeline of the Beirut Church, 1910: Syria Mission Papers of the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia (PHS), Record Group 115-4-4.

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transfer the Syria Mission from the ABCFM to the BFM. Upon examining mission records, Hoskins determined that ‘about the time the Syria Mission was transferred from the American to the Presbyterian Board a certain section of the [Beirut] Church rose in rebellion and from that day to this they have made open and secret war against the Mission’.² While Hoskins offered a historical narrative of this American-Syrian conflict that delegitimized Syrian Protestant resistance, Syrian practices of dissent shaped the trajectory of twentieth-century Protestantism in the region. Presbyterians and Congregationalists in Syria and Lebanon trace their history to the work of the ABCFM and to the establishment of the first two Middle Eastern Protestant congregations, the Armenian Evangelical Church (est. 1846 in Istanbul) and the Syrian Evangelical Church (est. 1848 in Beirut). The present-day Union of the Armenian Evangelical Churches in the Near East is a denominationally Congregational union affiliated with the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the United Churches of Christ. It took form in 1924 and included congregations established in Syria and Lebanon following the genocide and dispersion of Armenians during World War I.³ The National Evangelical Church of Beirut (NECB) emerged in the interwar period as congregationally governed and independent of the American Syria Mission’s Presbyterian system.⁴ At the same time, the mission’s Presbyterian Churches formed the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon. In 1959, the Synod took over from the American Presbyterians all responsibilities for Presbyterian churches, schools, and medical institutions. Two years later, the NECB and several affiliated churches formed the National Evangelical Union of Lebanon, a denominationally Congregational body like the Armenian Evangelical union.⁵ With a focus on the predominantly Arab congregations in Syria during the final decades of Ottoman rule (1890–1918), this chapter explains how Syrian and Lebanese Protestants who shared the same roots and Reformed theological tradition came to define their churches in the twentieth century as either Congregational or Presbyterian. Contrary to the accounts of missionaries like Franklin Hoskins, this was not merely the result of internal Syrian Protestant squabbling, self-interested troublemaking, or a preference for congregationalism. Rather, the church controversies of this period and subsequent denominational divisions were part of a wider Protestant dissenting tradition. Like ² Ibid. ³ Paul A. Haidostian, ‘Church Communion in the Middle East: An Armenian Evangelical Perspective’, Reformed World, LVI, 2 (June 2006). ⁴ For background, see Deanna F. Womack, ‘Conversion, Controversy, and Cultural Production: Syrian Protestants, American Missionaries, and the Arabic Press, ca. 1870–1915’ (PhD dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, 2015), pp. 98–221. ⁵ Betty Jane Bailey and J. Martin Bailey, Who Are the Christians in the Middle East? (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003), pp. 114–19.

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the early English Non-conformists and the Protestants of the global South who resisted missionary models in the twentieth century, the Syrians who seceded from the Beirut Church expressed a number of distinct modes of dissent. These included: 1) refusal to conform to American demands, 2) defence of indigenous Syrian culture, 3) emphasis on congregationally based church governance, 4) the creation of an independent church, and 5) identification of that church as the true expression of Protestantism in Syria, in contrast to American missionary immorality. This chapter examines each of these points of dissention, utilizing the anti-missionary pamphlet of 1902, private correspondence between missionaries and Syrians, and other neglected documents from Syrian church and missionary archives. The first section identifies the power imbalance between American missionaries and Syrian Evangelical Church leaders as the foundation for Syrian Protestants’ recurring cries of resistance and reform throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second section examines the Syrian dissenters’ use of congregationalism as a means of rejecting missionary control and establishing the Evangelical Independent Church in Beirut, a single congregation without denominational ties to other churches in Syria. The third section argues that the Independent Church members’ language of evangelical theology and biblical hermeneutics should prompt us to place their story within the larger history of Protestant dissenting traditions. Finally, the chapter demonstrates how the Syrian dissenters of the early twentieth century led the National Evangelical Church of Beirut from congregational autonomy to a denominationally Congregational affiliation.

DISSENT AGAINST WESTERN MISSIONARY POWER From its inception in 1894 to its reunification with the Evangelical Church of Beirut in 1906, the Evangelical Independent Church offers the most distinct and overlooked example of Protestant dissent in Ottoman Syria. Yet this congregation’s rejection of Western Christian impositions must be understood within a longer history of Syrian assertions of independent agency in response to American missionary power. Central among the Protestant converts who shaped this tradition of dissent was the early mission employee and intellectual of the Arab renaissance (Nahda), Butrus al-Bustani (1819–83). After the American mission rejected the Beirut church’s request to make him their first Syrian pastor in 1854, Bustani refused to continue working as an evangelist and translator for the mission. The story of his break with the Americans has been told by scholars of Lebanese history and Middle Eastern

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mission historians.⁶ This act of independence was one of many that made Bustani’s legacy a model for later generations of Syrian Protestants. When Bustani wrote the petition for the establishment of the Evangelical Church of Beirut in 1847, he suggested by repeated references to Jesus Christ alone as head of the church that missionary authority over the congregation should be only temporary.⁷ Although he ceased working as a paid mission employee, Bustani did not distance himself from the Protestant community or from his sense of responsibility to spread the gospel in Syria. Indeed, in 1862 he became the founding president of the Evangelical Society of Beirut (Jam‘iyyat Bayrut al-Injiliyya, also known as the Beirut Bible Society), an organization that made its rallying cry the call of Matthew 28:19–20 to make disciples of all nations. The society raised funds for the publication of Bibles and evangelistic leaflets and supported Syrian Protestant women and men who travelled the region preaching and distributing these texts. Using the term ‘missionaries’ or ‘evangelists’ (mubashirun) to refer only to Syrians, the society’s first annual report gave as little recognition to the Americans as the American missionaries’ reports typically offered to the Syrians.⁸ Bustani also embodied his vision of Syrian Protestant agency while serving as an elder and Sunday school teacher at the Evangelical Church of Beirut, where he continued to preach until his death in 1883.⁹ Bustani did not live to see the Beirut church controversy of the 1890s, but it is no coincidence that his daughters Alice and Louisa Bustani, and his son-in-law Khalil Sarkis, were among those who seceded from the church in 1892. In fact, of the thirty Syrians who founded the Evangelical Independent Church in 1894, most were from long-established Syrian Protestant families who had worshipped for decades with Bustani in the Evangelical Church of Beirut under the direction of an American pastor.¹⁰ The mission finally installed the church’s first ordained Syrian minister, Yusif Badr, in 1890.¹¹ The schism that occurred two years later, during Badr’s tenure, was a central reference point in the anti-missionary pamphlet of 1902, entitled ‘Syria and the Mission Work’. Its authors maintained, ‘It is ten years now since the quarrel within and ⁶ A. L. Tibawi, American Interests in Syria, 1800–1901: A Study of Educational, Literary and Religious Work (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), pp. 130–2, 281; A. L. Tibawi, ‘The American Missionaries in Beirut and Butrus Al-Bustani’, Middle Eastern Affairs, III, St Antony’s Papers, 16 (1963); Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 207–8. ⁷ ‘Syria: Organization of a Native Church’, Missionary Herald, XLIV, 8 (Aug. 1848), p. 266; Tibawi, ‘The American Missionaries in Beirut and Butrus Al-Bustani’, p. 181. ⁸ Evangelical Society of Beirut, A‘mal Jam‘iyyat Bayrut al-Injiliyya ‘an Sanat 1862 [Activities of the Evangelical Society of Beirut for the Year 1862], (Beirut, 1863). Courtesy of AndoverHarvard Theological Library Special Collections. ⁹ ‘Al-Asaf Al-Azim’ [The Great Sorrow], al-Nashra al-Usbu‘iyya, XIX, (17 May 1883), p. 149. ¹⁰ Notes of Henry H. Jessup, 18 March 1894, PHS 115-4-3. ¹¹ Womack, ‘Conversion, Controversy, and Cultural Production’. p. 112.

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without the church in Syria, and the voice from the grave is crying for help and reformation’. The ‘quarrel within’, a topic I address in the next section, arose when certain church members proposed to dismiss Badr as pastor and other Syrians rejected this move. The ‘quarrel without’ was a long-simmering contest of power between Syrian dissenters and American missionaries that finally boiled over with the pamphlet controversy at the turn of the century. Bustani’s church petition and the annual report of the Evangelical Society of Beirut offered a soft challenge to American authority. In contrast, the 1902 pamphlet issued a scathing assessment of the Syria Mission.¹² The document condemned the emotional, physical, and economic abuse of Syrians at the hands of American missionary men, and it challenged missionaries’ misrepresentations of Syria in speeches for donors in the United States. Written in English, the pamphlet was intended for such mission supporters, as it addressed itself to ‘the devoted Christian of this free land’. It was also a direct critique intended to shame the American missionaries in Syria, and one that might also be read by other Western missionaries. Indeed, in early 1902, the Independent Church pastor As‘ad Zarub presented the pamphlet to an affiliate of the British Syrian Mission in Beirut (BSM), H. B. Macartney. The BSM was a non-denominational body, and perhaps for this reason Zarub hoped that British missionaries would take the side of his independent congregation against the American Presbyterians.¹³ Macartney, however, delivered the pamphlet to Henry Harris Jessup at the American mission station. This marked the beginning of the American missionaries’ eight-year effort to induce Zarub to recant the pamphlet’s claims, a task Jessup passed on to Hoskins in 1903. For the American men who sought to reassert authority over this defiant pastor, the claims of Zarub’s pamphlet were slanderous and defamatory. But for the dissenters who produced it, this document conveyed the Syrian Protestant community’s struggles and aspirations. They rejected missionary impositions in order to assert local Protestant autonomy and defend the value of indigenous Syrian culture. The opening words of the pamphlet conveyed the authors’ deep pride as inhabitants of the region where Christ was born, ‘that little country where the light first shone over all the world’. Moving forward in time, the document then praised the work of the earliest ABCFM missionaries in nineteenth-century Syria, Simeon Calhoun, Cornelius Van Dyck, William Thomson, and Eli Smith. Affirming that these ‘first faithful missionaries’ brought back the light to a land where ‘darkness and ignorance ¹² ‘Syria and the Mission Work’, ca. 1902, PHS 115-4-4. This is the source for all subsequent references from the anti-missionary pamphlet of 1902. ¹³ On the BSM, see Frances E. Scott, Dare and Persevere: The Story of One Hundred Years of Evangelism in Syria and Lebanon, from 1860 to 1960 (London: Lebanon Evangelical Mission/ Camelot Press, 1960).

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reigned’, the pamphlet did not object to evangelical missions or Protestant theology. Rather, it condemned the American Presbyterians at the turn of the century for straying from the pious example of their predecessors. This dissenting pamphlet, so to speak, offered twelve numbered points, which may be condensed into three interconnected accusations: that the missionaries sought only wealth and personal gain, that they exploited Syrian Protestants, and that they misrepresented the Syrian context. With regard to the first claim, the pamphlet referred repeatedly to the missionaries’ luxurious homes in the mountains and the money they spent to ‘keep Arabian horses, carriages and servants’. In the view of the Syrian dissenters: [T]he former missionaries came down and lived among the natives and became as one of them, by which means they gained their love and confidence; whereas the present missionaries lift themselves up higher and higher above the natives and live in castles and palaces, not less than those living in the White House.

Naming several high profile American donors—like John Wanamaker, the famous department store owner in Philadelphia—the authors claimed that contributions intended for educational institutions were actually used to support the missionaries’ elite lifestyles. Other funds, it implied, were appropriated from the exorbitant fees that Syrians were forced to pay to mission schools and missionary doctors. The pamphlet’s second theme built on the first, as it indicated that missionaries mistreated and wielded power over Syrian Protestants. It claimed that the former missionaries succeeded in their endeavours because they ‘treated the native preachers as partners in the work and trusted them’ with responsibilities that even the Americans were unable to carry out. By contrast, the present missionaries ‘dismissed every native member and every smart man from the work and left those who call them “My lord, my lord, I am under your orders”’. Such Syrian employees were, in fact, ‘compelled to speak highly of their lords’. In the authors’ description, American missionaries were like Western missionaries and colonial administrators in other global contexts who assumed positions of tutelage over native workers and treated them as servants.¹⁴ Missionary abuses of power also extended into the realm of sexual morality, according to the pamphlet, which described American missionary men indulging in extra-marital affairs with Syrian women. When it came to the third general accusation—that missionaries misrepresented the status of Syrian society—the pamphlet capitalized on the growing transnational movements between Ottoman Syria and the Americas before World War I. During this period, Syrian immigrants in the US (not all of whom were Protestant) took special interest in missionary discourses on Syria. ¹⁴ Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 210; Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994 edn), p. 35.

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They gained access to official mission reports and newspaper articles by members of the Syria Mission, and some of them attended missionaries’ fundraising gatherings. What they heard and read did not match with reality. According to the Syrian dissenters, ‘When they lecture in America they make Syria the darkest place upon the surface of the globe, and its race in the most savage state, while things in reality are far from being so’. When a Syrian audience member questioned Henry Jessup during his visit to America, the pamphlet explained, Jessup admitted that ‘he spoke the things which the people of America would expect to hear, and not things as they are’. The document recorded a similar encounter between Syrian Protestant College graduate David Fullihan¹⁵ and missionary George Ford after a lecture in Philadelphia: [Fullihan] asked permission from the chairman to tell the audience that what was told by the lecturer was not right. After the opportunity was given to him Dr. Ford’s excuse was, that he did not know that a Syrian was present.

Such accounts from Syrian immigrants were likely told to the Independent Church pastor As‘ad Zarub when he visited the US at the turn of the century. Similar stories made their way back to Syria as migrant workers sent letters to their families and as Syrians at home took out subscriptions to SyrianAmerican newspapers or read reprinted articles from America in local Arab papers. One such publication, the New York based English-Arabic periodical Kawkab Amirka (The Star of America), introduced a column in 1892 entitled ‘The Missionary Controversy: What Do the Syrians Think of the American Missionaries Among Them’. Although some Syrian respondents defended the missionaries, others expressed the same dissenting views that the antimissionary pamphlet would articulate a decade later. One writer—who signed his name as Y. S.—advocated for a document like Zarub’s pamphlet that would be aimed at Western readers. He advised: Prepare a good petition, and have it signed by all among you who are interested in bringing about a change and reformation in the present missionary regime, and send copies of that petition to the Presbyterian General Assembly . . . Send some copies to influential pastors in England and America, and ask their cooperation for exposing to the Christian public, the crying evils and wrongs resulting from the misconduct of these missionaries.¹⁶

¹⁵ On Fullihan, see Catalogue of the Syrian Protestant College, Beirut, Syria, 36th Year, 1901–1902 (Beirut, 1902), p. 96. ¹⁶ Y.S., ‘The Missionary Controversy: What Do the Syrians Think of the American Missionaries among Them’, Kawkab America/The Star of America, English edn, I, 26 (7 Oct. 1892). This column was addressed briefly in Linda K. Jacobs, Strangers in the West: The Syrian Colony of New York City, 1880–1900 (New York: KalimahPress, 2015), p. 269.

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Like Bustani, Zarub, and many other Syrian Protestants, this author emphasized indigenous Christian agency. His letter to the editor concluded by asserting that contrary to missionary claims, ‘there are in Syria, today, many educated men and women, in their employ, more able and better qualified than they are to carry on the great work among their countrymen’.¹⁷ From this newspaper column, it is apparent that the 1902 text ‘Syria and the Mission Work’ was part of a wider conversation among Syrians in the Ottoman Empire and in America who took personally missionaries’ disparaging remarks about their society. Like other Syrian Christians and Muslims, the Syrian dissenters in Zarub’s church honoured their homeland’s ancient heritage and took pride in Syrian contributions to the modern Arab renaissance. Yet the pamphlet’s critique of American missionaries drew upon a distinctly Protestant tradition of dissent as it argued for congregational autonomy and referred back to the Beirut church schism of 1892. It is to this defining moment in Syrian Evangelical Church history that we now turn.

CONGREGATIONAL FORMATION AS SYRIAN RESISTANCE I cannot verify a direct connection between the Kawkab Amirka author ‘Y. S.’ and the Syrian dissenters who would later produce the 1902 pamphlet, but other respondents to the ‘Missionary Controversy’ column did indicate an affiliation with the Syrian Evangelical Church. Salim Sarkis wrote from Beirut in 1892 to address the schism that was then forming among Protestants in the city. He pointed to ‘the bad conduct of the American Missionaries, especially what they are now doing in dividing the Protestant congregation in two parties, the greater of which is alienated from the Church’.¹⁸ Six days earlier, prominent members of the Evangelical Church of Beirut—including Salim’s uncle, Khalil Sarkis—had written to Henry Jessup of a disagreement between the congregation and their pastor, Yusif Badr. These members desired the mission’s assistance in calling a new pastor.¹⁹ Jessup refused the request, and Khalil emerged as the spokesperson for the disgruntled members who eventually seceded from the church to form the Evangelical Independent Church.

¹⁷ Y.S., ‘The Missionary Controversy’. ¹⁸ Salim Sarkis, ‘Mukatibat’ [Correspondence], Kawkab Amirka, I, 19 (19 Aug. 1892); Salim Sarkis, ‘The Missionary Controversy: What Do the Syrians Think of the American Missionaries among Them’, Kawkab America/The Star of America, English edn, I, 24 (23 Sept. 1892). ¹⁹ Khalil Sarkis, Na‘mi Tabit, and ‘Abdullah Saigh to Henry H. Jessup, 14 July 1892, PHS 115-4-5.

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Although the remarks of Salim Sarkis indicated that some Beiruti Protestants blamed the church division on the missionaries, such tensions were not explicit in the 1892 letter to Jessup. There, the Syrian dissenters maintained a deferential tone, as they also did a year later when requesting the ordination of As‘ad Zarub as the pastor of their new congregation. It is significant, however, that the members determined to govern their church according to the ‘old nizam’ (organizing structure), the congregational system introduced by the ABCFM. In the Presbyterian mission’s system, the church would have been subject to the decisions of a Presbytery (a regional governing body of pastors, church elders, and missionaries). The aforementioned ‘quarrel within’ the Syrian Protestant community might have involved differences of opinion on church polity. However, the main question addressed in congregational meetings during this period was whether or not to dismiss the Beirut church’s pastor. Those who voted to retain Badr included members who opposed Presbyterian governance, indicating the complexity of internal Syrian Protestant politics. When the missionaries finally succeeded in 1896 in reorganizing the Evangelical Church of Beirut on a Presbyterian basis, they anticipated resistance from such members. At least one of these, Salim Kassab, left to join the Independent Church.²⁰ When it came to American-Syrian relations, church governance was a central issue in the quarrel that dated back to 1870. After the Syria Mission came under the Presbyterian BFM that year, the American missionaries sought to direct the Syrian Evangelical Churches’ gradual transition from congregational to Presbyterian polity. Since the missionary men were the de facto leaders of the Syrian Presbyteries that emerged in the 1880s, preference for the old congregational nizam signalled Syrian Protestant desires to manage their own affairs without close American supervision. Thus, when Franklin Hoskins revisited the history of the Beirut church in the early twentieth century, he characterized Syrian congregationalism as a tactic of ‘open and secret war’ against the mission.²¹ In four handwritten volumes, Hoskins consolidated Syria Mission records and copied excerpts from the official minutes, thus preserving select information from deteriorating documents while also presenting an interpretation of this history in light of the 1902 pamphlet controversy.²² Hoskins’ timeline of

²⁰ Hoskins [Untitled] Timeline of the Beirut Church, 1910. The missionaries approved the following provision on 12 June 1893: ‘Voted that in case the Beirut church refuse to accept the proposition of the mission, that the Beirut Station be directed to take the necessary steps to organize the church, de novo, on a Presbyterian basis’. This vote was recorded in Franklin E. Hoskins, ‘Beirut Church, Volume II’, PHS 115-4-3. On Kassab’s support of Badr and his later affiliation with the Evangelical Independent Church, see Salim Kassab to the Beirut Station, 20 March 1903, PHS 115-4-4; Murad Barudi, Salim Kassab, Jabir Dumit, As‘ad Atiq, Salih al-Salibi, and Ibrahim Hurani to American Missionaries in Beirut, 16 Dec. 1892, PHS 115-4-5. ²¹ Hoskins [Untitled] Timeline of the Beirut Church, 1910. ²² Franklin E. Hoskins, ‘Beirut Church’, Vols I–IV, ca. 1903–1916, PHS 115-4-3 and 115-4-4.

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four decades in the life of the Beirut congregation, from 1870–1910, focused on the Syrian dissenters. There were three noteworthy developments after the group’s initial ‘rebellion’ against BFM oversight in 1870. First, when the six congregations of the proposed Lebanon Presbytery met in 1885 and 1886, the Beirut church rejected the rules that the missionaries offered for Presbyterian governance. According to Hoskins, a troublesome faction ‘broke up the Presbytery at its second meeting after organization. They seized the “wakf ” [religious endowment] and finances and mismanaged them’.²³ Second, in 1892, ‘this same faction dissented and went out in a body carrying the “wakf ” with them’. These were the members who argued with Yusif Badr over management of the endowment, seceded from the Beirut church, and began worshipping separately under the direction of As‘ad Zarub. Third, when Hoskins described the establishment of the Evangelical Independent Church in 1894, he specified that Zarub ‘was ordained and installed but not by the Mission’.²⁴ Hoskins underlined this final phrase for emphasis, demonstrating his effort to reinterpret and thereby manage Syrian dissent. This same claim that Zarub was ‘irregularly ordained’ became enshrined in the mission’s official narrative when the Protestant community in Syria reconstituted itself after World War I.²⁵ Yet Zarub’s ordination had actually followed Syria Mission protocol. According to custom, two Syrian pastors—As‘ad Abdullah al-Rasi and Salim al-Hakim—performed the service. Hoskins’ account was therefore accurate but misleading because he excised from the record the fact that missionaries Henry Harris Jessup, Cornelius Van Dyck, Samuel Jessup, and William Eddy had also participated in the ordination process. Henry Jessup, in fact, served as chair when the seceding members met to establish officially the Evangelical Independent Church in March of 1894. Although their request for congregational polity was a hindrance to the Syria Mission’s designs, Jessup presided over the meeting because the BFM had charged the mission to establish selfgoverning and self-sustaining churches. The parishioners, in turn, agreed to take full responsibility for their pastor’s salary, which they did with funds from the aforementioned religious endowment.²⁶ ²³ Hoskins [Untitled] Timeline of the Beirut Church, 1910. On the history of the Sidon, Tripoli, and Lebanon Presbyteries, see Womack, ‘Conversion, Controversy, and Cultural Production’, pp. 113–17, 130; As‘ad ‘Abbud and Jirjis al-Khuri, Khutab fi Ta’rikh Majma‘ Mashikhat Sayda al-Injiliyya wa-Majma‘ Mashikhat Tarabulus al-Injiliyya [Speeches on the History of the Evangelical Presbyteries in Sidon and Tripoli], 1904. Courtesy of Near East School of Theology in Beirut Special Collections. ²⁴ Hoskins [Untitled] Timeline of the Beirut Church, 1910. ²⁵ Franklin E. Hoskins, ‘Anglo-American Congregation’, Jan. 1919, PHS 115-3-18. This printed history was likely produced at the American Mission Press in Beirut. ²⁶ Notes of Henry H. Jessup and Henry Jessup, ‘Minutes of the Presbytery of Beirut’, 24–5 March 1894, PHS 115-4-3; ‘Minutes of the Presbytery of Beirut Ordaining As‘ad Daud Zarub as Evangelist’, 24–5 March 1894, PHS 115-4-5; Henry Jessup to Rev. J. Gillespie, 28 March 1894,

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In the 1890s, Syria Mission reports made the best of this situation, highlighting the first truly independent Syrian Protestant congregation as an American missionary achievement. The authors of the 1902 pamphlet, however, apprehended their own history in different terms. They offered nostalgic words of praise to the earliest missionaries sent to Syria by the ABCFM, which was then a non-denominational society with a Congregationalist majority. The Syrian churches that these missionaries founded were not denominationally affiliated with Congregational churches in New England but rather followed a congregational model in which there was no central governing authority beyond the local church. In the view of the Syrian dissenters, whose families had worshipped in the Beirut church for decades under this system, the transfer to the BFM in 1870 destroyed the faithful efforts of the former missionaries: [T]he new missionaries began to change the system and discipline of the Syrian churches, from the simple old system to the Presbyterian denomination. They came by force to compel the churches to accept the rules of Presbytery as they are, without letting them understand what it meant. They organized a senate and a general assembly, and forced the people to believe in the government of the church.

In opposition to such Western missionary demands, the dissenting Protestants seceded from the Beirut church and, in the words of the pamphlet, proclaimed ‘independency without the slightest connection with the American missionaries’. Independent Church members persisted in this resistance despite what they perceived as continual attacks from the missionaries. Challenging Hoskins’ assertion that Zarub’s church was intent on ‘keeping up the strife’, the pamphlet explained: ‘When this band of Christians started alone as the first native and self-supporting church . . . the American missionaries tried by all means to scatter this band and destroy their activity and development from the world’. It went on to accuse the missionaries of impeding the congregation’s efforts to fund their own building, a necessity for the church’s viability. When Zarub travelled to the US to raise support for the project, the document explained, ‘the missionaries sent their letters that the churches of the United States of America may be closed before the faithful servant of God’. Zarub’s experience in the US prompted the production of the pamphlet and also supplied much of the content for its anti-foreign missionary critiques. Whether printed in the US during his visit or at a private press in Beirut, the document is material evidence of the transnational entanglements between the Ottoman Empire and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth PHS Syria Letters, 1893–5, Vol. X [microfilm reel]. Henry Jessup’s sermon at Zarub’s ordination was printed in al-Nashra al-Usbu‘iyya, 1471 (1 April 1894), pp. 105–7.

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centuries. Using a form of printed media so often employed in missionaries’ evangelistic campaigns, the Evangelical Independent Church members who authored the pamphlet expressed dissent, first, by critiquing the Americans’ treatment of Syrians and second, by defending congregationalism as a means of local church autonomy. A third form of dissent, conveyed through distinctly biblical language, is the subject of the following section.

B I B L I CA L F O U N D A TI ONS FOR D I S S E NT Considering the injustices that the pamphlet described, it is not surprising that Independent Church members would conceive of their experience in biblical terms. Although Zarub returned home to Syria empty handed, the pamphlet insisted that his ‘noble cause’ would be vindicated in the end. ‘We withdrew our pastor’, it explained, ‘that he may hold on with us, and the Lord will find a ram for the sacrifice’. By symbolically representing Zarub as a new Isaac saved from sacrificial testing, the authors asserted a scriptural foundation for the continued existence of their church. Like the child of the promise, the wrongly afflicted pastor was, in their view, representative of the future of the people of Israel (Genesis 22). Accordingly, the church understood itself as the true people of God. This was apparent in the concluding sentences of the pamphlet in which the members spoke in a collective voice: We want to tell that still there is a remnant in the East which will not bow a knee to ‘Baal’. It is ten years now since the quarrel within and without the church in Syria, and the voice from the grave is crying for help and reformation and the native Independent Evangelical Church ask[s] the protection of the devoted Christian of this free land. May God look over and do his justice.

Styling the independent congregation as the ‘remnant’ of the faithful who would not succumb to the idolatry of the missionaries, the pamphlet thus implied that the Americans would meet with the Lord’s anger like the unfaithful within Israel who worshipped Baal (Numbers 25:1–5).²⁷ Such biblical interpretation was strategy of Protestant dissent upholding the community’s decision to form an autonomous congregation and defending its authenticity over and against American missionary corruption. Reflecting the community’s sense of self-understanding, the document drew upon scriptural imagery to convince its readers—including American mission supporters and British missionaries—to support their appeal for true Protestant ‘reformation’.

²⁷ Among multiple references to the faithful ‘remnant’, see Ezra 9, Isaiah 10–11, and Romans 9:27.

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Individual members of the Independent Church used a similar approach to defend their pastor during the pamphlet controversy. In 1903, a year after the anti-missionary pamphlet surfaced, Independent Church member Antun Qanawati wrote a letter on his pastor’s behalf urging the missionaries to re-evaluate their actions towards Zarub on the basis of scripture.²⁸ Qanawati’s letter came soon after Franklin Hoskins took charge of the Beirut station and renewed the mission’s efforts to induce Zarub to recant. Hoskins called upon the pastor to sign a written ‘retraction of the libel of the pamphlet’ and make ‘atonement for those he [had] thus slandered’.²⁹ To facilitate this, he provided a form letter stating, ‘The charges of luxury, of lying, of swindling and of immoralities against individuals in particular and the community as a whole, are slanders and I regret deeply that I ever listened to them and blame myself for having had anything to do with the printing of them’.³⁰ In Qanawati’s opinion, such pressure to make a public confession was unwarranted, as the pastor had already endured the missionaries’ private rebuke and the ongoing controversy had taken a toll on him. While acknowledging his status as a lay person, Qanawati nevertheless endeavoured to instruct the missionaries ‘in the spirit of the gospel’ as he employed biblical texts to call them to forgive Zarub and refrain from punishing him for his mistakes. Qanawati penned his commentary in black script but drew attention to verses and short phrases from scripture by copying them in red ink. Unlike the Red Letter Bibles that had become a sign of new evangelical piety in the US at the turn of the century, the Syrian writer did not limit this symbolic tactic to the words of Christ but incorporated the New Testament epistles as well. Yet considering his message of reconciliation, the red colouring surely carried the same intent: to remind the readers of Christ’s blood shed for their sins.³¹ Qanawati began by weaving together a series of teachings from the gospels of Matthew and Luke (chapter and verse numbers added), as follows: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners (Matt. 9:13). Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also (Matt. 5:39). And if anyone takes something from you,

²⁸ Qanawati was a local businessman and well educated in Arabic composition. He was not a founding member of the church and does not appear in my source materials as one of the leading figures in the Syrian Protestant community. ²⁹ Franklin E. Hoskins to Khalil Sarkis, 4 May 1903, PHS 115-4-4; Hoskins to Sarkis, 11 May 1903, PHS 115-4-4; Hoskins to As‘ad Zarub, 28 May 1903, PHS 115-4-4. ³⁰ American Syria Mission [Untitled] Form Letter Addressed ‘to the Members of the American Community and Mission in Syria’, June 1903, PHS 115-4-4. ³¹ Antun Qanawati to the Syria Mission, 13 June 1903, PHS 115-4-5. All subsequent references to Qanawati in this chapter are drawn from this letter. On Red Letter Bibles, see Gordon D. Fee and Mark L. Strauss, How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth: A Guide to Understanding and Using Bible Versions (New York: Zondervan, 2009).

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do not ask for it again (Luke 6:30). First be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift (Matt. 5:24). If your brother sins, you must rebuke him, and if he repents, you must forgive him (Luke 17:3), not seven times but seventyseven times (Matt. 18:22). Love your enemies, bless those who curse you. Do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who abuse you (Matt. 5:44). For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? (Matt. 5:46). For if you forgive others their trespasses, your father in heaven will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your father in heaven forgive your trespasses (Matt. 16:14–15). Do not judge, so you may not be judged (Matt 7:1). Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye, but you do not notice the log in your own eye? (Luke 6:41).³²

Rendering these biblical principles of forgiveness and non-retaliation without the chapter and verse numbers, Qanawati demonstrated a deep familiarity with the Arabic Van Dyck Bible used in his congregation.³³ He followed the text closely, although not precisely, indicating that he may have quoted some verses by memory rather than copying them from the pages of his own Bible. After calling the missionaries’ attention also to the teachings of Peter and Paul (Rom. 12:19–20; 1 Peter 2:21 and 2:23; Eph. 4:26–7; Gal. 6:1), Qanawati pointed next to Stephen the martyr, who asked the Lord not to punish his murderers (Acts 7:20). Returning to the gospels, then, he repeated Jesus’ last words, ‘Father forgive them’ (Matt. 6:12), and suggested that the American missionaries had not followed the example of Christ in their dealings with Zarub. Rather than humiliating a local pastor and urging his dismissal from the church, Qanawati contended, they ought to give up the ‘law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’.³⁴ In his final red letter reference, Qanawati losely combined Ephesians 4:22 and 5:8, saying, ‘We have given up the old self, deluded by lusts, and so we act as children of the light’. This statement broke his earlier pattern of imperatives and also strayed from the scriptural text to employ the first-person plural. Perhaps Qanawati intended to soften his reference to missionary retaliation by including himself and the Americans together as forgiven sinners and children of God. Yet considering the Independent Church’s claim to be the remnant of true Christianity in Syria, Qanawati may actually have intended the verses as a reflection on his own congregation. His letter did not match the accusatory tone of the 1902 pamphlet, but like that text it used scriptural imagery to

³² My translation follows the NRSV except in certain cases, like Matthew 5:44, where the NRSV does not match the Arabic Van Dyck Bible. ³³ This was the Arabic Bible that missionary Cornelius Van Dyck completed in partnership with Arab translators in 1865, and it became the standard version for Protestants throughout the region. On the history of the so-called Van Dyck Bible and its Syrian translators, see David D. Grafton, The Contested Origins of the 1865 Arabic Bible: Contributions to the Nineteenth Century Nahda (Leiden: Brill, 2016). ³⁴ This text, which Qanawati penned in black, did not match exactly the text of Matthew 5:38.

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uphold local autonomy. In the end, his argument for reconciliation was also a plea for the Americans to leave Zarub and the Evangelical Independent Church in peace.

CONCLUSION : UNMANAGEABLE DISSENT Qanawati did not succeed in convincing the American Syria Mission to ‘close the door’ on the pamphlet controversy.³⁵ The missionary men continued to insist on a written recantation from As‘ad Zarub. Whether out of humiliation or for economic reasons, the Syrian pastor soon emigrated to the US, settling first in Massachusetts and later in Arkansas. On a brief visit to Syria in 1910, he signed a formal retraction and apology for the 1902 pamphlet.³⁶ This he did in exchange for the mission’s permission to preach from the pulpit of the Evangelical Church of Beirut where his former parishioners were then worshipping, having reunified with the Beirut church in 1906. Thus the schism of 1892 had healed, the pamphlet controversy was finally put to rest, and the Americans appeared to have gained the upper hand. Yet it would actually be the Syrian dissenters—and not the missionaries—who determined the denominational character of the congregation that became known as the National Evangelical Church of Beirut. In the year of Zarub’s recantation, Hoskins compiled his timeline documenting forty years of rebellion within the Beirut Protestant community. His entry for 1906 revealed why the mission’s attempt to manage the narrative of Syrian dissent did not end when the seceding church members rejoined the Evangelical Church of Beirut. That year, according to the missionary, ‘an irregular reunion of the two churches was proposed on a distinctly non Presbyterian basis’. In Hoskins’ view, the troublesome faction came back ‘to paralyze all church life in Beirut and to separate the 1st Church again from both Mission and Presbytery’.³⁷ The members of the Evangelical Independent Church did indeed return to their former congregation on their own terms. Representatives of both churches met in the home of Khalil Sarkis without a ³⁵ Antun Qanawati to the Syria Mission. ³⁶ As‘ad Zarub, ‘Retraction and Plea for Forgiveness’, 22 March 1910, PHS 115-4-5. Zarub arrived in New York on 25 May 1910. Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820–1957, T715, 1897–1957, roll, 1485 [database-online], Provo, Utah, 25 May 1910, Ancestry. com Operations, Inc., 2010. By 1912 Zarub had moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he managed a store known as Zorub’s Oriental Bazaar until the 1930s. ‘Hot Springs Arkansas City Directory’, Provo, Utah, 1912, U.S. City Directories, 1821–1989 [database online] Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011 and ‘Hot Springs Arkansas City Directory’, Provo, Utah, 1935, U.S. City Directories, 1821–1989 [database online], Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011. ³⁷ Hoskins [Untitled] Timeline of the Beirut Church, 1910.

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missionary present and drafted a congregational agreement that would end the Beirut church’s ten-year affiliation with the Lebanon Presbytery. Then the church leaders announced the decision to the Syria Mission.³⁸ In the years leading up to World War I, the Americans tried every possible means to bring the Beirut church back into the Presbyterian fold, from friendly invitations to threats of withholding access to church property. All such efforts went unheeded as the original Syrian dissenters and their fellow members in the reunified church held fast to the moral and biblical principles of congregational autonomy.³⁹ Although Hoskins’ narrative identified dissenting elements in the Syrian Protestant community, he and his fellow American missionaries did not recognize the church division or the pamphlet controversy as signs of theologically-based Protestant nonconformity. As head of the Beirut station, Hoskins emphasized the irregularity of Zarub’s ordination and of the Beirut church’s principles of governance.⁴⁰ In the view of Samuel Jessup, a longtime missionary in Sidon, the schism was ‘caused by obstreperous members of the church against an excellent pastor’ and the authors of the pamphlet were ‘slanderers’.⁴¹ William Nelson, of the mission’s Tripoli station, described the congregation in 1910 as ‘a native church over which we have absolutely no control and which has flouted our relations to Presbytery so flagrantly’.⁴² Yet by the time the community emerged from World War I, the course of the Evangelical Church of Beirut had been set. The most that Hoskins could manage in 1919 was to describe the post-war church as combining ‘the wisest and best principles of the whole Presbyterian System and the Congregational Polity, without insisting upon the narrower conceptions of either’.⁴³ In reality, the congregation did not and would not ever again understand itself as following Presbyterian principles. In writing the history of the present-day National Evangelical Church of Beirut, missionaries and mission historians alike have overlooked the secession of 1892, the 1902 pamphlet, ³⁸ [Untitled] Reunification Agreement of the Evangelical Church of Beirut, 21 Nov. 1906, PHS 115-4-5. The agreement was addressed to Henry Harris Jessup and bore the signatures of Khalil Sarkis, Salim Kassab, Ibrahim al-Hurani, As‘ad Khairallah, Jabir Dumit, Khalil al-Mishalani, Faris al-Mishalani, Jirjis al-Khuri al-Maqdisi, and two others whose names are illegible. ³⁹ In one statement during the war, the missionaries expressed their willingness to allow the Syrian congregation the use of mission property and the manse ‘so long as the church is in friendly relations with the Mission and true to the standard of faith which we hold and to the polity adopted by the Evangelical Churches of Syria with which we are connected’. The text of this January 1916 letter appeared in Franklin E. Hoskins, ‘Beirut Church, Vol. IV’. ⁴⁰ Hoskins [Untitled] Timeline of the Beirut Church, 1910; Hoskins, ‘Anglo-American Congregation’. ⁴¹ Samuel Jessup to Arthur J. Brown, 31 Aug. 1902, Arthur Judson Brown Papers, Yale Divinity School Library Special Collections, Record Group 2-4-119; Samuel Jessup to Franklin Hoskins, March 1910, PHS 115-4-4. ⁴² William Nelson to Franklin Hoskins, 16 March 1910, PHS 115-4-4. ⁴³ Hoskins, ‘Anglo-American Congregation’.

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and the congregational reunion in 1906. Each of these events was a manifestation of Protestant dissent and a refusal to conform to imposed norms. Like the Puritan Dissenters whose spiritual descendants in New England initiated the ABCFM and its Syria Mission, Beiruti Protestants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries separated themselves from the established religious authorities: American missionary ministers. Syrian Evangelical Church members claimed independence as a matter of conscience and, in the case of the antimissionary pamphlet, conceived of themselves as a remnant of Protestant Christianity in Ottoman Syria. For members of the Evangelical Independent Church and for the majority of Beirut church members after 1906, congregational polity was a means of protection against American missionary management. Congregationalism itself could not prevent missionary abuses, as the tensions between ABCFM missionaries and Armenian Protestants in nineteenth-century Turkey have proved. Armenian pastors’ complaints about American oversight resembled the Syrian dissenters’ critiques even though the Armenian Evangelical Churches were organized according to the same congregational structure that the Beiruti Protestants desired.⁴⁴ Nevertheless, congregationalism symbolized local autonomy for Beirut church members and also represented a link to their Protestant roots. Calling for ‘help and reformation’, Zarub’s pamphlet referred twice to a voice crying from the grave. Perhaps such words recalled the efforts of the first generation of Syrian Protestants like Butrus al-Bustani or of the ‘first faithful missionaries’ like Cornelius Van Dyck, who ‘died dishonored by the new missionaries’, according to the pamphlet. As the Syrian dissenters of the early twentieth century added their voices to earlier cries for independence, they determined the denominationally Congregational character of the National Evangelical Church of Beirut, the oldest Arabicspeaking Protestant church in the region today.

S E L E C T B I BL IO G R A P H Y Archives Andover-Harvard Theological Library Special Collections, Cambridge, MA. Arthur Judson Brown Papers (RG 2), Special Collections, Yale University Divinity School Library, New Haven, CT. Near East School of Theology Library Special Collections, Beirut, Lebanon. ⁴⁴ Thomas Boyajian, The American Missionaries and the Armenian Protestant Community (1869); Armenian Young Men’s Christian Association, Controversy between the Missionaries of the American Board and the Evangelical Armenian Churches in Turkey (New York, 1882). The Evangelical Armenian Churches in Anatolia remained under the ABCFM after 1870 and became denominationally Congregational.

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Syria Mission Papers of the United Presbyterian Church in the USA (RG 115), Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, PA. Periodicals Kawkab Amirka (The Star of America), New York City. al-Nashra al-Usbu‘iyya (The Weekly Bulletin), Beirut. Publications ‘Abbud, As‘ad, and Jirjis al-Khuri. Khutab fi Ta’rikh Majma‘ Mashikhat Sayda al-Injiliyya wa-Majma‘ Mashikhat Tarabulus al-Injiliyya [Speeches on the History of the Evangelical Presbyteries in Sidon and Tripoli] (Beirut: American Mission Press, 1904). Association, Armenian Young Men’s Christian. Controversy between the Missionaries of the American Board and the Evangelical Armenian Churches in Turkey (New York: Armenian Young Men’s Christian Association, 1882). Bailey, Betty Jane, and J. Martin Bailey. Who Are the Christians in the Middle East? (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2003). Beirut, Evangelical Society of. A‘mal Jam‘iyyat Bayrut al-Injiliyya ‘an Sanat 1862 [Activities of the Evangelical Society of Beirut for the Year 1862] (Beirut, 1863). Boyajian, Thomas. The American Missionaries and the Armenian Protestant Community (1869). Catalogue of the Syrian Protestant College, Beirut, Syria, 36th Year, 1901–1902 (Beirut, 1902). Cox, Jeffrey. The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (New York: Routledge, 2008). Fee, Gordon D., and Mark L. Strauss. How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth: A Guide to Understanding and Using Bible Versions (New York: Zondervan, 2009). Grafton, David D. The Contested Origins of the 1865 Arabic Bible: Contributions to the Nineteenth Century Nahda (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Haidostian, Paul A. ‘Church Communion in the Middle East: An Armenian Evangelical Perspective’. Reformed World LVI, 2 (June 2006), pp. 209–20. Jacobs, Linda K. Strangers in the West: The Syrian Colony of New York City, 1880–1900 (New York: KalimahPress, 2015). Makdisi, Ussama. Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). Said, Edward W. Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994 edn). Scott, Frances E. Dare and Persevere. The Story of One Hundred Years of Evangelism in Syria and Lebanon, from 1860 to 1960 (London: Lebanon Evangelical Mission/ Camelot Press, 1960). ‘Syria: Organization of a Native Church’, Missionary Herald XLIV, 8 (Aug. 1848): 266–70. Tibawi, A. L. ‘The American Missionaries in Beirut and Butrus Al-Bustani’. Middle Eastern Affairs III, St Antony’s Papers, 16 (1963). Tibawi, A. L. American Interests in Syria, 1800–1901: A Study of Educational, Literary and Religious Work (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966). Womack, Deanna F. ‘Conversion, Controversy, and Cultural Production: Syrian Protestants, American Missionaries, and the Arabic Press, ca. 1870–1915’ (PhD dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, 2015).

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Part III America and Europe

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8 Dissent as Mainline Laura Rominger Porter

Modernity remade North American dissenter Protestantism by remaking the environment it inhabited. The twentieth-century heirs of Protestant dissent adapted to these large-scale developments, but they did so in different ways and with uneven results. The story of their adaptation revolves around three major historical forces: modern systems of thought, consumer capitalism, and the expanding liberal state. These forces shattered the seemingly solid foundation on which Protestants stood as they entered the twentieth century. Dissenter churches and faiths began the century optimistically united in mission and spirit. They ended it theologically splintered by modernism, reoriented in mission around a pervasive consumer culture, and reconfigured along political rather than denominational lines. These different adaptations to modernity watered down the family resemblance between dissenter Protestant traditions. Although not always conscious of a shared identity that transcended their own denominations, members of America’s dissenter communions—Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Baptist/ Restorationist, and Methodist/Holiness churches—at one time cohered loosely in their anti-Anglican religious genealogy, commitment to church–state separation in order to guarantee religious freedom, reliance on biblical authority in a pluralist (yet overwhelmingly Protestant) environment, and belief that North America, particularly the United States, ought to be a ‘Christian civilization’.¹ They could not have imagined the theological fragmentation,

¹ The commitment to ‘the Bible alone,’ individually interpreted, was widespread in the US by the antebellum period. In contrast to Lutherans and high Anglicans, dissenter Protestants relied on the Bible in place of, as opposed to above, all other authorities. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2002), pp. 372–85, esp. 377. The early history of biblicism in North America, and the ideal of Bible-based Christian civilization replacing European models of Christendom, may be found in Mark A. Noll, In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783 (New York, 2015).

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cultural accommodation, and political realignment that would make dissenter Protestantism less and less distinct in the American cultural landscape. Intellectual modernism was the first challenge to dissenter Protestant coherence. It forced a theological regrouping of American Protestants as self-styled ‘liberals’ and ‘fundamentalists’ that achieved institutional expression in so-called ‘mainline’ denominations and their conservative, sectarian offshoots.² Each strain emphasized different dissenter principles: the liberal theological turn extended from a commitment to freedom of conscience, while fundamentalists claimed ‘the Bible alone’ as their epistemic guidepost. These theological divides also undercut a shared ideal of ‘Christian civilization’, allowing consumer culture to shape a generically ‘American’ religious mission that harmonized with consumer individualism. This mission found expression in new marketing techniques as well as in therapeutic and prosperity-driven theologies, elements of which could be found in mainline and fundamentalist/evangelical churches alike. Finally, the expansion of the post-war liberal state sorted mainline and fundamentalist/evangelical Protestants into opposing political coalitions defined by competing cultural agendas and attitudes toward government. The political priorities of religious ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’, which divided dissenter denominations while aligning them with other faith traditions and secular ideologies, invited even more selective applications of dissenter sensibilities as the twentieth century came to a close. These changes did not just divide the twentieth-century heirs of dissenter Protestantism. They also pushed the so-called ‘mainline’ denominations to the demographic margins of American Christianity. By the end of the twentieth century, the liberal ‘mainline’ denominations stood more divided than ever from their conservative offshoots, yet having experienced a dramatic reversal in cultural standing: their denominations, once the face of public Protestantism, were declining even as theologically conservative personalities and special-purpose groups were wielding greater influence by claiming biblical support, mastering the marketing techniques of consumer capitalism, and

² The theological binary between ‘liberal’ and ‘fundamentalist’ did not perfectly align with the institutional binary between ‘mainline’ and ‘fundamentalist’ (later, ‘evangelical’) churches. Nor do these binaries adequately capture the many Protestants who fell somewhere in the middle of these spectra: for instance, ‘evangelical liberals’ described in Matthew Bowman, The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism (New York, 2014), and traditionalist ‘churchly conservatives’ who remained in mainline churches but did not embrace liberalism, as described in Timothy E. W. Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill, 2015). While not all theological ‘conservatives’ were ‘fundamentalists’, and not all ‘mainline’ Protestants were ‘liberals’, it was nevertheless true that liberal Protestants identified with mainline denominations and exerted outsized influence on them, while self-identified fundamentalists left such churches to spearhead separatist, doctrinally exclusive splinter churches. For the sake of tracking religious developments in the broadest of strokes, this essay uses the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘mainline’, and ‘conservative’ and ‘fundamentalist’ (later ‘evangelical’) somewhat interchangeably, assuming the above qualifications.

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championing an anti-pluralist ideal of ‘Christian America’. If ‘mainline’ Protestantism refers to an informal religious establishment achieved through cultural clout, then evangelicals made the strongest claim to such a title by the close of the twentieth century. Such dramatic shifts in religious life only make sense in light of the momentous changes in ideas, culture, and politics that will frame this chapter.

FRAGMENTATION OF ‘THE BIBLE ALONE ’ : DI S S E NTE R PROTESTANTS AND MODERN THOUGHT By the 1920s, two key dissenter Protestant emphases that were once compatible, even mutually reinforcing—biblicism and individual conscience—were set against each other. The resulting institutional fallout was dramatic. Denominational identities that had once comprised a distinct (if diffuse) dissenter Protestantism began to erode. Self-styled ‘liberals’ clashed more with ‘fundamentalists’ in their own communions than with theological liberals in rival denominations, giving rise to a ‘mainline’ coalition joining liberal and moderate dissenter Protestants with non-dissenter Lutherans and Episcopalians. At the same time, fundamentalist heirs to the same dissenter faiths migrated to new churches defined by common-sense biblicism or ‘orthodoxy.’ Why this was the case had everything to do with the modern ideas and critical methods that fractured North American Protestant theology around the turn of the twentieth century.

Theological Fragmentation The modernist-fundamentalist controversy boiled over during the 1920s and 1930s but began decades earlier, as the modernist ‘new theology’ cohered during the 1880s. What made this theology ‘new’ was both its willingness to examine the Christian tradition not as transcendent and eternal, but as conditioned by history and culture, and its willingness to examine the sources of Christian doctrine—including the Bible—by the standards of modern critical theories. The dissenter Protestants who spearheaded this theological turn drew inspiration from their forebears who championed freedom of individual conscience and open inquiry. They were also self-consciously ‘modern’ in their methodology and their mission to adapt the Christian tradition to the newest ideas in scientific and humanistic disciplines. In addition to broad sociological factors that were secularizing American universities in the late-nineteenth century, specific ideas prompted this

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modernist turn. First among these was Charles Darwin’s theory of human evolution. Some biblical inerrantists were initially open to reconciling evolution with the Bible, despite the challenges that evolutionary theory posed to a literal reading of Genesis. Yet as it became clear that evolution could also prop up atheism and scepticism, conservatives balked. Even more divisive among American theologians was the application of critical methods to the Bible. For most of the nineteenth century, the majority of American Protestants practiced what has been termed a ‘common sense’ approach to scripture, a hermeneutic that assumed the reader could immediately grasp the Bible’s intended meaning. Yet during the final decades of the nineteenth century, theologians exposed to German methods of higher criticism grew more aware of multiple creation stories that had circulated in the ancient world, more doubtful toward the miraculous stories recorded in the Bible, and less certain about the dating and authorship of biblical texts. Theological modernists responded to these challenges by redefining divine revelation as both extra-biblical and progressive. They sought to reconcile the Christian faith with the new scientific outlook, but without rejecting all religious claims that lacked empirical verification. They instead developed a theology of God as immanent in human culture, embedded in the history of the natural world and the course of human progress. What made their theology truly distinct was not their endorsement of scientific observation—for even fundamentalists would (selectively) court the authority of empirical evidence—but their belief that human understandings of religious truth changed over time, so that the progress of human learning was but another extension of divine revelation. For modernists, it was the task of theologians and the church to adapt Christianity to each new era of human history. In concert with more moderate trends toward theological liberalism, modernism sparked deep theological divisions that left few dissenter denominations unscathed. Congregationalists were exceptional in their openness to new ideas: Rev. Theodore Munger, for example, drew from evolutionary theory to promote notions of divine immanence and human progress, and framed modern ideas as reconfigurations rather than refutations of inherited truths. Presbyterians, by contrast, were deeply divided. By 1893, minister and Union Seminary theologian Charles A. Briggs was suspended from the ministry of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) for his historicist view of the Bible and disdain for catechisms and creeds. Union also housed German-trained historicist Arthur Cushman McGiffert, forced out of the PCUSA in 1900. Graduating from Union that same year, New York minister Henry Sloane Coffin viewed the Bible as a ‘record of the progressive religious experience of Israel culminating in Jesus Christ’, but questioned its historical reliability and took no issue with those who questioned its supernatural accounts, including the virgin birth. He would remain a liberal

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evangelical voice in the PCUSA and eventually preside over Union Seminary.³ Baptist institutions also fostered widespread engagement with modern ideas into the first decades of the twentieth century. Ezekiel G. Robinson, an early proponent of reconciling tradition and science, encountered German theologians at Newton Theological Institute and went on to serve as president of Rochester Theological Seminary and Brown University before accepting a chair in ethics and apologetics at the University of Chicago. With the publication of The Faith in Modernism (1924), Chicago’s Shailer Mathews stood as one of the leading Northern Baptist voices for theological modernism.⁴ Although denominationally diverse, spokesmen for the new theology embraced the probabilistic model of scientific knowledge while abandoning the quest for theological certainty. Modernist theologians were optimistic about the prospects for religious knowledge because of their faith in human reason and their emphasis on divine revelation in every era of human history. Yet they also believed that knowledge was limited by historical contingency and subjectivity—that facts and theories accumulate over time, and that every culture has only limited access to transcendent truths. Theological modernists were therefore less united by their specific beliefs than in their intellectual outlook: probabilistic, respectful of individual conscience, and intellectually tolerant of new ideas. Amid the era’s emphasis on practical social reforms, such theological inclusiveness corresponded to active ecumenical cooperation through organizations like the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (FCC), just one expression of the consolidation of the major ‘mainline’ denominations in the early twentieth century.⁵ Yet the mainline was also defined by its defence of liberalism against its fundamentalist challengers. As recent scholarship has made clear, fundamentalism arose in reaction to theological modernism, yet also as a peculiar adaptation to modernity. Fundamentalists shared with modernists a desire for empirical validation, a methodological self-consciousness, a quest for intellectual coherence, an individualistic impulse, and a willingness to abandon traditional authorities and embrace new technologies—if only to preserve older doctrinal commitments.⁶ ³ William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Durham, NC, 1992); John Von Rohr, The Shaping of American Congregationalism, 1620–1957 (Cleveland, OH, 1992), p. 352; Bradley J. Longfield, Presbyterians and American Culture: A History (Louisville, KY, 2013), p. 126; quoted in ibid., p. 134. ⁴ William H. Brackney, Baptists in North America: An Historical Perspective [in English] (Malden, MA, 2006), p. 100. ⁵ The FCC sought to speak for Protestant America but was predominantly northern and white, a demographic that would continue to dominate the twentieth-century mainline. Jason S. Lantzer, Mainline Christianity: The Past and Future of America’s Majority Faith (New York, 2012), p. 34. ⁶ Kathryn Lofton, ‘Commonly Modern: Rethinking the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversies’, Church History, LXXXIII, 1 (2014), pp. 137–44; Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, p. 9; Matthew

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Yet they remained stubbornly opposed to modernist efforts to adapt Christianity to secular ideas. Self-identified fundamentalists sparred with modernists less in the realm of higher learning than in denominational agencies and presses, mainly in northern denominations (due to southern society’s longstanding conservatism, religious investment in Lost Cause mythology, and slower pace of modernization, southern denominations remained insulated from modernism until the evolution controversies of 1920s). Among northern Baptists, conservative rumblings began in the 1910s with the liberal turn of Northern Baptist Seminaries (a confrontation paralleled in Canada by conflicts over the liberal curriculum of McMaster University). By the National Baptist Convention of 1920, conservatives had mobilized against liberal theology and the ecumenical Interchurch World Movement, and would continue to upset convention meetings through the following decade. In 1923, fundamentalists formed the Baptist Bible Union of North America as a subgroup within the NBC. After World War I, the PCUSA was also an intense theatre of conflict between modernist and fundamentalist partisans.⁷ The main theological roots of the broader fundamentalist movement, however, were interdenominational, traceable to the Niagara Bible Conferences in New York (beginning in 1883) and revivalist Dwight Moody’s Northfield Summer Conferences and the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago (both established in 1886). From these early networks emerged a cadre of leaders committed to biblical inerrancy and traditional revivalist theology. Yet when interdenominational leaders convened to author a theological manifesto, the multivolume The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (1910–15), they had to downplay many of their historic differences and were able to agree only on generalities like biblical inerrancy, the necessity of conversion for salvation, and the importance of moral rectitude. Their privileging of some traditional beliefs over others indicated a reaction to modernism more than traditionalism per se.⁸ Although fundamentalists shared an adherence to the literal truth of the Bible, they tended to avoid more divisive theological systematization. The exception was eschatology. In a remarkable departure from tradition for self-identified traditionalists, many fundamentalists adopted a premillenial dispensationalist view. Based on literal interpretations of the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation, this doctrine posited the unfolding of different

Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism [in English] (Cambridge, MA, 2014), p. 4. ⁷ Brackney, Baptists in North America, pp. 115, 153, 117–18; Longfield, Presbyterians and American Culture, p. 149. ⁸ Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, pp. 10, 162–92.

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historical epochs or ‘dispensations’ that would culminate in a period of tribulation, Christ’s literal return to earth and thousand year reign. In contrast to optimistic liberal Protestants, fundamentalists believed that the world was destined to slide further into sin before the coming day of judgement. The publication of Scofield Study Bibles in 1909, annotated in detail by Moody associate and premillennial dispensationalist C. I. Scofield, ensured that succeeding generations of fundamentalists would endorse this pessimistic view of modern times.⁹ Yet what truly marked fundamentalists was their overriding commitment to common-sense biblical interpretation over both secular discoveries and denominational authorities and institutions. By appointing the Bible and ‘pure’ religion rather than church traditions as their axiomatic foundation, fundamentalists could preserve their notion of theological certainty and skirt the probabilistic turn embraced by liberal modernists. Yet by privileging individual ‘common-sense’ interpretation to the exclusion of ecclesiastical traditions and institutions, they also set themselves on a course of continual sectarian division, populist leadership, and extremely decentralized forms of religious organization for much of the twentieth century.¹⁰

Institutional Fragmentation and the Theological Origins of Mainline Decline After World War I, northern fundamentalists adopted a more militant stance in their denominations that would lead to formal separation. For their part, theological liberals were inclusive of many theological viewpoints as a matter of principle, but not to the point of allowing fundamentalists to set the course of the leading denominations. Harry Emerson Fosdick drew this line with ‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’ his widely circulated sermon preached in 1922 at New York City’s First Presbyterian Church. Presbyterian theologian and fundamentalist spokesman J. Gresham Machen responded with Christianity and Liberalism (1923), arguing that liberal theology was in fact a radical departure from historic Christianity. Although his learned writings helped to unify militant conservatives during the 1920s, the movement would lose respectability after media coverage of the 1925 Scopes ‘monkey trial’ solidified their public image as anti-modern, anti-intellectual rubes.¹¹

⁹ For an interpretation of twentieth-century evangelicalism that emphasizes this eschatology, see Sutton, American Apocalypse. B. M. Pietsch, Dispensational Modernism (New York, 2015) draws out the modern aspects of this theology. ¹⁰ Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, pp. 4, 6, 9. ¹¹ Longfield, Presbyterians and American Culture, p. 150.

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Liberal Protestants triumphed during the 1920s by winning denominational control and public influence; fundamentalists concluded that coexistence was impossible. The final trigger was the inter-denominational Laymen’s Foreign Mission Inquiry of 1932, whose Re-Thinking Missions emphasized the truths of non-Christian religions and advocated service over evangelization. Leaders in the PCUSA attempted to distance the denomination from the Inquiry, but Presbyterian missionary Pearl S. Buck initiated a firestorm with her endorsement of Re-Thinking Missions and rejection of supernatural, evangelical Christianity. Machen, dissatisfied with his denomination’s moderate response to the controversy, formed an Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions in 1933, precipitating his own suspension. He and his followers left the PCUSA in 1936 to form the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC), which by 1937 would itself divide over doctrinal issues.¹² Northern Baptists followed a similar path. As liberals embraced ecumenism in the first decades of the century, fundamentalist Baptists made congregational autonomy both a point of orthodoxy and a method for resisting modernism through separation.¹³ In 1932, fundamentalists left the NBC to form the General Association of Regular Baptists. Moderates followed in 1946 to form the Conservative Baptist Association. In 1927, Canadian fundamentalists separated from the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec and established the Regular Baptist Missionary and Educational Society of Canada, and were soon joined by separatists from the British Columbia Baptist Convention to form the Union of Regular Baptist Churches of Ontario and Quebec. Fundamentalist churches also regularly defected from the Southern Baptist Convention.¹⁴ As independent fundamentalist churches proliferated, North America’s dissenter Protestant traditions were more fragmented than ever. Although embarrassed by the Scopes trial and alienated from the mainline denominations, fundamentalists spent the following decades busily building new churches, agencies, and educational institutions that would equip them for national influence in future decades. In 1942, some leading conservative voices adopted the more inclusive label of ‘evangelical’ in establishing the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). The ‘neo-evangelical’ quest for greater public engagement and intellectual respectability resulted in the founding of Fuller Theological Seminary in 1947 and the first issue of Christianity Today in 1956.

¹² Ibid., pp. 160–3. Congregationalist missionaries were early advocates of humanitarian service and education over evangelism in the mission field, and like other liberal denominations suffered serious decline in interest after World War I. However, unlike northern Presbyterians, the Congregational Christian Churches did not contain a prominent fundamentalist contingent. Von Rohr, The Shaping of American Congregationalism, pp. 373–6, 442, 417. ¹³ Brackney, Baptists in North America, p. 127. ¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 154–9, 164–7.

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Yet even as they won converts and greater public influence during the second half of the twentieth century, the fundamentalist-evangelical movement found intellectual coherence elusive. While liberal Protestants shared this characteristic, fundamentalists held no countervailing commitment to inclusivity and tended to treat theological disagreement as grounds for institutional separation. In the last half of the twentieth century, conservative Protestants would find less unity in churches and theology than in political defences of traditional cultural mores.¹⁵ Yet even more self-defeating over the long-term was the ecumenical, practical theological tone of mainline denominations. Caught between fundamentalism and secularism, mainline denominations minimized their theological differences for the sake of internal unity and interdenominational—even interfaith—cooperation on major cultural and social issues. Yet such efforts had the unintended effect of minimizing theology itself. This set their churches on a course of perpetual adaptation to intellectual trends and a loss of defining doctrinal content. Thus, a theological tradition that intentionally integrated new ideas into the Christian faith would by the 1960s find itself less and less distinguishable from the ideals of liberal humanism without any distinctively Christian elements. Moderate critics belatedly sought to defend some of the emphases of liberal theology, arguing that American culture was indebted to theological liberalism for its humanitarian values. Yet their observations seemed only to confirm liberal Protestantism’s lack of distinction from broad cultural ideals.¹⁶ The mainline’s lack of theological coherence and distinctiveness ultimately undermined its own institutional purpose, contributing to a decline in members and public influence.¹⁷ Thus as Protestant liberalism navigated the straits between fundamentalism and secularism, it tended to de-emphasize the historically Christian foundations that many laypeople still took for granted. By the 1960s, scholarly reflection could do little to shore up their commitment to increasingly liberal theological trends. Indeed, radical Protestants’ critiques of the cultural status quo, and of the mainline’s own privileged place within it, tended to alienate churchly conservatives in the pews who had never fully embraced liberalism’s challenge to inherited doctrines and traditional notions of

¹⁵ For a thoughtful examination of the inconsistencies in evangelical thought, see Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York, 2013). ¹⁶ Robert E. Brown, ‘Theology and Belief ’, in Philip Goff, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Religion in America (Malden, MA, 2010), p. 361; Lantzer, Mainline Christianity, pp. 51–64; Matthew Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2012), pp. 6, 10. ¹⁷ David Mislin, Saving Faith: Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn of the Secular Age (Ithaca, NY, 2016); David A. Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, NJ, 2013).

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divine transcendence. For their part, mainline leaders chose not to combat the forces of cultural secularization, embarking instead on the well-trodden path of cultural adaptation and inclusivity that fostered openness to nonChristian religions and movements for women’s ordination. These efforts may have been a logical extension of liberal theology, but such deviations from tradition were too much for some conservatives and moderates.¹⁸ Moreover, liberal Protestantism’s failure to demonstrate its intellectual distinctiveness or spiritual relevance to a generation of its own youth would mean poor prospects for new members in the final decades of the twentieth century.¹⁹ After 1970, mainline Protestant numbers would decline or remain static, failing to keep pace with population growth. Its commitment to intellectual inclusiveness was to some degree responsible.²⁰ The fate of the American mainline shares much in common with the fate of ecumenical Protestantism in Canada, although in both nations mainstream Protestant churches continue to wield public influence.²¹ Yet whether similar causes were at work in these two nations is unclear. Indeed, the extent to which liberal theology explains mainline decline should not be overstated in the case of the United States, where ideological factors were undoubtedly exacerbated by sociological ones—particularly the rise of consumer capitalism and structural changes wrought by a new era of political mobilization.²²

THE W ANING OF ‘ C H R IS T I A N CI V I L IZ A T I O N’ AND THE RI S E OF CONS UME R I NDI VID UAL IS M By the turn of the century, scientific ideas and higher criticism had disarmed Protestant leaders of their former theological guideposts. Disagreement over biblical interpretation exposed a rift in Protestant America that grew deeper still amid rapid social changes. After the Civil War, the large-scale transition ¹⁸ This classic explanation for mainline decline, which blames cultural accommodation and lack of strong moral demands, is summarized in Lantzer, Mainline Christianity, p. 63; Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire, pp. 11–13, 18. ¹⁹ Brackney, Baptists in North America, pp. 134–5; Lantzer, Mainline Christianity, pp. 88–9; Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire, 19. ²⁰ Lantzer, Mainline Christianity, p. 63. Presbyterian, Episcopal, American Baptist, and Methodist denominations lost around four million members between 1960 and 1980. Bowman, The Urban Pulpit, pp. 281–2. ²¹ Mark A. Noll, ‘What Happened to Christian Canada?’, Church History, LXXV, 2 (2006): pp. 245–73. ²² Some of the major explanations for decline are summarized in Lantzer, Mainline Christianity, pp. 85–104. Potential factors include lack of an evangelizing mission or conversionist theology to grow members, the decline of denominationalism, lower birth rates than evangelical churches, suburban relocation of members, and lack of cultural engagement and critique. See also Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire, pp. 18–19.

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from a producer-based economy of farmers and small-town shopkeepers accelerated, giving way to a more urban wage-labour economy overseen by corporations. The transformation to consumer capitalism had profound religious implications. In addition to raising theological questions about the ethics of the free market and consumption, economic changes uprooted many North American Protestants and drew them into cities populated by foreign variants of Roman Catholicism and awash in secular temptations. These cities loosened moral restraints, encouraged material indulgence, and disrupted traditional social and economic relations. Together these circumstances amounted to a social and cultural crisis that would undermine a unifying social ideal of ‘Christian civilization’ and inspire new, Protestant strains of consumer individualism.²³ Protestant leaders at first confronted such challenges through social reform and personal piety—both key to maintaining ‘Christian civilization’. Yet in the course of this confrontation, the ideological fissures in Protestant America widened. Old-fashioned Protestants in towns and cities across the United States and Canada condemned immoral ‘worldliness’ and sought a cure in revivalism rather than social reform. At the same time, their more liberal, cosmopolitan counterparts regarded modern cities as open fields for waging social reforms. These two confrontational impulses—revivalism and the liberal social gospel—regarded the problems and prospects of modern society differently, although they both sought to conform aspects of modern society to Christian ideals.²⁴ As industrial capitalism ushered in a new era of mass consumption, however, cultural confrontation gave way to religious expressions of consumer individualism. Leaders of the mainline denominations increasingly sought to remedy social problems through state intervention, ‘scientific’ social programmes and denominational centralization. Yet their theological attention moved away from social ethics and toward a more therapeutic theology that addressed the spiritual anxieties of prosperous lay members. Ultimately, its modernized organizational forms and individual-centred spirituality mirrored the new corporate professionalism and middle-class abundance that attended consumer capitalism. At the same time, fundamentalists continued their retreat from ‘the world’ in their own religious agencies, ministries, and media organizations that uncritically adopted a consumer model of religious outreach—one that harmonized with antistatist, free-market individualism.

²³ On cities as the main contexts of Protestant confrontation with modernity, see Bowman, The Urban Pulpit, pp. 13–15; and Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, p. 7. ²⁴ As Matthew Bowman argues, ‘liberal evangelicalism’ was the dominant spirit of mainline churches during this period, as distinct from those churches’ later shift to a purely social message that neglected ideas of spiritual regeneration. Bowman, The Urban Pulpit, pp. 6–9.

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In short, fundamentalists undercut the social elements of ‘Christian civilization’ with their growing allegiance to economic individualism, and instead adapted their institutions and theology to appeal to individual religious consumers; mainline Protestants continued to support ‘Christian civilization’ through ecumenical cooperation and impersonal denominational agencies, but their theological attention increasingly turned to the individual concerns of prosperous urban Protestants. However divided, all dissenter Protestants emerged from their encounter with modern economic changes having moved from a shared sense of stewardship over America’s (Protestant) ‘Christian civilization’ and toward a religious mission more in line with consumer culture.

Confrontation, 1880–1920 The revivalist answer to modernity’s ‘urban crisis’ arose in the 1870s and persisted within the Protestant mainstream through the first decades of the twentieth century. Its main point of origin was Dwight Moody. A former shoe salesman, Moody embarked on an evangelistic mission through the YMCA and Chicago Sunday schools. By the late 1870s he was preaching to crowds of thousands and striking an updated Victorian note: the essence of his solution to the era’s ‘problems’ (‘social’, ‘labour’, or ‘vice’) was the conversion of individuals: ‘Ruin by sin, Redemption by Christ, and Regeneration by the Holy Ghost’, as he put it. Some dissenting Protestants had long abandoned the doctrine of conversion (as in the Unitarians’ turn to transcendentalism) if not softened it considerably (in Horace Bushnell’s liberal theology of Christian nurture), but revivalism resonated among other dissenter Protestants, including Moody’s Congregationalist backers as well as Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Disciples of Christ. Although he used modern techniques to appeal to his audience, Moody’s simple message identified modern social evils as not so modern at all, but the product of a universally corrupt human nature to which the spiritually transformative work of Jesus Christ was the only solution.²⁵ Moody’s revivalism was conservative in its theology and politics, but it did condemn material greed. Anxieties over decadence in the American republican tradition had long been infused with historically Christian admonitions against avarice, idolatry, gluttony, and covetousness, and Moody himself was known to preach against ‘other gods’—including wealth—above the Almighty. Yet rather than taking on material consumption and wealth, revivalists more ²⁵ Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, pp. 17–65; George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York, 2006 edn), pp. 32–9; Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI, 1992), pp. 288–90; Von Rohr, The Shaping of American Congregationalism, pp. 330–1.

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often targeted the consumption of strong drink, sinful amusements, and the poverty that was thought to result from such behaviours. Sin—personal sin, and primarily sins against Victorian mores—dominated the revivalist message. If not the most theologically novel response to urban ‘worldliness’ or the most attuned to exploitative market forces, its diagnosis and cure resonated with Americans who were instinctively familiar with the revivalist jeremiad. Indeed, the loosening of Victorian Protestant morality among such city-dwellers had much less to do with intellectual scepticism fostered by a pluralistic environment than with the disruption of older family and communal moral constraints. Traditional Protestants, many of them more theologically moderate than fundamentalists, retained a discernible social mission amid their condemnations of the ‘world’. In the 1880s, urban Congregationalists and Baptists embarked on programmes for community-based evangelism and ‘institutional churches’ that provided recreational facilities and social services. At the same time, late-century holiness circles that tended to be less politically engaged were nonetheless zealous in their private charitable missions. Among their many relief efforts were the Christian and Missionary Alliance (founded in the 1880s) and the Salvation Army, which migrated from Britain to the US and Canada in the late-nineteenth century.²⁶ The social dimension to the revivalist impulse was also apparent in the protest politics that swept the agrarian South and Midwest during the 1880s and 1890s. The Populist revolt drew from themes of Christian restoration and perfection to champion the interests of farmers against banks and railroads, seeking a return to a more virtuous era and moral economy. Populists tended to hold ties to the Holiness and Restorationist offshoots of dissenter Protestantism, and overlap was not incidental. Like urban revivalism, this movement regarded cities with suspicion and its supporters felt comfortable under revival Big Tops, yet it diverged in calling for a more radical social politics (one that would eventually wane). Political firebrand and populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan—revered orator, three-time Presidential candidate, eventual Secretary of State and devout Presbyterian—articulated this cooperative, political path to Christian civilization. He promoted producer-friendly economic policies as well as personal morality in commercial dealings—social Christianity with an old-time revivalist flair.²⁷ Even as premillennial views began to undercut the social dimension to revivalist Protestantism at the turn of the century, it lingered in ²⁶ Von Rohr, The Shaping of American Congregationalism, pp. 331–2; Brackney, Baptists in North America, pp. 81–2; Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 82–4; Noll, A History, pp. 279, 295–9, 304; Joe Creech, Righteous Indignation: Religion and the Populist Revolution (Urbana, IL, 2006). ²⁷ Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 132–5; Noll, A History, pp. 300–2; Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York, 2007).

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condemnations of dishonest profit-making, participation in charitable work, and moral reform campaigns like prohibition. For conservative Protestants who resisted social change, Victorian values of duty and restraint served as critical checks against the excesses of the industrial economy. Even Russell Conwell, whose ‘Acres of Diamonds’ sermon spread a message of divine blessing for hard work during the 1880s and 1890s, emphasized stewardship and economic discipline. By 1915 Conwell was warning against luxury and labour exploitation. Although conservative evangelicals (including fundamentalists) did accentuate personal moral obligations more than social ethics, the boundaries between traditional revivalism and the Social Gospel would remain permeable until the 1920s.²⁸ Leaders of the Social Gospel, initially found among urban, liberal ministers, opposed Protestants like Conwell who openly endorsed wealth accumulation, and they uniformly condemned unbridled capitalism. Yet their social ideals varied. Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch openly advocated socialism while the more moderate Congregationalist Washington Gladden endorsed a Christianized form of capitalism, but both served as vocal proponents of the movement. What tended to unify Social Gospellers was a spiritual concern with social environments and material welfare rather than individual morality. Influenced by theological modernism, they extended the doctrines of sin and redemption to promote secular, often statist remedies to social problems. As the Social Gospel cohered during the 1880s and 1890s in the US and somewhat later in Canada, its overriding goal was to institute the ‘Kingdom of God on earth’ through progressive politics and inner-city ministries. Activists who were inspired by a theology of divine immanence hoped to Christianize the social order through empirically validated social programmes and legislation—not individual salvation.²⁹ Certain theological themes linked social gospel leaders across denominational lines while distinguishing them from their secular allies in progressive politics. Congregationalists Gladden and Josiah Strong, Baptist Rauschenbusch, Presbyterians Henry Sloane Coffin and Charles Stelzle—all were inspired by postmillennial optimism and a ‘Kingdom of God’ theology of divine immanence. The challenge for many of the social gospel’s earliest proponents was forging a path that used the insights of modern social science while remaining distinctly Christian, even evangelical. Thus their theology recast older notions of conversion, salvation, and redemption as social concepts, while emphasizing Christ’s power as a socially transformative force. As Henry Sloane Coffin wrote, ‘society must be saved’ not by ‘saving sinners’, but through ²⁸ Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 88–9, 131; Brackney, Baptists in North America, p. 90. ²⁹ Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 84, 91; Noll, A History, pp. 279, 304.

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‘collective or directly environmental modes of action’.³⁰ The theological differences between Protestant liberals and fundamentalists were therefore connected to a broader disagreement over how to confront the era’s social problems.³¹ In addition to animating secular reforms with a spiritual mission, the Social Gospel encouraged denominational modernization in the form of professionalized staff and increased bureaucratic efficiency. In the PCUSA, for example, Charles Stelzle served as director of a Workingmen’s Department, the first such agency of its kind. Like other new agencies, it was staffed with a paid secretary.³² Ecumenism, too, promised more efficient cooperation in social gospel reforms, as when the FCC endorsed ‘The Social Creed of the Churches’ in 1908. The mainline’s acceptance of professional methods and organizations paralleled the bureaucratic expansion of American businesses and government agencies at the turn of the twentieth century. During this time the denominations embraced efficiency itself as a value, welcoming greater national centralization—even among Baptists and Congregationalists who prided themselves on local governance. From 1910 to 1913, for example, Congregationalists conducted an extensive review of their district organizations and benevolent societies, concluding with a new Constitution that strengthened the powers of the National Council to coordinate the work of separate mission organizations. The mainline as a whole likewise moved into a new era of ‘corporate denominationalism’ that better served the prerogatives of its new social missions.³³ In sum, the unsettling social transformations of the early twentieth century inspired a range of critiques and solutions from dissenting Protestant traditions. Conservatives called for personal morality and repentance, condemning secular amusements and, at times, material greed; liberal Protestants sought to transform social relations by addressing economic exploitation and building on the insights of social science. While one applied an older theological formula to new circumstances, the other extended modern theology into a new social ethic and new denominational efficiencies. Yet as material consumption increasingly set the pulse of American culture, both Protestant strains would absorb the generically ‘American’ religious mission of individual fulfilment. ³⁰ Brackney, Baptists in North America, pp. 101–3; quoted in Longfield, Presbyterians and American Culture, p. 135; on how liberal evangelicals differed from progressives, see Bowman, The Urban Pulpit, pp. 6–7. ³¹ On how liberal evangelicals defined social reform as a spiritual imperative, see Bowman, The Urban Pulpit, pp. 124–33. George Marsden argues that reaction to the Social Gospel after 1900 was one of the main factors behind fundamentalists’ abandonment of social action. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 91–3. ³² Longfield, Presbyterians and American Culture, p. 135. ³³ Brackney, Baptists in North America, pp. 88–91; Von Rohr, The Shaping of American Congregationalism, pp. 320–1; Russell E. Richey, ‘Denominations’, in Philip Goff, ed., Blackwell Companion to Religion in America (Malden, MA, 2010), pp. 98–9.

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Consumer Synthesis, 1920–2000 Dissenter Protestants entered the twentieth century united in the sense that modern economic and social changes threatened ‘Christian civilization’, but their first lines of defence built on older Victorian assumptions. What began as either utopian optimism about social regeneration or revivalist appeals for moral restraint and economic fairness soon gave way to new forms of individualism compatible with American consumer impulses. From the 1920s onward, the major Protestant streams absorbed the values, practices, and assumptions of American consumer culture. Amid this broad cultural synthesis, fundamentalists and liberal Protestants continued to differ in how they defined their mission to the ‘world’. Fundamentalists of the 1920s persisted in condemning ‘worldliness’—dancing, popular music, fashion, and movies—even as they abandoned social reform. The trajectory of William Jennings Bryan is instructive for tracing the fate of social Christianity among conservative biblicists more broadly defined. Once a standard-bearer for working America and progressivism, Bryan in his later years focused his attention on the campaign against evolutionary science, which for him encouraged not only the denigration of scripture but also an inevitable slide into social Darwinist justifications of eugenics and class inequality. Although he prevailed at the conclusion of the 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, he could not persuade the metropolitan public that evolution threatened the moral bedrock of American civilization. His final campaign instead represented the end of a socially conscious traditional Protestantism, as moderates abandoned the movement and left behind a more extreme core of anti-intellectual, separatist, and radically individualist fundamentalists.³⁴ Fundamentalism continued to diverge from liberalism as its theological individualism, rooted in conversionist theology, merged more explicitly with economic individualism. This connection swelled as business leaders underwrote their preferred spokesmen and institutions: Billy Sunday’s ministry received support from magnates John D. Rockefeller, John Wanamaker, and S. S. Kresge, The Fundamentals were financed by California oilman Lyman Steward, and the Moody Bible Institute shared close ties with Quaker Oats president Henry Crowell. Businessmen found in fundamentalism an individualist counterpoint to the social gospel: popular revivalists like Sunday, for example, melded an evangelistic emphasis on individual salvation with the anti-socialist patriotic rhetoric of the interwar era (Sunday himself was a lifelong anti-union Republican). The fundamentalist alliance with capitalist ³⁴ Bryan was a conservative Biblicist in the Presbyterian tradition, but not closely allied with the fundamentalist movement apart from his participation in the Scopes trial. Sutton, American Apocalypse, p. xiii; Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 132–5; 161.

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donors imputed a welter of business assumptions into religious messages and institutions. As Timothy Gloege has recently argued, the partnership produced a ‘corporate evangelical’ understanding of human nature, whereby fundamentalists moved from understanding themselves as ‘Christian workers’ to operating as individual ‘consumers’ of theological orthodoxy in a religious market no longer regulated by denominational authorities. This conception of religious believers as theological consumers also spread to conservative Protestantism more broadly. While the fundamentalist ‘brand’ promised doctrinal purity to individual believers, revival religion increasingly promoted a prosperity gospel of material abundance and emotional well-being.³⁵ American consumer culture thus reshaped the form of conservative dissenter Protestantism as much as its content. As the twentieth century wore on, the conservative revivalist message resembled more and more a product marketed to religious customers, benefiting from the techniques used to promote any other therapeutic product or entertainment. The early leaders of Moody Bible Institute learned from their corporate partners how to brand nondenominational fundamentalism as ‘pure’, old-time religion. During the 1910s and 1920s, Billy Sunday deployed vaudeville theatrics and explicitly directed his ministry to seek souls ‘as a successful commercial corporation goes after sales’. His successor in big-tent revivalism, celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, took Sunday’s theatrics to new extremes, preaching with the aid of elaborate sets, props, and costumes in her Los Angeles tabernacle. Her expert use of print, radio, and film media demonstrated how fundamentalist and charismatic Protestants would reassert themselves outside the mainline denominations. The market for religious entertainment even transcended racial barriers: when black revivalists were excluded from radio broadcast channels, they turned to the record industry as an evangelistic medium.³⁶ The corporate world was never far from these mixtures of old-time revivalist Protestantism and new consumer-oriented techniques, both of which harmonized with free market individualism. As McPherson earned fundamentalist credentials with her message that American culture was besieged by modernism and immorality, business leaders helped to make such concerns politically mainstream by blending her ideal of ‘Christian America’ with antisocialist principles. The result was a civil religion fit for the Cold War era. ³⁵ Longfield, Presbyterians and American Culture, pp. 137–8; Gloege, Guaranteed Pure; Josh McMullen, Under the Big Top: Big Tent Revivalism and American Culture, 1885–1925 (New York, 2015). ³⁶ Gloege, Guaranteed Pure; quoted in Longfield, Presbyterians and American Culture, pp. 137–8; Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple Mcpherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, MA, 2009), pp. 66–89; 49; McMullen, Under the Big Top; Lerone A. Martin, Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion (New York, 2014).

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By the 1950s, the interwar coalition of fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and corporate America achieved a new currency motto of ‘In God We Trust’ and the insertion of ‘under God’ into the Pledge of Allegiance. This coalition laid the foundation for a curious mix of small-government economics and establishmentarian religious politics in later decades—granting new life to an ideal of ‘Christian America’ that increasingly clashed with the inclusive models of religious pluralism supported by the mainline denominations.³⁷ By the latter half of the century, the conservative Protestant proclivity for economic individualism morphed into outright endorsement of free enterprise and consumer capitalism. Business leaders were important in this shift. For reasons that were not always religious, a cluster of corporate leaders sought to win a broad swath of evangelical Protestantism for big business and the emerging service economy. The Walton family, for example, cultivated Walmart’s Christian credentials as it expanded from the 1960s through the 1990s, secured the loyalty of evangelical service workers and consumers, and built connections between evangelical institutions of higher learning and free market economics.³⁸ Although the liberal mainline tended to disagree with conservative Protestants on the virtues of corporate capitalism, they shared a generally uncritical stance toward consumer culture and its individualist orientation during the 1920s and beyond. In 1925, liberal Protestants heralded advertising executive Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows, a bestseller that rendered Jesus of Nazareth a confident salesman and promoter. After World War I, they were less energized by social-gospel ideals of collective salvation and more focused on inner well-being. In a culture that promoted indulgence and leisure rather than restraint and hard work, urban middle-class Protestants yearned for an idealized past of vitality and adventure. Liberal ministers like Harry Emerson Fosdick looked to personality psychology to guide their congregants toward an abundant inner life to supplement the material abundance achieved through new patterns of consumption and leisure. Although a more pessimistic ‘neoliberal’ theology would emerge during the late 1940s and 1950s, those years also saw the growth of theologies of peace and ‘positive thinking.’³⁹ ³⁷ Kevin Michael Kruse, One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York, 2015); Axel R. Schäfer, Piety and Public Funding: Evangelicals and the State in Modern America (Philadelphia, PA, 2012); Mislin, Saving Faith. ³⁸ Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York, 2010); Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA, 2010). ³⁹ T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago, IL, 1994); Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Columbia, MO, 2001). The prophetic tradition was minimized at mid-century but resurgent during the 1960s and 1970s. Bowman, The Urban Pulpit, p. 286. On developments in the 1940s and 1950s, see Lantzer, Mainline Christianity, p. 51; Noll, A History; Von Rohr, The Shaping of American Congregationalism, p. 404.

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Liberal Protestantism’s prophetic tradition, once so prominent in the Social Gospel movement, would remain in tension with a consumer-oriented, therapeutic gospel of well-being and personal fulfilment for the remainder of the century. By the 1960s and 1970s, some liberals took a self-critical turn amid growing dissatisfaction with denominational leadership and lay apathy, while a more radical critique sought to reclaim a prophetic voice within a seemingly consensus-driven and socially conformist mainline Protestantism. Baptist theologian Harvey Cox developed a socially conscious alternative to midcentury liberalism in The Secular City (1965), while other radical theologians developed the ‘death of god’ theology. Their turn to secular ideas did not represent the mainline majority, but their views were symptomatic of a belief that Protestant liberalism had superintended a nation of selfish consumerism, social inequality, and endless military conflict.⁴⁰ If such critical checks against consumer individualism did not resonate for the mainline majority, most were sceptical of consumer models of church outreach. This was not always the case. In the 1910s, Charles Stelzle, founder of the Labor Temple in New York, was looking to movie houses and vaudeville to make his programmes more appealing to the masses. At the same time, the Men and Religion Forward Movement successfully mobilized voters for social gospel issues by adopting modern advertising techniques.⁴¹ Yet the true heirs of the consumer style of religion would be the evangelical broadcast giants of the later twentieth century, foremost among them Oral Roberts (who expanded from radio to television in 1954), Pat Robertson (televangelism pioneer and founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1959), Kenneth Hagin (purveyor of the ‘Word of Faith’ movement), and the scandal-plagued Jimmy Swaggert and Jim Bakker (founder of Praise the Lord network in 1974). These celebrity evangelists built their media empires on a prosperity gospel of health and material blessing that thrived in the Pentecostal-charismatic revivalist tradition. By the 1990s, the model and the message of both televangelism and burgeoning megachurches reflected consumer assumptions.⁴² In different ways, fundamentalist-evangelical and mainline Protestants both adapted to consumer individualism. Yet their uneven mastery of dynamic institution-building and consumer marketing techniques—which the more churchly, mainline Protestants never fully embraced—would continue to set them apart. Institutional flexibility and an aggressive cultural message gave evangelical Protestants an edge over the mainline denominations in the ⁴⁰ Brown, ‘Theology and Belief ’, p. 361; Lantzer, Mainline Christianity, pp. 51–64. ⁴¹ Longfield, Presbyterians and American Culture, pp. 135–6; Curtis, A Consuming Faith, pp. 4, 11, 233, 254–65. ⁴² For a recent account of how American Christians came to view prosperity and health as marks of divine blessing and spiritual progress during the post-war era, see Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel [in English] (Oxford, 2013).

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last decades of the twentieth century. And as consumer culture muted a historic commitment to ‘Christian civilization’ with a generic American individualism, intensified political allegiances also overrode any coherent dissenter Protestant identity.

THE RESTRUCTURING OF P ROTESTANT AMERICA: THE S TA TE, P OLITICIZATION, AND THE DECLINE OF DENOMINATIONALISM The post-World War II era brought dramatic changes to American religion. Some of those changes—new media technologies ripe for exploitation by celebrity preachers, the growth of therapeutic religion and the prosperity gospel, and increasing intellectual pluralism among mainline Protestants— were continuous with earlier links between American Protestantism and consumer culture, and with earlier theological confrontations with modern science and secular ideas.⁴³ Yet alongside these developments, the last half of the twentieth century saw a new force—an enlarged, liberal, pluralist state— reshape American religious life. The post-war US federal government first roused the Protestant defenders of ‘Christian America’ with its judicial moves to erect a strict ‘wall of separation’ between religion and government that went beyond previous Constitutional interpretations of disestablishment. It then goaded them with new assertions of federal power in society, whether by guaranteeing civil rights to minority groups and women that seemed to threaten the traditional order of white Protestant communities and families, or by taking up social welfare issues in which Christians held a vested interest. Less directly, the federal government’s social and economic policies extended economic prosperity to conservative white evangelicals, increasing their political clout.⁴⁴ Consequently, between the end of World War II and the end of the twentieth century, American Protestants grew increasingly politicized over the place of religion, morality, and the family in a secularizing society. Political engagement, in turn, not only further flattened theological identities under the political labels of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ but also restructured religious institutions: as special-purpose agencies more effectively mobilized partisan churchgoers in

⁴³ On the increasing intellectual pluralism among liberal Protestants after the 1920s, see Bowman, The Urban Pulpit, pp. 7–9; Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire, p. 6; and Mislin, Saving Faith. ⁴⁴ Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt; Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, NJ, 1988).

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cross-denominational battles for public influence, denominations declined in their public importance.⁴⁵ Unlike any other historical development, the expansion of the liberal state encouraged the selective application of theological convictions that once made dissenter Protestants a distinct and coherent group. By affirming and accelerating religious pluralism, it challenged Protestants’ privileged place in American society—a privilege that had always undergirded their delicate ideological balance of religious freedom and ideals of an informal Protestant Christendom. Many dissenter Protestants then cast aside any genuinely pluralistic notion of religious freedom in defence of (Protestant) ‘Christian America.’ Liberal Protestants, on the other hand, expanded their inclusive notions of intellectual, cultural, and religious pluralism at the expense of any distinctive mission that would set them apart from secular liberalism. This self-sorting of evangelical and liberal Protestants into opposing political blocs ushered in a realignment of American Protestants that minimized their shared heritage and hardened existing cultural and political fault lines. A new kind of governmental threat to ‘Christian America’ first appeared in the Supreme Court’s increasingly separationist interpretations of the First Amendment, particularly as it applied to public education. The federal government’s separationist turn with regard to church–state questions may be pinpointed to the momentous move to ‘incorporate’ the First Amendment, that is, make it applicable to the states (on the basis of the 14th Amendment). In 1940, Cantwell v. Connecticut (involving Jehovah’s Witnesses) extended the First Amendment guarantee of religious free exercise. In 1947, Everson v. Board of Education incorporated the establishment clause in its ruling against the use of public school buses for parochial school students. The Everson decision leaned on Thomas Jefferson’s previously obscure reference to a ‘wall of separation’ between church and state. This was a much more restrictive metaphor for disestablishment compared to the accommodationist model that had prevailed until then, typically to the benefit of Anglo Protestantism. In addition to marking the national Constitution’s supremacy over state constitutions, these rulings set off a ‘second disestablishment’ characterized by stricter separation between religion and government institutions. It was a trend eventually endorsed by mainline leaders but roundly denounced by evangelicals. ⁴⁵ Evangelicals were not always aware of the tensions between their separationist stance toward seeming ‘interference’ in religious matters and their establishmentarian stance toward public expressions of the Christian faith, nor of the tensions between their support for the Cold War-era national security state and their ideological opposition to big government’ welfare and economic policies. These tensions are given extensive treatment in Schäfer, Piety and Public Funding. The reorganization of denominational Protestantism in the form of parachurch agencies is examined in Wuthnow, Restructuring of American Religion.

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These constitutional turning points would not spark political reaction until later cases in the 1960s, however. Even with a legal religious pluralism in place to match a growing social religious pluralism by mid-century, mainline and evangelical Protestants stood confidently (and uncharacteristically) united during the 1940s and 1950s. Bonded by Cold War anti-communism, economic prosperity, and religious revival, mainline and evangelical Protestants gravitated toward the religious centre. Celebrity evangelist Billy Graham cooperated with mainline leaders in his national ‘crusades’. Church membership soared, sparking a boom in church building projects. A widespread spirit of ecumenism birthed the National Council of Churches (1950), the United Churches of Christ (1957), and the reunification of the northern PCUSA and southern PCUS (1958). In public life, mainline Protestants affirmed the pluralism of ‘Judeo-Christian,’ tri-faith America—a remarkable legacy of the dissenting tradition’s commitment to religious toleration—even as evangelical Protestants took for granted that the era’s generic civil religious expressions of ‘under God’ and ‘in God we trust’ upheld their distinctly Protestant interpretation of America’s God.⁴⁶ Yet deep religious polarity stood on the horizon. Post-war defence spending and federally-insured mortgages fuelled unprecedented growth in America’s sunbelt as well as racially and religiously homogeneous suburbs across the United States. Transplanted white evangelicals from the South and Midwest, zealous and upwardly mobile, slowly transformed the nation’s religious demographics and cohered in a more ideologically conservative political outlook. They would eventually outpace mainline denominations and exert tremendous political influence.⁴⁷ The religious fuse to this political tinderbox remained unlit through the 1950s and 1960s, even as the movement to end racial segregation succeeded with the support of black Protestant churches. The civil rights movement drew inspiration from the prophetic tradition of black dissenter Protestants, with roots stretching back to the Baptist and Methodist conversions of the nineteenth century, while benefiting from both mainline Protestant support and southern whites’ weak religious defences of segregation.⁴⁸ Yet indirectly, the movement did lay the groundwork for white evangelicals’ selective opposition to ‘big government’ during the 1970s and 1980s. It did so by expanding federal ⁴⁶ William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT, 2004); Mislin, Saving Faith; Charles H. Lippy, ‘From Consensus to Struggle: Pluralism and the Body Politic in Contemporary America’, in Charles L. Cohen and Ronald L. Numbers, eds, Gods in America: Religious Pluralism in the United States (New York, 2013); Kevin Michael Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (Oxford, 2011), pp. 10–11. ⁴⁷ Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, pp. 169–71. ⁴⁸ David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004).

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authority to ensure individual rights in state and local governments, first through the Supreme Court (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954) and eventually through legislation in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Right Act of 1965. At this time, many white evangelicals—like many white Americans—became negatively disposed to the federal government’s intervention in locally segregated communities. Yet it was only with later, similar efforts to guarantee equal rights to religious minorities, women, and homosexuals that ‘big government’ came under fire from a distinctly religious and nationwide coalition during the 1970s and after.⁴⁹ The US government’s expanded welfare functions were not incidental to the growing politicization of the nation’s dissenter Protestants from 1940 to 1990. Their connection, however, was less ideological (with respect to the role or size of government) than structural (how religious institutions were restructured around new government funding streams). Aside from a few ideologically driven Christian libertarians, the American Protestants who first opposed social welfare entitlements did not typically do so from a standpoint of defending the prerogatives of private religious institutions, nor indeed on any grounds that were distinctly religious.⁵⁰ But government welfare programmes, alongside new government interference in the church–state relationship, would prompt new associational forms in response to new government activity. Slowly but steadily, centralized denominational bureaucracies were joined by more adaptive, flexible parachurch agencies that advanced special religious interests through political channels. By the late-twentieth century, those parachurch agencies were better matched than denominations to the new political landscape, where religious lobbying groups influenced public policy and religious philanthropies succeeded by wielding political capital in bids for government largess.⁵¹ From the 1940s to the 1970s, the liberal state’s interventions to guarantee First Amendment rights, economic and educational advancement, civil rights for minorities, and welfare provision for the poor and elderly reshaped civil society in ways that undermined the denominational form of mainline Protestantism. Yet although the decline of mainline denominations and the momentum of conservative evangelicalism would become major trends by the late-twentieth century, these developments were unforeseen as ⁴⁹ Wuthnow, Restructuring of American Religion, p. 148; Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York, 2010); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ, 2002). ⁵⁰ A strain of Christian libertarianism simmered in the New Deal era, but this view did not become mainstream until later decades. Kruse, One Nation under God. On evangelicals and the New Deal, see Schäfer, Piety and Public Funding, p. 127; Williams, God’s Own Party, p. 39; and Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, p. 41. ⁵¹ Wuthnow, Restructuring of American Religion, p. 114; Schäfer, Piety and Public Funding, pp. 27–45, 147–62.

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mainline Protestants exerted outsized influence on public policy during the 1940s and 1950s. The mainline’s successful alignment with the political mainstream, however, actually exacerbated its own rapid decline in subsequent decades. Despite and because of its earlier success, mainline liberal Protestantism lost support from both conservative lay members and increasingly secular political liberals (including their own youth) during the 1960s and 1970s. Political leftists and the counterculture of the 1960s held the informal Protestant establishment responsible for the social problems associated with the status quo. At the same time, traditionalist Protestants who had remained in the mainline denominations were dismayed at their leadership’s abdication of their place of cultural privilege, demonstrated not only in their self-critical response to protest movements but also in their embrace of a more neutral, inclusive model of American religious pluralism. By the 1960s, liberals’ commitment to religious diversity as a matter of public policy included affirmation of faiths outside the so-called ‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition and explicit support for separationist Supreme Court rulings. As the mainline leadership also adopted a passive stance toward the secularization of American government and society, conservatives and moderates looked beyond their churches for political movements to defend Christian America and traditional ‘family values’.⁵² In sum, as liberal Protestantism’s longstanding commitment to religious inclusivity evolved to its logical extreme in the 1960s, that principle was turned against the distinctive theological foundations that had held conservatives and moderates in the mainline, yet without making a persuasive case to secular humanists for religious affiliation.⁵³ Liberal Protestants’ response to the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, especially when articulated in radical or theologically complex terms, was a losing message for many American Protestants who desired moral clarity and a defence of traditional family mores amid the tumult of the 1960s. At the same time, although much of the liberal mainline’s social mission of justice and equality was realized in the achievements of the welfare state, the civil rights movement, and Vietnam War protests, those achievements also reaped ambiguity of religious purpose for those outside the core of the Religious Left.⁵⁴ The unintended consequence of theological inclusiveness was that Protestant liberalism grew less and less distinguishable from Enlightenment humanitarianism and liberal individualism in American

⁵² Mislin, Saving Faith; Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire, pp. 11–13, 18–19; Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America, pp. 219–26; Lantzer, Mainline Christianity, pp. 73–6. ⁵³ Treatment of how the liberal Protestant commitment to intra-Christian inclusivity expanded to include inter-faith, cultural, and ethic inclusivity may be found in Mislin, Saving Faith. ⁵⁴ This is, in part, because the Religious Left tends to downplay the idea that faith should play a role in politics at all. Lantzer, Mainline Christianity, p. 78.

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politics. By the close of the twentieth century, the liberal mainline was in some respects a victim of its own intellectual and political success.⁵⁵ The fate of the American mainline shares some telling parallels with the decline of the United Church of Canada. By the 1960s, Canada’s once-vital mainstream Protestant churches, standing for theological modernism and an ethic of self-fulfilment while side-lining its evangelical strain, appeared to stand for little that was distinctively Christian—and little that was uniquely compelling in a modernizing nation. The expansion of Canada’s state welfare services, moreover, undermined the social purpose that Protestant churches had fulfilled in earlier decades. Adapting too much to secular ideas and too little to a changing institutional landscape weakened the United Church and the US mainline alike.⁵⁶ In the US, however, the active defence of traditional mores against cultural change revitalized conservative Protestantism. Increasingly, evangelicals looked to the government, primarily public schools, to reinforce their interpretation of America’s Protestant Christian identity. Yet those paying attention to national affairs instead found a Supreme Court affirming a more rigidly separationist interpretation of the First Amendment. Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) found even generic prayers and Bible readings in public schools in violation of the establishment clause. Meanwhile, the social reality of American religious pluralism was not only lending greater practical urgency for the ‘second disestablishment’ but also, following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, headed for religious demographics far more diverse than the Protestant-Catholic-Jew ideal enshrined during the 1950s and epitomized by the election of Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy as President.⁵⁷ By the 1970s and into the 1980s, the presumed special relationship between Protestant Christianity and the US government—a relationship that many dissenter Protestants, despite their historic commitment to religious freedom, seldom criticized and generally took for granted—appeared seriously imperilled. A cluster of political and cultural shifts related to gender, family, and education only fuelled white evangelicals’ fears of moral decay within the sacred halls of government—and by that government’s own design. With guarantees of women’s right to abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973), a national movement to pass an Equal Rights Amendment to ensure gender equality, ongoing secularization of public schools through evolution curricula and bans on displaying the ten commandments (Epperson v. Arkansas, 1968; Stone v. ⁵⁵ On this theme of cultural and political success despite demographic decline, see Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion; Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire, pp. 48–9; and Mislin, Saving Faith. ⁵⁶ Noll, ‘What Happened to Christian Canada?’ pp. 265–7. ⁵⁷ Lantzer, Mainline Christianity, pp. 66–73; Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America; Schultz, Tri-Faith America.

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Graham, 1980), perceived threats to tax exemption for private religious schools (Bob Jones University v. United States, 1983), and moves to defend the civil rights of homosexuals, the evangelical mood grew increasingly—and quite literally—apocalyptic.⁵⁸ Conservative white evangelicals coalesced politically in their moral objections to these policy moves, and in an era of genuinely expanded federal authority, the moral stakes of party politics were high indeed. The result was a dramatic politicization of religious beliefs and denominations that would align theological conservatives with the Republican Party and render party politics the main arena of religious contest in American society. By the close of the twentieth century, the politicization of Protestant cultural agendas had fundamentally restructured American Protestantism (and American religion more broadly) by replacing denominational umbrellas of religious identity with the ideological ones of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’. If the dissenter Protestant traditions had long ago been ‘Americanized’ in their individualist approach to the Bible, splintered along mainline/fundamentalist lines and altered to meet the demands of consumer society, any commonalities between the dissenter denominations were now even more muted by political allegiances. On the ‘liberal’ side of the political boundary stood mainline and black Protestants, as well as liberal Catholics and Jews, who allied with political liberals on issues of church–state separation, peace, poverty, and civil rights, and endorsed statist solutions; on the ‘conservative’ side stood white evangelical Protestants and more orthodox Catholics who believed that traditional Christian morality, ingrained in the nation’s heritage and necessary to its future success, should retain its privileged cultural status—free from the interference of seemingly secular, ‘big’ government liberals.⁵⁹ The significance of this political rift is conventionally understood in terms of the Religious Right’s political importance to the elections of Ronald Reagan (1980 and 1984) and George W. Bush (2000 and 2004). But the religious consequences were just as profound. The governing assumption of America’s so-called ‘culture wars’ was that politics, not churches or families, would be the principal realm of moral combat. Public issues such as the size of government and guarantees of religious freedom—although these were central historic concerns for dissenter Protestants who had suffered persecution under the Anglican establishment—now took on more urgency than theological doctrine. And in organizational terms, the non-denominational churches and parachurch associations best adapted to grassroots mobilization ⁵⁸ Sutton, American Apocalypse, pp. 352, 354, 359. ⁵⁹ Wuthnow, Restructuring of American Religion. For treatment of the mainline’s political support for the First Amendment, see Derek H. Davis, ‘From Engagement to Reentrenchment: An Examination of First Amendment Activism by America’s Mainline Churches, 1980–2000’, in Robert Wuthnow and John Hyde Evans, eds, The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-Based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestantism (Berkeley, CA, 2002), pp. 317–42.

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would hold significant advantages over centralized, slow-moving, deliberative denominational assemblies—such as those that governed mainline communions.⁶⁰ Despite the mainline’s numerical decline in the final decades of the twentieth century, its cultural imprint on American society owed much to its commitment to the dissenter notions of religious freedom. Liberal Protestants built on a tradition of religious toleration to forge a more equitable model of religious pluralism, and their commitment to the rights of individual conscience resonated during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Yet notably, the mainline’s tendency by the 1960s to retreat from cultural battles that sought to align government and religion—tactics commonly deployed by evangelical dissenters still tethered to the ‘Christian America’ version of Protestant Christendom—contributed to their declining membership rolls. Thus even as certain dissenter principles, such as toleration of religious diversity and freedom of conscience, propelled the rise of mainline denominations during the social and intellectual crises of the early twentieth century, those same pluralistic ideals seemed to lose their resonance among the many Protestants who wanted greater cooperation between religion and government at century’s end.⁶¹

CO NCLUSION Understood as a constellation of new ideas and critical methods, economic transformations, and expanded government bureaucracies, ‘modernity’ in the North American context polarized dissenter Protestants and altered the terms by which dissenter traditions would succeed or fail by the end of the twentieth century. The interplay between these external forces and Protestant responses led to no single outcome. Although nearly all varieties of dissenter Protestantism accentuated therapeutic and consumer impulses during this era, liberal mainline institutions were less successful than evangelical ones in adapting to a transformed institutional and political landscape. As the mainline denominations endorsed a more inclusive theology and grew more ambivalent toward mixing religion and politics, evangelicals won over moderates and became the public voice of American Protestantism. Indeed, by century’s end evangelical Protestants were the new ‘mainline’. Yet the very idea of a religious ‘mainline’ has always stood in tension with the anti-establishmentarian strains of Protestant dissent. Historic commitments to religious liberty and the rights of conscience have often been turned ⁶⁰ Davis, ‘From Engagement to Reentrenchment’; Lantzer, Mainline Christianity, pp. 89–90. ⁶¹ Davis, ‘From Engagement to Reentrenchment’.

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against the cultural and political ambitions of Protestant leaders. Thus to the extent that commitments to theological toleration and suspicion of political power contributed to the numerical losses of American mainline denominations, those losses may in fact reflect the logical outworking of Protestant dissent in the modern world.

SEL E C T B I B L I OG R A P H Y Bowler, Kate. Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel [in English] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Bowman, Matthew. The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Brackney, William H. Baptists in North America: An Historical Perspective [in English] (Malden, MA Wiley-Blackwell, 2006). Curtis, Susan. A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001). Dochuk, Darren. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). Gloege, Timothy E. W. Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Hedstrom, Matthew. The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Hollinger, David A. After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). Hutchison, William R. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992). Hutchison, William R. Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). Kruse, Kevin Michael. One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015). Lantzer, Jason S. Mainline Christianity: The Past and Future of America’s Majority Faith (New York: New York University Press, 2012). Longfield, Bradley J. Presbyterians and American Culture: A History (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013). Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 edn). Mislin, David. Saving Faith: Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn of the Secular Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). Noll, Mark A. ‘What Happened to Christian Canada?’ Church History LXXV, 2 (2006): 245–73. Schäfer, Axel R. Piety and Public Funding: Evangelicals and the State in Modern America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

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Schultz, Kevin Michael. Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Sutton, Matthew Avery. American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism [in English] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Von Rohr, John. The Shaping of American Congregationalism, 1620–1957 (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1992). Williams, Daniel K. God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Worthen, Molly. Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Wuthnow, Robert. The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

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9 Southern Baptists and Evangelical Dissent Bill J. Leonard

SOUTHERN BAPTISTS AND E VANGELICALS: THE S ITUATION When it comes to the relationship between Southern Baptists and Evangelicals, opinions remain decidedly varied, ranging from appreciative cooperation to studied indifference. At first glance the two movements within American Protestantism seem clearly complementary, grounded in theology and praxis at once evangelical and evangelistic. Yet on closer examination, the cultural, ecclesiastical, and theological boundaries of each group reveal substantial diversity and perhaps occasional ambiguity. By the latter twentieth century, transitions in both movements extended the dialogue and the questions. Were they parallel theologically and distinct regionally? Were their similarities coincidental or connected? How did historic perceptions extend or inhibit interaction? What issues of dogma and demographics unified and divided these two leading segments of conservative Protestantism in the US? By the late twentieth century, changes, indeed, divisions in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) raised such questions anew, particularly from the Baptist perspective. Several studies from that period illustrate something of the conversations. This essay explores the connections between the Southern Baptist Convention and American Evangelicals, at least certain segments of that broad theological and ecclesiastical coalition. The intent is less to establish concrete conclusions, than to delineate various similarities and differences that unite, divide, or generally characterize the two movements. In some ways Southern Baptist beliefs seem to overlap with those groups that identify themselves as Evangelicals in American religious life. In other ways, the history and sociology of the two groups makes comparisons difficult indeed. In the twentyfirst century, an increasingly normative theological and ethical conservatism within the SBC has brought the denomination, its leaders, and many of its churches, into greater affinity with certain groups of Evangelicals.

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SOUTHERN BAPTISTS AND E VANGELICALS: AN INTENSE CON VERSATION In 1983, Mercer University Press published a volume entitled Are Southern Baptists ‘Evangelicals’? containing essays from three prominent Southern Baptist seminary professors including James Tull of Southeastern Baptist Seminary, James Leo Garrett of Southwestern Baptist Seminary, Fort Worth, and E. Glenn Hinson, of Southern Baptist Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. Garrett supported the connection; Hinson disagreed with it; and Tull offered a more blended analysis.¹ Their discussion reflected growing debates between ‘Moderates’ and ‘Conservatives’ in the SBC regarding the nature of theological orthodoxy, Baptist identity, and denominational governance. The three professors were clearly insiders, respected professors, collegially articulating their differences. Hinson insisted that the distinctions were substantial. He suggested that while the two movements shared commitments to biblical authority, personal conversion to Christ, and a concern for the church’s world mission, they were nonetheless products of different theological and historical ‘wombs’. Evangelicals were descended from ‘Protestant scholastics’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with links to millennial and fundamentalist groups in nineteenth-century England and America. He concluded that Evangelicals ‘let nothing stand above what they consider the objective Word of God’ evident in Holy Scripture.² Baptists, Hinson contended, were born of seventeenth-century Protestant dissent, exiles from religious and theological establishments who ‘insisted that faith must be free and voluntary if it is to be genuine faith, that there is no objective word apart from uncoerced human response’. He understood the Baptist vision of Christianity as one ‘which places the priority on voluntary and uncoerced faith or response to the Word and Act of God over any supposed objective Word and Act of God’.³ James Leo Garrett asserted that Hinson had minimized the theological influence of Puritanism shared by both Baptists and Evangelicals. He maintained that Hinson may also have created an ‘unwarranted’ antithesis regarding Baptist emphasis on religious liberty, their use of confessions of faith to delineate their Protestant orthodoxy, and their commitment to biblical authority. Garrett explored the theological affinity between the two groups by noting their shared commitments to biblical authority, personal conversion, conservative theology, and the church’s missionary imperative. He asked whether affirming historic and contemporary links with Evangelicals might enable Southern Baptists to ‘break out of their cultural or regional or class or ¹ James Leo Garrett, Jr et al. Are Southern Baptists ‘Evangelicals’? (Macon, GA, 1983). ² Ibid., pp. 120–1. ³ Ibid., p. 120.

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racial captivity to model an authentic (that is, biblical) and aggressive (that is, evangelistic) form of Christianity at the end of the twentieth century?’⁴ The book concluded with James Tull’s effort to summarize the similarities and differences between the two professors and the movements they described. He noted that this was an important debate that was essential for Southern Baptists at that moment in their history. Although Tull did not refer explicitly to the doctrinal debates extending throughout SBC life at that point in time, he urged discussion of issues ‘with mature understanding and sagacious vision’ in order to ‘appreciate keenly the precious heritage which we have in being Baptists’.⁵ A decade later, David Dockery, theology professor, seminary provost, and irenic conservative, edited a volume entitled Southern Baptists & American Evangelicals: The Conversation Continues, with essays contributed by a variety of Southern Baptist and Evangelical scholars who explored historical and theological parallels and divergences between the two American Protestant communities. By the 1990s, the SBC was moving in decidedly conservative directions with increasing doctrinal affinity to discernibly Evangelical theological viewpoints, and a reassertion of a denomination-wide, normative, confessional identity. Many of the leaders of this ‘conservative resurgence’ argued that it was ‘imperative’ that Southern Baptists explore their relationship with Evangelicals more explicitly. Likewise, evangelicals were reaching out to the SBC. Fuller Seminary president Richard Mouw observed: We, those of us who represent the Northern Evangelical community, desperately need dialogue with the Southern Baptist community. My impression is that [Southern Baptists] need dialogue with [Evangelicals]. We must overcome the polarization that so easily sets upon us and has so obviously afflicted your Southern Baptist community. We must reconsider those old questions that evangelicals love to raise: ‘What happened at the cross?’⁶

Dockery expressed hope that the two movements might ‘recognize the complementary strengths that we can share and, simultaneously, recognize the shortcomings in our fuzzy and incomplete thinking among the radical progressives, the rigid rationalists, as well as the fussy fundamentalists’.⁷ Essayists explored theological, ecclesial, missional, and geographical reasons why Southern Baptists and Evangelicals might pursue greater connection and why they had neglected such endeavours in the past.

⁴ Ibid., p. 207. ⁵ Ibid., p. 231. ⁶ Richard Mouw, ‘Theological and Ethical Dimensions of American Evangelicals’, in David S. Dockery, ed., Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals: The Conversation Continues (Nashville, TN, 1993), p. 148. Richard Mouw was president of Fuller Seminary. ⁷ Ibid., p. 108.

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By the 2000s the resurgence of conservatives in denominational leadership and theological consensus had become so comprehensive in SBC life that the question, ‘Are Southern Baptists Evangelicals?’ seemed something of a moot point. Renewed SBC confessionalism and the overarching evangelical theological sentiments of the denomination’s leadership offered clear affinity with Evangelicalism. Likewise, cultural and demographic transitions in both groups created another imperative for greater connection between the two groups.

SOUTHERN BAPTISTS AND E VANGELICALS: PUBLIC SCRUTINY During the last three decades of the twentieth century, Evangelicals and Southern Baptists were the subject of extensive description and analysis in the church, the academy, and the public square. The presidential candidacy and subsequent election of Southern Baptist Sunday schoolteacher Jimmy Carter created widespread curiosity and disagreement as to the implication of a ‘born-again’ chief executive, not only in the secular press but also among Evangelicals and Carter’s own Southern Baptist co-religionists. Wes Michaelson, editor of Sojourners magazine commented that ‘Jimmy Carter can give to millions of evangelicals that sense of respectability in America for which they have deeply longed and believe they deserve’, but critiqued the candidate’s failure to condemn the Vietnam War. Evangelist Billy Graham, directly connected with the SBC through his long-time membership in First Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas, observed that he would prefer a ‘qualified’ president who minimized his ‘religious profession’ over an unqualified individual who ‘made a religious profession’. Graham insisted that there was not ‘a hair’s difference’ between Carter’s faith and that of his potential Republican opponents, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.⁸ Carter’s election gave new impetus to a continuing focus on the nature of Evangelical and Southern Baptist approaches to faith, politics, and American culture in general. Graham’s earlier assessment became particularly poignant in 1980 when Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan whose evangelical credentials were less apparent but whose conservative politics inspired support from large numbers of Evangelical Christians, including many Southern Baptists. Numerous Baptist clergy and laity also took the occasion to participate in movements identified with the ‘New Religious Political Right’ as evident in such religiopolitical coalitions as Religious Roundtable, Focus on the Family, the Moral

⁸ Randall Balmer, Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter (New York, 2014), p. 63.

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Majority, and other movements encouraging evangelical engagement in the political arena. Evangelicals also gained attention through their connections with the ‘megachurch’ and church growth movements, evidence to some analysts that conservative congregations would continue to increase membership while more left-ward denominations would continue their downward spiral. These developments served to extend popular and scholarly curiosity as to the nature of Evangelicalism and the resulting actions of American Evangelicals. Throughout the 1980s also, the SBC came under extensive scrutiny due in large part to a highly public controversy between so-called ‘Moderates’ and ‘Conservatives’ whose long-standing theological differences shaped a series of ‘Baptist Battles’ for control of the elaborate denominational system. Convinced that the SBC had veered too far to the left, Conservatives sought to reclaim lost orthodoxy through a series of ‘course corrections’ that would reaffirm confessional orthodoxy and purge denominational institutions of Moderates who promoted or tolerated doctrinal compromise on issues of biblical inerrancy, confessional uniformity, and a variety of socio-ethical issues related to gender, sexuality, abortion, and church/state relationships. Moderates, on the other hand, viewed the controversy as a blatant ‘takeover’ effort by Conservatives seeking denominational control in order to impose fundamentalist dogma and right-wing politics on a denomination in which local autonomy and liberty of conscience had long nurtured ‘unity in diversity’. Such divisiveness, Moderates declared, would ultimately undermine the denomination’s collective commitment to mission action and world evangelization.⁹ ‘The Controversy’, as it came to be known, dominated Southern Baptists’ internal struggles and external press coverage well into the 1990s until Conservatives gained complete control of all SBC boards and agencies through the election of a series of conservative denomination presidents who oversaw appointment of persons committed to the ‘course correction/takeover agenda’. By that time, a small but relatively vocal group of Moderates began to distance themselves and their churches from continuing engagement in Convention affairs. Some formed new Baptist groups such as the Alliance of Baptists, and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. With these transitions, many conservative leaders emphasized the importance of Southern Baptist identification with the larger community of Evangelicals, encouraging greater engagement with Evangelical faith communities, educational institutions, and theological outlooks. They insisted that the two movements had much in ⁹ For varying summaries of the SBC controversy see: Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990); Bill J. Leonard, God’s Last and Only Hope: The Fragmentation of the Southern Baptist Convention (Grand Rapids, MI, 1990); Duane A. Garrett and Richard R. Melick, Jr, eds, Authority and Interpretation: A Baptist Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI, 1987), Paul Pressler, A Hill on Which to Die: One Southern Baptist’s Journey (Nashville, TN, 1999).

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common and should develop greater connections in addressing common doctrinal, ethical, and political affirmations and concerns. Even some who identified more explicitly with the Moderates urged members of their coalition to consider greater connection with Evangelicals.

SOUTHERN BAPTISTS AND E VANGELICALS: DEMOGRAPHIC AND CULTURAL REALITIES As the twenty-first century got underway, both Evangelicals and Southern Baptists were compelled to confront new realities, many related to demographic shifts impacting groups and individuals across the theological spectrum. Demographically, the 1980s and 1990s may well represent the pinnacle of both Evangelical and Southern Baptist numerical and cultural influence in the United States. In American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell suggested that those Protestants who identified themselves as Evangelicals ‘constituted 23 percent of all Americans in the early 1970s’. This percentage increased ‘to 28 percent by the mid-1990s, and thereafter slumped to 24 percent’.¹⁰ They also observed that had they limited their ‘definition [of evangelicals] to the standard denominational evangelicals (Baptists and the like), the post1993 decline in evangelical Protestants would have appeared sharper . . . ’ Thus, Putnam and Campbell conclude: ‘the evangelical boom that began in the 1970s was over by the early 1990s, nearly two decades ago. In twentyfirst century America expansive evangelicalism is a feature of the past, not the present.’¹¹ From their perspective, conservative churches were no longer growing as they had three decades before. Similar demographic issues confront the SBC. While it remains America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Convention reported continued decline in baptismal and membership statistics from 2006–13. Also in 2013, onefourth of its over 46,000 member churches reported no baptisms at all and a substantial drop in baptisms for teens and young adults was also recorded. Indeed, in 2013, the only growth in baptisms came from children under five years of age, a striking development for a believers’ church. Financial and demographic shifts have forced significant downsizing or reorganizing in much Southern Baptist institutional life and new evangelistic campaigns have not been able to stem the tide of decline. After the 2013 report, Southern Baptist administrator Thom Rainer declared: ‘I am grieved ¹⁰ Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York, 2010), pp. 103–4. ¹¹ Ibid., p. 105.

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we are losing our evangelistic effectiveness.’¹² In fact, more general studies of Baptists suggested that despite certain megachurch exceptions, the twenty-first century sociological picture places the entire religious communion in a state of numerical decline.¹³ Given these twenty-first century developments, connections and conversations between Southern Baptists and Evangelicals have theological and demographic implications. Those conversations come at a time when a growing number of churches in both movements are forced to re-examine the nature of their identity as they seek to pass on unshakable traditions to a new generation whose attention they find difficult to attract.

DEFINING EVAN GELICALS AND SOUTHERN BAPTISTS: NO E ASY TASK Southern Baptists and Evangelicals are equally difficult to define. Both movements identify certain shared or at least parallel doctrines that describe a particular approach to Christian orthodoxy and action, yet members of each coalition often define those dogmas in diverse ways, often with contrasting biblical hermeneutics. Even brief descriptions illustrate the dilemma of comparison.

Southern Baptist Roots: Historical-Theological Identity When the SBC was founded in 1845, its people were heirs of over two hundred years of Baptist history that shaped their identity considerably. The earliest Baptists were born of Reformation Protestantism a century after Luther’s dissent against the Roman Catholic papacy, and committed to Luther’s emphasis on sola scriptura (scripture alone), sola fides (faith alone), and sola gratia (grace alone). Second-generation Protestants, Baptists began in 1609 with a group of English Puritan Separatists exiled in Amsterdam. Under the leadership of John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, they repudiated the infant baptism given them in the Anglican Church, confessed their faith in Christ, and received believer’s baptism by affusion (pouring), thus constituting a believers’ church, in which all who claimed membership in Christ’s church were required to profess their faith, followed by believer’s baptism as a pledge ¹² Kate Tracy, ‘Five Reasons Why Most Southern Baptist Churches Baptized Almost No Millenials’, Christianity Today, (29 May 2014). ¹³ Tobin Grant, ‘Baptist Decline Is Just Math: More Move to Other Churches Than Reverse’, Religious News Service (11 Sept. 2014).

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of that commitment. By the 1640s immersion had replaced affusion as the normative mode of baptism. These first Baptists drafted a confession of faith in 1611 and returned to England a year later, bringing their Baptist ways with them. The confession defined the church as ‘a company of faithful people separated from the world by the word & the Spirit of GOD, being knit unto the LORD, & one unto another, by Baptisme. Upon their own confession of the faith, and sinnes’.¹⁴ This concept of a believers’ church remains central to Baptist identity, shaping ecclesiology, theology, soteriology, and community. On their return to England, the group became known as General Baptists because of their belief that Christ died for the sins of the entire world, and that his death on the cross represented a general atonement, through which all persons were potentially elected to salvation, actualizing that regeneration through repentance and faith. Every individual had the free will to choose, ignore, or reject God’s saving grace. This Arminian theological outlook would come to characterize an important segment of Baptist churches in England and the US. By the 1630s another Baptist faction had developed in London, this one drawn from the Puritan Independents (Congregationalists). They became known as Particular Baptists because of their belief that Christ’s atoning death on the cross was efficacious only for the elect, a communion chosen for salvation before the foundation of the world. Like their General Baptist counterparts, the Particular Baptists constituted believers’ churches in which a profession of personal faith was necessary for church membership. Their 1644 London Confession of Faith declared, ‘That faith is the gift of God wrought in the hearts of the elect by the Spirit of God . . . .’¹⁵ Conversion occurred only after grace was infused into the heart of depraved sinners, regenerating them and enabling repentance and faith. Particular Baptists shared many beliefs with Calvinist Presbyterians and Congregationalists, approving the Second London Confession of Faith in 1677 with large segments taken from the Westminster Confession of 1644, with amendments related to believer’s baptism, lay preaching, the use of ‘Hymns and Spiritual Songs’ (not simply the Psalms), and replacing the term Sacrament, with Ordinance in describing baptism and the Lord’s Supper.¹⁶ Southern Baptists reflect these diverse sources of theological identity. Some lean toward Arminian emphasis on free will and general atonement, while others are thoroughgoing Calvinists, committed to the tenets of Reformed theology. Debates over those divergent dogmas would characterize SBC life into the twenty-first century.

¹⁴ William L. Lumpkin, and Bill J. Leonard, eds, Baptist Confessions of Faith (Valley Forge, PA, 2011 edn), p. 111. The statement has been adapted to modern English. ¹⁵ Ibid., p. 150. ¹⁶ Ibid., p. 218.

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Baptist Identity: Distinctive Beliefs and Practices By early in their history, Baptist groups reflected a broad spectrum of similarities and differences in belief and practice. At the centre of Baptist identity is a strong commitment to the idea of a believers’ church, in which baptism and church membership are extended only to those who can testify to an experience of God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Baptism is offered only to those who can make such a confession. This concept of the church meant that Baptists insisted that faith could not be coerced by governmental or ecclesiastical religious establishments. God alone is judge of conscience and each person is responsible only to God for faith or non-faith. Since they perceived that governments and state-privileged churches were ever attempting to impose a particular faith, thereby violating freedom of conscience, Baptists understood that religious dissent was not only possible, but probable. Their concern for freedom of religion became a hallmark of early Baptist identity in England and America. All Baptist groups shared a common conviction regarding the believers’ church. Their other distinguishing characteristics included the following: • Biblical authority and liberty of conscience: Baptists affirmed the authority of scripture as the inspired guide for faith, doctrine, and Christian living as well as a concern for the freedom of conscience in addressing biblical interpretation. For many years, Southern Baptists debated the relationship between those two ideas. • An Experience of God’s Grace: All who would claim membership in the church must testify to a personal experience with Jesus Christ. Baptists have often given great emphasis to personal conversion. Southern Baptists understand conversion as secured through a dramatic salvific event or gentle nurture through the life of the church. They often differ, however, over specific processes for securing salvation. • Church Ordinances: Believer’s Baptism by Immersion and the Lord’s Supper: Baptism follows profession of faith and is public testimony to internal redemption, hence not given to infants. Southern Baptists are among those Baptist groups that immerse children, some as young as ages four or five. The Lord’s Supper is celebrated as a command to the church set forth by Jesus himself. Most congregations view it as a memorial to Christ’s death and resurrection, done ‘in remembrance’ of those saving events. • Congregational autonomy and associational cooperation with other congregations: Baptists’ congregational polity grew out of their belief that the authority of Christ was mediated through the congregation of believers. The 1611 confession written in Amsterdam declared ‘that as one congregation hath CHRIST, so hath all. And that the Word of GOD cometh not

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out from any one, neither to any one congregation in particular. But unto every particular Church as it doth unto all the world. And therefore no church ought to challenge any prerogative over any other.’¹⁷ Yet early Baptists also developed ‘associations’ of churches for fellowship, doctrinal conversation, and shared ministry. In time, many Baptist groups extended these associational relationships into denominations. The Southern Baptist Convention incorporates numerous associational/denominational connections on the local, state, and national level, combining resources for publication, education, missionary, and other ministries funded cooperatively. • The priesthood of the laity and the ordaining of ministers: Baptists extended Martin Luther’s emphasis on the priesthood of all believers to assert that all baptized believers were called to be witnesses for Christ in the church and in the world. One Baptist group, the Six Principle Baptists, practiced the laying on of hands on two occasions, first to the newly baptized as a sign of common calling, and a second time to those set aside for specific ministry in and with the church. Baptists set aside those whose calling led them into the ministry of the word and the care of souls. Southern Baptists affirm ministerial ordination but divide over whether women can receive those credentials. • Theological Spectrum: Calvinism and Arminianism: Baptists began at both ends of a Calvinist/Arminian spectrum that now runs from the strict Calvinism of such groups as Primitive and Old Regular Baptists, to the Arminianism of Free Will and General Baptists. Southern Baptists tend to incorporate elements of both theological traditions with some affirming staunch Calvinist views, often modifying those dictums to allow for missionary endeavors while affirming the classic ‘Five Points’ summarized in the TULIP formula including Total Depravity; Unconditional election; Limited atonement; Irresistible grace; Perseverance of the saints. Others emphasize certain Arminian-related beliefs such as individual free will, Christ’s general atonement, election for all who accept Christ through repentance and faith, and the freedom of sinners to choose, reject, or ignore God’s grace. Proponents of both theological approaches affirm the power of grace to sustain all who believe. • Religious liberty and loyalty to the state: The early Baptists did not hesitate to challenge church–state establishmentarian practices in England and America. Many advocated a radical egalitarianism in which the state could not judge the conscience of heretic or atheist, opening the door to modern religious pluralism. Southern Baptists echoed that concern for religious freedom but by the late twentieth century were substantially

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 111.

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divided across a spectrum from strict separationist (religious views and practices should have no place in government-related contexts) to accommodationist (government should not favor any religion but should allow free exercise in public and private spheres). • Consistently confessional—selectively creedal: Baptist groups have long utilized confessions of faith to organize and articulate basic theological positions, usually supported by biblical texts. Yet certain groups and individuals rejected use of confessional documents, fearing that they undermined the centrality of scripture as the only doctrinal rule of faith. The SBC was similarly divided, particularly in the latter twentieth century, with some members insisting on greater confessional identity, even uniformity, of member churches and denominational employees, and others insisting on ‘no creed but the Bible’. • A (Mostly) Missionary People: Many Baptist groups place great emphasis on their missionary mandate to evangelize the world for Jesus Christ, a movement energized in the late 1700s by William Carey and Andrew Fuller who modified the popular Calvinism of their day toward recognition of the ‘obligation’ of Christians to disseminate a global gospel. Baptists in America were quick to respond as the founding of the Triennial Convention illustrates. Not all Baptists agreed, with certain strict Calvinists insisting that such efforts were a futile human attempt to affect the salvation of sinners, an activity that only God could generate by sovereign action toward the elect. The SBC began with a missionary mandate that remains a significant denominational emphasis as reflected in the Convention’s global missionary task force.

Baptists in the South: Seeds of a Denomination A Baptist presence in the American South was evident from the 1690s when a group of Baptist dissenters travelled from Maine to Charleston, South Carolina, ultimately founding the First Baptist Church in that colonial community and constituting what became known as the Charleston Tradition. Thoroughgoing Calvinists, these Baptists affirmed the need for a church composed only of professed believers, confirming faith through baptismal immersion. They sought educated ministers who would preach erudite and exegetical sermons in ordered worship services in which only the Psalms— infallible biblical hymnody—would be sung. They called persons to conversion but would often look askance at overtly emotional revival methods. The Charleston Tradition represents one facet of Baptist identity in the South, long before the formation of a separate regional denomination. A second group of Baptists came into the South in the 1740s, founding a church at Sandy Creek, North Carolina. This Sandy Creek Tradition was the

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result of revivalistic efforts by Separate or New Light (pro-revival) Baptists influenced by the First Great Awakening in New England. Led by Shubal Stearns (1706–71) and Daniel Marshall (1706–84) they established churches in the Carolinas that were characterized by ‘enthusiastical’ conversionism, religious awakenings shaped by revivalism, and spontaneous Spirit-inspired preaching by ministers who followed their call to ministry regardless of their formal educational training. They sang hymns as well as Psalms, to congregations in which converts ‘got saved hard’, with shouting, weeping, or other ‘religious affections’ of religious experience. Baptists in the South were heirs of these varied traditions that shaped commitments to evangelism and revivals, worship, and educational institutions across the region. By the mid-nineteenth century Baptists and Methodists were the largest denominations in the South and Baptist colleges stretched from Virginia to Texas. These Baptists participated in the founding of Baptists’ first national denominational organization, the General Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States for Foreign Missions in 1814. Known as the Triennial Convention since it met in convocation every three years, the body became a clearing house for several societies related to home and foreign missions, publications, and education. Amid such theological and organizational unity came Baptists’ and America’s most divisive issue: slavery. Perhaps one of the great gulfs between Southern Baptists and ‘Yankee’ Evangelicals involved the issue of race in the slaveholding and Jim Crow South. The Southern Baptist Convention began in 1845 as a result of debates between Baptists North and South regarding chattel slavery and its impact on regional cooperation in a denominational missionary enterprise. Throughout its early history of the Triennial Convention, its leaders worked diligently to keep the missionary organization neutral on the slavery issue, realizing that it had the potential to divide the group irrevocably. But as abolitionist sentiments increased among northerners, and southerners set forth various ‘biblical defences’ of slavery, denominational compromise became increasingly impossible. Richard Furman, pastor of First Baptist Church, Charleston, and onetime president of the Triennial Convention, was among the first to issue a biblical defence of the South’s Peculiar Institution. In an 1822 address to the South Carolina legislature Furman concluded that ‘the result of this inquiry and reasoning’ regarding slavery proved ‘that the holding of slaves is justifiable by the doctrine and example contained in Holy writ; and is, therefore consistent with Christian uprightness both in sentiment and conduct’.¹⁸ ¹⁸ Richard Furman, ‘Rev. Dr. Richard Furman’s Exposition of the Views of the Baptists Relative to the Coloured Population in the United States in a Communication to the Governor of South Carolina, 1822’, in Bill J. Leonard, ed., Early American Christianity (Nashville, TN, 1983), p. 381.

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Furman’s efforts to defend slavery anticipated an increasing division between Southern and Northern evangelicals regarding the issue. Protestant turned Catholic Orestes Brownson, noted in 1847: ‘Nearly all the young men from Protestant theological seminaries come out infected, and, wherever settled as ministers, seek to enlist their congregations in the [abolitionist] movement.’¹⁹ In a sense, Southern Baptist and Northern Evangelical views on race, and the memory of them, served to distance elements of the two movements into the twentieth century. By the 1840s pro and anti-slavery divisions made neutrality impossible. When the mission society executive board refused appointment of a slaveholder named James Reeve, nominated by southerners as a test case, Georgia Baptists convened a gathering at First Baptist Church, Augusta, Georgia in May 1845 and the Southern Baptist Convention was born. The founding document made no reference of slavery, but declared that the new body was formed ‘for the purpose of carrying into effect the benevolent intentions of our constituents, by organizing a plan for the eliciting, combining and directing the energies of the whole denomination in one sacred effort for the propagation of the Gospel . . . ’.²⁰ From its beginning, the Convention linked local congregations, regional associations, and state conventions into a national denominational apparatus that allowed them to pool funds for establishing mission work, publications, educational institutions, benevolent activities, and evangelistic emphases. The SBC and its leaders developed an elaborate programme that provided white Baptists in the South with a sense of Baptist identity nurtured at every level of denominational life. That Baptist identity was in many ways inseparable from Southern identity, a coalition of regional and theological subgroups bound together by a general theological conservatism and missionary zeal.

EVANGELICALS: COMMON CORE, U NCOMMON DIV ERSITY At first glance, it appears that Evangelicals and Southern Baptists share many theological commitments and approaches to propagating the Christian message in church and society. Yet Evangelical constituencies are so broad that similarities and distinctions are not easily summarized. Common beliefs are often the source of very diverse applications and biblical interpretations. On ¹⁹ Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (Knoxville, TN, 1997), p. 147. ²⁰ Proceedings of the Southern Baptist Convention Held in Augusta, Georgia, May 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th, 1845, (Richmond, VA, 1845), p. 3.

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the whole, Evangelicals represent a broad coalition of varying denominational and non-denominational churches some of which are highly organized around various polities and judicatories, while others are free standing, less formally ordered congregations and coalitions. Evangelical scholar George Marsden writes that ‘an evangelical is a person who subscribes to certain evangelical views’ shaped by a ‘Reformation doctrine’ that includes 1) ‘a high view of the authority of Scripture and of its trustworthiness—though not necessarily involving [biblical] inerrancy’; 2) a belief in ‘God’s saving work recorded in Scripture’; 3) ‘eternal salvation only through faith in the atoning work of Christ’; 4) emphasis on ‘evangelism and missions’ as God’s way of awakening sinners; 5) and ‘the importance of a spiritually transformed life—a trait that all other Christian groups share’.²¹ Scottish Evangelical scholar David Bebbington proposes a ‘quadrilateral of evangelical characteristics’ that include: 1) Biblicism, devotion to teaching and authority of scripture; 2) Crucicentrism, a commitment to the centrality of Christ’s cross; 3) Activism, efforts to evangelize and respond to human need; 4) Conversionism, persons are called to experience god’s grace through Christ. Amid these theological definitions, in the US and other areas of the world, evangelicalism, or at least a segment of it, is often identified with particular political ideologies linked to specific political parties and conservative approaches to government and social issues. These include conservative legislative issues related to abortion, homosexuality, contraception, and definitions of religious liberty. Indeed, many evangelicals claim a strong dissenting tradition against what they view as increased secularization in the society.²² In his response to Southern Baptist-Evangelical identity, James Leo Garrett cited several basic descriptions of historic evangelicalism including Bruce Shelley’s broad account of ‘evangelical’ as a term that refers to ‘a group of Protestant churches in Germany, Low Church sympathies in the Church of England, Christians in the Wesleyan tradition, and American fundamentalists’. Shelley extended that definition to incorporate ‘all Christians within Protestant Christianity who emphasize salvation by faith in the atoning death of Jesus Christ through personal conversion, the authority of Scripture, and the importance of preaching in contrast to ritual as a means of saving grace’.²³ Garrett notes that Shelley omits a reference to the AnabaptistMennonite tradition of the radical Reformation, a communion that would ²¹ George M. Marsden, ‘Contemporary American Evangelicalism’, in David S. Dockery, ed., Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals: The Conversation Continues (Nashville, TN, 1993), pp. 28–9. ²² Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, What Is an Evangelical?, http://www.evangelicalfellowship. ca/page.aspx?pid=775. ²³ Bruce L. Shelley, Evangelicalism in America (Grand Rapids, MI, 1967), p. 16. Garrett correctly notes that Shelley omits reference to the sixteenth-century Anabaptists.

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surely qualify for inclusion. He also acknowledges some debate as to whether classic Pentecostal-oriented Christians fit an evangelical description.²⁴ Others are uncertain as to whether African American Protestants, and which ones, might be included among American evangelicals. Thus Southern Baptists are not the only group whose connections to Evangelicals have seemed erratic to some. Likewise, Evangelicals as a collection of varying denominations, nondenominations, congregations, and individuals represent no single theological or doctrinal consensus. In his study American Evangelicals, Barry Hankins concludes that an evangelical ‘is a Christian who believes two things and experiences two things’. This involves a belief ‘that the Bible is the supreme and authoritative foundation for truth and that Christ’s death on the cross was a sacrifice for the sins of the world’. Those two theological affirmations point to an experience of ‘conversion through Christ’, and a resulting empowerment ‘to engage in an active and holy life of evangelism and service to humankind’.²⁵ This basic definition creates clear links between Evangelicalism and Southern Baptist insistence on biblical authority, salvation through Jesus Christ, and religious experiences of conversion and Christian discipleship. Evangelicals consistently date their origins with various segments of the Protestant Reformation, evident in those groups, especially Lutheran in orientation, that used the word evangelical to describe themselves and their commitment to sola scriptura and sola fides. Many identify their ideological origins with the Genevan reformer, John Calvin, and the systematic theology he introduced in his classic Institutes of the Christian Religion. They trace their American roots to the Puritan settlements in New England and the work of such individuals as John Cotton, Increase and Cotton Mather, Richard Hooker, and of course Jonathan Edwards.

SOUTHERN BAPTISTS AND E VANGELICALS: SHARED INFLUENCES In the context of American religious life, Southern Baptists and Evangelicals clearly share multiple influences from a variety of movements and theological developments. These include American revivalism, personal conversionism, elements of Reformed theology, and the inward experientialism of classic Protestant Pietism. Factions in the two movements accepted and reacted ²⁴ James Leo Garrett, Jr, ‘ “Evangelicals” and Baptists: Is There a Difference?’, in James Leo Garrett, Jr et al., eds, Are Southern Baptists ‘Evangelicals’? (Macon, GA, 1983), p. 35. ²⁵ Barry Hankins, American Evangelicals: A Contemporary History of a Mainstream Religious Movement (New York, 2008), pp. 2–3.

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against varying aspects of American fundamentalism, church/state relationships, Premillennialism, and models for defining the nature of both biblical authority and inerrancy. While both Evangelicals and Southern Baptists share roots in Reformation Protestantism, they came of age in America during those eighteenth and nineteenth-century revival movements known as the First and Second Great Awakenings. Yet even then there were divisions. Early in the First Awakening, many Baptists were hesitant to engage the phenomenon since it originated with churches privileged by the Standing Order of New England religious establishment, religious elements that frequently reacted punitively against Baptists. Yet the Separatist Baptist movement that came South in the mideighteenth century was thoroughly committed to the Awakening and many of its revivalistic expressions. By the Second Great Awakening, particularly on the American frontier, Baptists were at the forefront of revival enthusiasm. Evangelicals and Baptists in the South (the SBC by 1845) were staunch conversionists, calling individuals to an experience of grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Yet Baptists and Evangelicals also divided on the nature of that conversion, particularly where ‘religious affections’, outward manifestations of spiritual ‘enthusiasm’ were concerned. Many Old Side Presbyterians, Old Light Congregationalists, and Regular Baptists promoted conversion, but eschewed overly emotional, charismatic outbursts, particularly if they were perceived to be a primary verification of salvation. Baptism was another issue. Unlike many Evangelical churches and communions, Southern Baptists uniformly delayed baptism until after the sinner’s profession of faith, and insisted that such baptism be administered by total immersion. Indeed, believer’s baptism by immersion was a sacramental dividing line between Southern Baptists and other Evangelical conversionists who retained the practice of infant baptism as a sign or promise of covenantal relationship with God. Baptists and Evangelicals also confronted theological specificity, particularly regarding the use of confessions of faith and their relationship with Reformed theology. As noted, Southern Baptist identity reflected the spectrum of Calvinist and Arminian theological positions. The Regular Baptists who came to seventeenth-century Charleston were solid Calvinists, while the eighteenth-century Separate Baptists who settled at Sandy Creek, North Carolina modified their Calvinism considerably with less emphasis on unconditional election and limited atonement. Unlike their Charleston counterparts, the Separate Baptists often resisted the use of confessions of faith as detrimental to the centrality of biblical authority. The SBC had no official confession of faith for the first eighty years of its history, finally approving the Baptist Faith and Message in 1925. This was due in part because certain denominational founders, specifically William B. Johnson (1782–1862), opposed the use of confessions.

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Nonetheless, the Convention’s first seminary, founded in 1859 at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina and moved to Louisville, Kentucky in 1877, was formed around an Abstract of Principles to be subscribed by all faculty members. That document was created at the insistence of the school’s first president, James P. Boyce (1827–88). Although Boyce assured the Baptist constituency that, ‘Upon no point, upon which the denomination is divided, should the convention, and through it the seminary, take any position’, the Abstract reflected extensive influence of seventeenth-century Particular (Calvinist) Baptist confessions.²⁶ Basil Manly, Jr, a founding faculty member at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote that he drafted the Abstract using the language of the oldest Calvinist Baptist confession, the London Confession of 1644.²⁷ A strict interpretation of that document in the nineteenth century was reasserted in the 1990s when Albert Mohler became seminary president. That confessional emphasis extended Southern Baptist affinity with many Evangelicals. In 1925 when the SBC approved its first confession of faith, much of the text of the document was taken from the New Hampshire Confession of 1833, a document that reflected the best of a modified Calvinism that allowed plenty of room for a more (modified) Arminian reading of Baptist faith. Article V of the Baptist Faith and Message illustrates the expanse of the confession in discussing ‘God’s Purpose of Grace’. It reads: ‘election is the gracious purpose of God, according to which He regenerates, sanctifies, and glorifies sinners. It is consistent with the free agency of man, and comprehends all the means in connection with the end. . . . All true believers endure to the end. Those whom God has accepted in Christ, and sanctified by His Spirit, will never fall away from the state of grace, but shall persevere to the end.’²⁸ Southern Baptist leader Daniel Akin observes that this statement ‘is in some sense so general that it is capable of being affirmed by hyper-Calvinist, modified Calvinist, and even those closer to, but not identified with, Arminianism or semiPelagianism. The emphasis on the biblical doctrine of perseverance or . . . “the security of the believer,” makes this clear.’²⁹ Akin, an SBC conservative, delineated several issues on which, in his view, Southern Baptist conservatives were ‘more biblical’ than their Evangelical counterparts. These included their confessional commitments to the doctrine of repentance, to a specific theology of the ordinances, their ‘affirmation of the doctrine of [salvific] perseverance’, ²⁶ James P. Boyce, ‘The Objections to the Seminary, V’, Christian Index (25 June 1874), p. 2; and Gregory A. Wills, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1859–2009 (New York, 2009), p. 31. ²⁷ Wills, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1859–2009, p. 32. ²⁸ Baptist Faith and Message 2000: http://www.utm.edu/staff/caldwell/bfm/index.html. ²⁹ Daniel L. Akin, ‘Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals: A Common Salvation?’, in David S. Dockery, ed., Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals: The Conversation Continues (Nashville, TN, 1993), p. 179.

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and in their insistence that ‘Hell’ involves ‘a conscious eternal punishment for the unbeliever’, a doctrine that he understands as ‘clearly inconsistent with evangelical/biblical soteriology’.³⁰ From the denomination’s beginnings, Southern Baptists were divided on the use and interpretation of confessions of faith. The decision of conservatives to pursue a ‘course correction’ for the Convention was in large part aimed at a more uniform confessionalism as central to SBC identity and orthodoxy. In many ways, that extended the possibility of connection to American Evangelicals. For both Southern Baptists and Evangelicals, orthodoxy and confessionalism were inseparable from issues related to the impact of Protestant fundamentalism in both movements. Fundamentalism came to represent a response to liberal Protestant assertions regarding the application of new science and biblical ‘higher criticism’ to traditional Christian dogma and an affirmation of unchanging ‘fundamentals’ of Christian orthodoxy. George Marsden called fundamentalism a ‘militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism’, and called fundamentalists ‘evangelical Christians, close to the traditions of the dominant American revivalist establishment . . . who in the twentieth century militantly opposed both modernism in theology and the cultural changes that modernism endorsed’.³¹ Marsden generally agreed with Ernest Sandeen’s thesis that the ‘roots’ of fundamentalism could be found among conservatives committed to the premillennial belief that the return of Christ was immediately at hand, and the ‘Princeton theologians’ whose fundamentalism involved a highly reasoned form of theological orthodoxy. The two schools of thought agreed on such doctrinal fundamentals as 1) the infallibility (inerrancy) of scripture; 2) the virgin birth of Christ; 3) the sacrificial atonement provided by his death on the cross; and 4) his bodily resurrection. They divided over the literal interpretation of the details of his second coming. During the early twentieth century, Evangelical enclaves—churches, schools, mission agencies—were deeply divided over the tenets of fundamentalism and their application to Christian institutions. Southern Baptists generally escaped the first wave of fundamentalist divisions except for the loss of a vociferous minority of churches that moved into what became the Independent Baptist camp, a strongly separatist fundamentalist group that rejected all connection to those who appeared to tolerate or give voice to those outside fundamentalist dogma. J. Frank Norris (1877–1952), pastor of First Baptist Church, Fort Worth, Texas, was one of the most prominent separatist Baptist fundamentalists of the twentieth century, who came out of the SBC and helped to found the Bible Baptist Fellowship. Many of these fundamentalists were separatists, distancing themselves from those who did not tow the doctrinal party line. ³⁰ Ibid., pp. 184–5. ³¹ George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York, 1980), p. 4.

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Concerns about fundamentalist anti-intellectualism and fanaticism led many Evangelicals to distance themselves from that form of militant religious conservativism. By mid-twentieth century, moderate evangelicals such as Harold Ockenga, Carl Henry, and Billy Graham promoted the term NeoEvangelical to describe their kind of Christianity. The battle lines created by fundamentalism were of major importance for the way in which Evangelicals perceived Southern Baptists and vice versa. For many years, Evangelicals often seemed unable to distinguish between separatist fundamentalists and Southern Baptist conservatives, particularly when the two groups seemed the abode of anti-intellectualism, uneducated preachers, premillennialism, and character assassins. Southern Baptist conversionism often appeared to be either highly emotional with a strong emphasis on religious feeling, or a thoroughly transactional process of ‘walking the aisle’, during an ‘invitation hymn’ and ‘praying the sinner’s prayer’ that marked entry into grace. Southern Baptist-related schools reflected significant scholarship while popular pulpit rhetoric often challenged an ‘educated ministry’ as a detriment to genuine faith. In various public venues, Southern Baptists sounded like an unruly collection of progressives, evangelicals, bound together by region and denominational programme.³² Evangelical scholar Joel Carpenter candidly observed that, ‘Southern Baptists often seemed to [Evangelical] Yankees to behave like the Junior Chamber of Commerce at prayer. They came off as flashy, selfaggrandizing, emotionally cloying, theologically sloppy and somewhat worldly in personal behavior.’³³ There is little doubt that issues of race both in times of slavery and segregation also impacted Evangelicals’ assessments of Southern Baptists, particularly outside the South. In short, while Evangelicals recognized certain theological affinities with Southern Baptists, many found the Convention an anomaly of denominational solidarity and theological inconsistency that seemed culturally and ecclesiastically impenetrable. By the twenty-first century with the loss of Protestant privilege and the increasing presence of multiple religious traditions in American culture, Southern Baptists had joined segments of the Evangelical community in deepening their role as dissenters against what they believed to be a rising and dangerous secularization of the culture. As they felt their own views ignored on issues of abortion, homosexuality, and traditional ethical values, Southern Baptists and Evangelicals alike were ready to provide dissenting witness against socio-ethical trends. Some did so by calling for a ‘new monasticism’ by which Christian values were kept alive in faith communities increasingly withdrawn from the culture. Others, plunged into certain aspects ³² Leonard, God’s Last and Only Hope. ³³ Joel A. Carpenter, ‘Is “Evangelical” a Yankee Word? Relations between Northern Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention in the Twentieth Century’, in David S. Dockery, ed., Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals: The Conversation Continues (Nashville, TN, 1993), p. 79.

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of the ‘culture wars’, offering conservative alternatives to liberal theology and politics. Still others warned of too close affiliation with one political party or another, since political expediency and non-negotiable Christian truth collided.³⁴

SBC DENOMINATIONALISM: A NEW DO OR TO EVANGELICALS Throughout much of the twentieth century SBC denominationalism was perhaps the central factor in maintaining distance between the Convention and American Evangelicals. In a sense, across those years, the SBC was America’s largest Protestant denomination, grounded in southernness and united by an elaborate programme that linked local churches, regional associations, and state conventions in and through a national denomination that facilitated undergraduate and ministerial education, publication, and missions, all the while inculcating a deep and profound Christian/Baptist identity into its constituents. Likewise, the Convention system nurtured a ‘Grand Compromise’ that created space for progressives, moderates, conservatives, and even fundamentalists, many of whom both tolerated and critiqued each other. These groups within the SBC also had many responses to Evangelicals as a theological and regional community. Moderates often viewed them as too conservative, too creedal, or too Calvinist. At the same time, more conservative Southern Baptists warned that Evangelicals were not conservative enough, that they compromised on elements of the Christian mission, personal evangelism, and biblical inerrancy.³⁵ As the ‘Grand Compromise’ came apart in the 1990s, conservatives secured control of denominational systems and identity, while moderates distanced themselves from the SBC implicitly and explicitly.³⁶ By the 2000s many conservative leaders encouraged Southern Baptists to recognize their theological and conversionistic affinity with the larger community of Evangelicals, particularly in terms of the centrality of confessionalism as a way of affirming Christian orthodoxy. Such theological collegiality has created greater connections and dialogue in publications, conferences, and joint projects. Perhaps the question ‘Are Southern Baptists Evangelicals’, is less volatile or even ³⁴ See Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem (New York, 2015); R. Albert Mohler, Jr, We Cannot Be Silent: Speaking Truth to a Culture Redefining Sex, Marriage, and the Very Meaning of Right and Wrong (Nashville, TN, 2015); Lydia Bean, The Politics of Evangelical Identity: Local Churches and Partisan Divides in the United States and Canada (Princeton, NJ, 2014). ³⁵ Garrett and others, Are Southern Baptists ‘Evangelicals’?, pp. 179–82. ³⁶ Ibid., pp. 173–87.

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important, since many of those who challenged it have long ago left or been silenced in the Convention itself. Harvard’s Harvey Cox offered his own dose of realism, commenting in a 2009 work: ‘The conservative-evangelicalfundamentalist community is neither monolithic nor immobile. It is divided and subdivided along theological, racial, gender, geographical, denominational, and political lines. These divisions collide and conflict, and the internal rhetoric generated is frequently more intense than the rhetoric they direct toward their external opponents.’³⁷ While affirming greater kinship with Evangelicals, conservative Southern Baptists continue to confront internal divisions over a variety of ‘evangelical’ issues including Charismatic/Pentecostal influences, SBC-related churches minimize or drop entirely the Baptist name, declining baptismal statistics, and the increasingly public divisions between Calvinists and non-Calvinists in defining Baptist doctrinal orthodoxy. Not surprisingly, Evangelicals also confront similar controversies, trends, and divisions. Whether the two movements will be able to reassert, reconsider, or even reform their theological, sociological, and missionary identities, collectively or separately, remains to be seen.

SEL E C T B I B L I OG R A P H Y Ammerman, Nancy Tatom. Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). Balmer, Randall. Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter (New York: Basic Books, 2014). Bean, Lydia. The Politics of Evangelical Identity: Local Churches and Partisan Divides in the United States and Canada (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2014). Boyce, James P. ‘The Objections to the Seminary, V.’ Christian Index, 25 June 1874. Carwardine, Richard J. Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1997). Cox, Harvey. The Future of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2009). David S. Dockery, ed., Southern Baptists & American Evangelicals: The Conversation Continues (Nashville, TN: 1993. Dreher, Rod. How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem (New York: Regan Arts, 2015). Garrett, Duane A., and Richard R. Melick, Jr, eds. Authority and Interpretation: A Baptist Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1987). Garrett, James Leo, Jr, E. Glenn Hinson, and James E. Tull. Are Southern Baptists ‘Evangelicals’? (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1983).

³⁷ Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith (New York, 2009), p. 137. Harvey Cox is the Hollis Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard.

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Hankins, Barry. American Evangelicals: A Contemporary History of a Mainstream Religious Movement (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008). Leonard, Bill J. God’s Last and Only Hope: The Fragmentation of the Southern Baptist Convention (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990). Lumpkin, William L. and Bill J. Leonard, eds. Baptist Confessions of Faith, 2nd revised edn (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2011 edn). Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Mohler, R. Albert, Jr We Cannot Be Silent: Speaking Truth to a Culture Redefining Sex, Marriage, and the Very Meaning of Right & Wrong (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2015). Pressler, Paul. A Hill on Which to Die: One Southern Baptist’s Journey (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 1999). Putnam, Robert D., and David E. Campbell. American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). Shelley, Bruce L. Evangelicalism in America (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1967).

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10 The Twentieth-Century Black Church A Dissenting Tradition in a Global Context David D. Daniels III

The Black Church in the United States is a movement within the Protestant Dissenting Tradition that originated in Great Britain during the postReformation era. The Black Church, with affiliated congregations and missions in over sixty countries throughout the Black Atlantic, has operated during the long twentieth century in two arenas: the United States and the Black Atlantic. It has sought to proclaim the Christian faith in such a manner that Christianity would be understood as a faith for all people, regardless of race or nationality. It has found ways to resist racial orders of segregation and colonialism, although its strategies were never monolithic.¹ Religious dissent of the Black Church with its focus on defending the Christian gospel against being corrupted by the doctrine of racism marks the contribution of the Black Church to the wider dissenting tradition in the global context. It rejects the alliance of Christianity and the race order with its racial hierarchies. It engages in the religious delegitimation of the racial order of African American subordination and white supremacy. It espouses a Christian egalitarianism that affirms the equality of the races and envisions a church where grace structures ecclesial life rather than racism.² Religious dissent of the Black Church can be placed on the landscape of religious dissent close to the anti-monarchist and anti-royalist currents that

¹ See Sylvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (New York, 2015); the African American denominations with the largest presence throughout the Black Atlantic are the Church of God in Christ, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, and the National Baptist Convention, Inc. ² On the ‘double function’ of religion in legitimating and delegitimating the dominant social order see Dwight B. Billings and Shaunna L. Scott, ‘Religion and Political Legitimation’, Annual Review of Sociology, XX, 1 (1994), p. 173.

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rejected the alliance of the Church with the monarchy. Instead of being against the alliance of the Church and monarchy, the religious dissent tradition of the Black Church has been against the alliance of the Church and the racial order. As eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Evangelicalism rejected and delegitimated the alliance between the Anglican Church and the aristocracy of the Virginia Colony with their hierarchy of social classes which inscribed their hegemony in the church and society with the class politics of deference and subordination, the religious dissent of the Black Church rejected and delegitimized the alliance of White Christianity to the racial order of slavery.³ This chapter will explore the dissenting tradition of the Black Church in terms of Black Protestant denominations during the long twentieth century (1896–2008).

BLACK CHURCH AS A CONSTRUCT AND I TS TRADITION OF RELIG IOUS DISSENT Three categories will be employed to organize a definition of the Black Church as an American and global ecclesial construct: history, witness, and global presence. In this chapter, the Black Church consists of Protestant congregations and denominations founded by African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and African immigrants in the United States. The Black Church is an ecclesial innovation that was constructed to frame the diverse and contradictory religious experience of these Black Protestant communities in the United States and the Black Atlantic challenging the ‘White Church’ as an instrument of anti-black racism and European colonialism. The Black Church emerges over-against the white alliance of race and Christianity in which race pre-empts grace in the functional ecclesiology of White Christianity and in the construction of a White Christian identity. In a sense, the Black Church is not, then, the counterpart to the White Church. While it appears on the surface that a Protestant denomination of African Americans mirrors a Protestant denomination of whites, it does not; the White Church replicates the dominant racial order of African American subordination and white supremacy while the Black Church resists and subverts the dominant racial order. The White Church is erected with the politics of racial exclusion whereas the Black Church is erected with the politics of racial inclusion; the Black Church functions as a ‘counter-public’ that is ‘distinct from and in conflict with the dominant white society and its ³ See Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982, 2012 edn).

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racist institutional structures’. Segregation operates within White Christianity as an instrument of the racial exclusion and subordination of African Americans; it replicates and re-enforces the structures of dominant racial order within the church and society. In resisting and subverting the dominant racial order, the separatist thrust of the Black Church works to create a church and society that transcends the racial order. First, the Black Church as a term connects with the collective history of the denial of religious liberty to African Americans during the era of slavery, the experience of being treated as second-class Christians during the era of slavery and segregation, the racial oppression of African Americans, and the African American struggle against slavery as well as the battle against racial segregation and injustice within the church and society. Protestant denominations founded and led by African Americans rejected the exclusionary and discriminatory practices of dominant white Protestantism against African Americans, refusing to accept ‘segregation and second-class citizenship in Christian communions’. In colluding with the racial order of African American subordination, White Christianity treated African Americans as second-class Christians and members within the church. By practicing de jure and de facto racial segregation within the church, White Christianity offered justification for the treatment of African Americans as second-class citizens within the society. Many White-led and -majority denominations erected racial barriers to the bishopric, pastorate, ordination, lay membership, Eucharist, and even, baptism; they introduced ‘Negro pews’, ‘Negro balconies’, and Negro presbyteries. Through their actions and inactions, many White-led and -majority Protestant denominations supported, sustained, and shaped the racial order along with being shaped by the racial order of white supremacy.⁴ Rather than being second-class members within White-led congregations, African American Protestants organized their own congregations during the 1700s as an expression of religious dissent committed to racial egalitarianism. By the early 1800s, African American Protestants established Methodist denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and United American Methodist Episcopal; and they founded black Baptist associations such as Providence Baptist Association and the Woods River Baptist Association. Unable to find ecclesial space within established American or white majority denominations for a church polity that affirmed racial equality and proclaimed grace over race, African American Christians claimed the biblical right and secured the United States constitutional right to establish and govern their own denominations. ⁴ Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church, p. 14; Frank S. Loescher, The Protestant Church and the Negro: A Pattern of Segregation (New York, 1948); David M. Reimers, White Protestantism and the Negro (New York, 1965).

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African Americans, drawing deeply from the egalitarian theologies of eighteenth and early nineteenth century Evangelicalism (Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist), created the Black Protestant denominations as an ecclesial space to envision grace over race, a church marked by racial equality. They campaigned for a racially inclusive church.⁵ The religious dissent of the Black Church also captured the imagination of African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants. On the crux of the twentieth century, Afro-Cape Verdeans established congregations in Rhode Island and Providence, refusing to accept being second-class Christians in congregations led by ‘white’ Cape Verdeans. Afro-Caribbeans founded congregations in Florida and organized denominations in New York and Massachusetts. Afro-Caribbeans and Afro-Canadians became leaders in historic black denominations founded by African Americans, including serving as bishops.⁶ This history of racial order sets the social context in which African Americans practiced Christian faith and defended the Christian gospel against racial corruption. An outcome and manifestation of black religious dissent is that throughout the twentieth century nearly 90 per cent of African American Christians have belonged to black Protestant denominations. During the early twentieth century, the Black Church served as a champion of Christian message of a church for all people and an agent of racial progress as it fought against legalized racial segregation. Second, the Black Church as a term connects with the collective witness of African Americans as a religious people. The African American Protestant congregations specifically associated with the anti-slavery and abolitionist movements were called ‘Freedom Churches’, key founders of African American Protestant denominations were called ‘apostles of freedom’, and the dissenting message against the alliance of racism and Christianity was called the ‘gospel of freedom’. The religious dissent of the Black Church developed a Christianity that was ‘free’ from or independent of the church corruption by racism.⁷ Central to the collective witness of the Black Church is a ‘black sacred cosmos’ or religious worldview. The black sacred cosmos of African Americans constructed their religious worldview from the inherited practices and beliefs from their African heritage and adopted as well as adapted religious practices and beliefs from Europeans and First People in the North America. The black ⁵ Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the Ame Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York, 2008), pp. 27–37; also see Carol V. R. George, Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Emergence of Independent Black Churches 1760–1840 (New York, 1973) and J. Gordon Melton, A Will to Choose: The Origins of African American Methodism (Lanham, MD, 2007). ⁶ Brandon Winstead, There All Along: Black Participation in the Church of the Nazarene, 1914–1969 (Lexington, KY, 2013), pp. 15–27. ⁷ See Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, and George, Segregated Sabbaths.

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sacred cosmos is a product of the ‘shared group experience’ of people of African descent in the United States that ‘shaped and influenced the cultural screens’ of the African American way of communicating and interpreting life and God’s engagement with the world. Different theological trajectories within the Black Church produced broad range Christian experiences among African Americans reflected in the diversity of pieties, liturgies, theologies, polities, and politics.⁸ The dissenting tradition of the Black Church sought to defend the Christian faith from the corruption of pro-slavery and pro-segregation theologies. It denounced doctrines that avowed the hierarchy of the races, white supremacy, and ‘Negro’ inferiority along with Anglo-Saxon superiority. It deemed as unbiblical and unChristian doctrines that espoused white purity and Negro impurity with the attendant demanded necessity of racial segregation with Negro subordination. It rejected White Christianity as normative with its theologies, polities, liturgies, and ethics that justified white supremacy explicitly or implicitly. It countered doctrines that patterned Christian identity and solidarity along racial lines. It exposed polities and politics that justified the white will to rule over African Americans in church and society. A connection was recognized between the ‘religious segregation’ of the races and social segregation of the races. Theologically, grace outpaced race in ordering ecclesial and social life, confessing the ‘Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man’ as central to Christianity. Striving to be Christian communities of grace where all people were welcomed, many African American denominations became religious communities that were open to all; they promoted grace over race. The theological grounding for African American religious dissent was based on the doctrines of a common creation of all people, a common image of God in all people, a church for all people, and the ‘equality of the races’. Drawing on Bakhtin, the dissenting tradition of the Black Church can be seen to have birthed ‘a second world and second life outside officialdom’, outside the dominant racial order co-constituted by the church and State.⁹ Third, the Black Church as a global presence is clearly evident as it operates within Black Atlantic, a special term to connect the sites within the Atlantic communities where people of African descent reside in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. By operating in two contexts, the United States and the Black Atlantic, the Black Church has been shaped by and participated in the struggle for racial equality in the United States as well as the struggle against European colonialism in the Black Atlantic throughout the twentieth century. As a key ⁸ C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC, 1990), p. 2. ⁹ Alistair Renfrew, Mikhail Bakhtin (New York; London, 2015), p. 131.

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institution, the Black Church has created and sustained various networks in the Black Atlantic during the twentieth century in order to advance its views of the Christian faith.¹⁰ With European colonialism defining the church and society in the Black Atlantic, the Black Church in the United States became the forerunner of black religious independence globally, being one of the most independent, best funded, best organized, and black-governed institutions among people of African descent during the early twentieth century. By 1910, African American denominations included over 160 congregations and missions within nearly twenty countries in the Black Atlantic. These affiliated congregations and missions were located within Canada, Africa, and the Caribbean rim, crisscrossing the Anglophone, Francophone, and Spanish-speaking zones.¹¹ During this period, a group of African-led congregations in West Africa and South Africa would join African American denominations; these congregations broke away from white Western missionary control. They joined African American denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion, the National Baptist Convention, Inc., African Orthodox Church, and the Church of God in Christ. These congregations joined the Black Church in protesting ‘against white domination in power and culture over the church’ and advocating for black pastoral leadership and religious self-determination during the era of European colonialism. In southern Africa, some of these denominations would be accused by European missionaries and colonial authorities of being against colonialism as well as advocates of an ‘Africa for the Africans’ ideology.¹² The African Methodist Episcopal Church especially was perceived by some European colonial leaders as a subversive group in southern Africa. With a vision that went beyond the Black Atlantic and extended to people of colour as well as white colonized communities, African Methodist Episcopal Church leaders outlined a religious agenda that called for the uniting of ‘the oppressed peoples’ of the West such as African Americans, Amerindians, Jews, and the Irish as well as ‘people of color’ in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines within the imperial grip of the United States along with those under European domination in Africa, India, and China. Others such as William Henry Sheppard, an African American Presbyterian missionary to the Congo, and ¹⁰ Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 19, 15–16; also see Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000. ¹¹ David Daniels III, ‘Reterritorizing the West in World Christianity: Black North Atlantic Christianity and the Edinburgh Conferences of 1910 and 2010’, Journal of World Christianity, V, 1 (2012), p. 109. ¹² Ogbu U. Kalu, Clio in a Sacred Garb: Essays on Christian Presence and African Responses, 1900–2000 (Trenton, NJ, 2008), pp. 169–74, 160.

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C. C. Boone, an African American Baptist missionary, specifically called for the political freedom of colonies such as the Congo.¹³ At these predominately white international ecumenical conferences during the early twentieth century, African American delegates voiced the religious dissent perspectives of the Black Church in their theological and moral objections to racial injustice. They protested ‘Anglo-Saxon domination’ in church and society. They sought an ecumenism grounded in all people sharing power, a unity based on ‘peoples of every nation, kindred, tribe and tongue’. They connected the racial struggle in the United States as part of the larger global struggle against white domination.¹⁴

CURRENTS WITHIN THE DISSENTING TRADITION OF THE BLACK CHURCH: 1896 – 1 96 5 During the early twentieth century, African American Protestant religious dissent found expression in four key currents. These currents of religious dissent arose in response to solidifying alliance between White Christianity and the emerging racial order marked by the racial segregation of church and society. During the rise of race segregation, early twentieth-century Black Church leaders stated that they were ‘surprised and astonished at the recent attitude of the church’ which has adopted ‘racial prejudice’. They saw the dominant religion, White Protestantism, caved into white supremacy, elevating race over grace. They identified narrowing ‘the bounds of human brotherhood’ and segregating ‘black men [and women] in some outer sanctuary’ as a theological travesty. They judged the ecclesial restructuring of the church around race and not grace as ‘wrong, unchristian and disgraceful’. They sought ‘the co-operation of all men [and women] of all races’, especially Christians of all races, in the restructuring of the church and society around freedom and justice for all people, regardless of their race; they envisioned the restructuring of the church around grace, not race.¹⁵

¹³ South African Native Affairs Commission, Minutes of Evidence, Vol. IV (Cape Town, 1903 and 1905), pp. 449, 466 cited in Robert A. Hill and Marcus Garvey, eds, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Africa for the Africans, 1923–1945, Vol. X (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA; London, 2006), p. 34; Lawrence S. Little, Disciples of Liberty: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Age of Imperialism, 1884–1916 (Knoxville, TN, 2000), pp. 82, 123; Sandy Dwayne Martin, Black Baptists and African Missions: The Origins of a Movement, 1880–1915 (Macon, GA, 1989), p. 198. ¹⁴ Negro Year Book, (1922), p. 229. ¹⁵ ‘The Church’ in ‘The Niagara Movement: Declaration of Principles 1905’ (accessed 16 May 2016. scua.library.umass.edu/digital/dubois/312.2.839-01-07.pdf.

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The four currents of dissenting traditions associated with the Black Church included the conservative religious dissent approach of critical racial accommodation, the progressive religious dissent approach of civil rights activism, the pragmatic religious dissent approach of critical racial accommodation and civil rights activism, and the radical religious dissent approach of black-led interracial organizing. First, the proponents of the conservative religious dissent approach of critical racial accommodation sought to adjust to the racial order of African American subordination by disavowing civil rights protest and civil disobedience as they worked to ‘prove’ through economic progress and the politics of respectability that African Americans in time were ‘fit’ for the rights of full citizenship; related to this would also be their demonstrating their ‘fitness’ for equality within the church. Second, the promoters of the progressive religious dissent approach of civil rights activism struggled to overthrow the racial order of African American subordination by securing civil rights for African Americans; they fought for racial and social equality through protest, boycotts, judicial rulings, and legislation. Third, the agents of the pragmatic religious dissent approach of accommodation and activism worked for ‘black progress’ within the system of the racial order; simultaneously, they worked to dismantled it. Fourth, advocates of the radical religious dissent approach of black-led interracial organizing erected an interracial ecclesial order in which African Americans were the leaders and most whites were the followers; this black-led interracial order inverted the racial order of black subordination, delegitimating the dominant racial order and erecting an alternative to the racial order of African American subordination.¹⁶ Since religion often legitimizes the dominant order, sanctioning the power structures, racial privileges, and racial inequalities, these dissenting traditions of the Black Church are ways that the Black Church has reimagined the role of Christianity in the era of the race segregation of church and society. While the dominant religion often offers interpretations and explanations of the racial realities which justify the dominant arrangement of the racial subordination of African Americans, these dissenting traditions opted to compose theological interpretations and explanations that challenged the racial order. The dissenting traditions of the Black Church designed approaches that countered racial exclusion and subordination, envisioned a church and society where grace trumps race in structuring the life of the church and society, and exposed the false theological and racial reasoning justifying legalized racial segregation.¹⁷ ¹⁶ Gary Dorrien, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven, CTt; London, 2015), pp. 5–7. ¹⁷ Marcela Cristi, From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2001), p. 79.

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As racial segregation increasingly defined the life of the church and society from 1896 to 1945, congregations and denominations were more and more divided by race, making it illegal for interracial congregations and denominations to exist in many parts of the southern United States as well as these interracial religious organizations being against the social norms in other regions of the country. The racial segregation of White Protestant denominations mirrored the racial segregation of society. Yet the Black Church envisioned and sought to erect a church that was for all people and races.

The Conservative Religious Dissent Tradition of Critical Racial Accommodation The critical racial accommodationist approach was trumpeted by leaders such as Booker T. Washington and Amanda Berry Smith. The proponents of the critical racial accommodation approach resigned themselves in a sense to the intractability of the racial order of African American subordination. In their disavowing civil rights protest and civil disobedience, they opted for survival. As they resigned themselves to a long-term gradualist approach to secure full civil rights as African Americans in the future, they dedicated themselves to the task of earning racial equality and eventually being treated by whites as equals in the church and the society. They adjusted themselves and argued that all African Americans need to adopt to this short-term strategy and obey the law by accepting the separate development of African American society offered by the dominant society. During this period of preparation for civil rights, African Americans were to ‘learn’ the values and skills of industry as well as civilization. Since this racial adjustment was not a complete resignation to the racial order, there was space for African Americans to ‘reform’ race relations through the ‘politics of respectability’ as African Americans conformed to the preferred manners and culture that the dominant society mandated for African Americans. In the process, the Black Church was to shun electoral politics, limit Black Church resources solely to religious purposes, and restrict the duties of clergy exclusively to spiritual matters. There was to be a clear separation between church and politics.¹⁸ Even some leading African American newspapers denounced political use of Black Church facilities and the political activity of black congregations. According to The Broad Ax, a Chicago weekly newspaper, ‘The Negro race is the only race in the world to have their churches turned into political halls for faking preachers and the small-headed base White Republican politicians who contend that they can buy any “Darkey preacher and a whole church full of ¹⁸ Dorrien, The New Abolition, p. 5.

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N[egroes] for ten dollars”.’ In 1912, the Chicago Defender castigated Black churches for allowing their space to be used for political meetings. The editorial charged that political partisanship led to discrimination against Democratic candidates by Republican interest.¹⁹ As African Americans worked to ‘prove’ through economic progress related farming and manual labour, in time, they would be ‘fit’ to be granted the rights of full citizenship. This development would result in African Americans being deemed ‘fit’ for equality within the church and the society.

Pragmatic Religious Dissent Tradition of Critical Racial Accommodation and Civil Rights Activism Second, the agents of the pragmatic religious dissent approach utilized accommodation and activism simultaneously. These leaders such as Bishop Alexander Walters, Nannie H. Burroughs, Revd Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., Lucy Wilmot Smith, Sarah Willie Layten, and Dr Kelly Miller worked for ‘black progress’ within the system of the racial segregation as they worked hard to dismantle the system. The Women’s Convention of the National Baptist Convention, Inc. embodied this approach. Through the Women’s Convention, Black Baptist women mounted campaigns for racial justice that opted for the pragmatist approach, merging the accommodationism with activism as they challenged the alliance of White Christianity with the racial order of African American subordination; these women framed a platform that worked for ‘black progress’ within the system of the racial order as well as agitated for disassembling of the racial order.²⁰ In 1913, the Women’s Convention approved a 7-Point Manifesto entitled: ‘What We Want and What We Must Have’. With its strident tone, it attacked the reigning racial order and demanded change. While the Manifesto temporarily accepted the doctrine of separate but equal, it aggressively sought ways to fight for equality within the confines of racial separation regarding specific issues. They demanded that the living standards within the segregated neighbourhoods of African American be drastically raised: ‘Well-built, sanitary dwellings’ were to become the norm along with clean, paved streets; segregated public schools for African Americans must receive funding equal to white public schools. The accommodations on public transportation must be the same for blacks and whites. The judicial system must treat African Americans ¹⁹ Ralph Nelson Davis, The Negro Newspaper in Chicago, MA Thesis, University of Chicago, (1939), p. 59, cited in St Clair Drake, Churches and Voluntary Associations in the Chicago Negro Community ([Chicago], 1940), p. 110; Chicago Defender (22 July 1913), p. 7, cited in Joseph A. Logsdon, The Rev. Archibald J. Carey and the Negro in Chicago Politics, MA Thesis, University of Chicago (1961), p. 30. ²⁰ Dorrien, The New Abolition, p. 7; also see Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent.

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equal to whites. Penal institutions for African Americans must treat blacks humanely. Voting rights must be granted to all African Americans, albeit limited to African Americans who are ‘intelligent and industrious citizen[s]’. The Manifesto called for the end to the ‘convict lease system’ of the penal institution as well as the end to lynching. While these black Baptist women employed the ‘separate but equal doctrine’ to reform the racial order, they worked to improve the plight of African Americans. They fought to eradicate lynching and its horrific violence as well as the convict lease system with its system of economic exploitation. The aim of these reforms was to implode the racial order from within in order to transition to a society that embodied the ‘Parenthood of God and the Siblinghood of All People’.²¹

Radical Religious Dissent Tradition of Black-Led Interracial Organizing The radical dissenting tradition of black-led interracial organizing could be seen as a third option. Advocates of this approach founded black-led interracial denominations where African Americans leaders had white followers; these black-led interracial organizations resisted, delegitimated, and subverted the racial order of black subordination by erecting an alternative to the dominant racial order. These black-led interracial denominations violated the custom and laws of the racial order marked by racial segregation, challenging the alliance of White Christianity and the racial order and creating faith communities where grace trumped race. The radical dissenting tradition of the Black Church framed denominations such as the Church of God in Christ, Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, the United Pentecostal Council of the Assemblies of God, the Holy Nazarene Church of the Apostolic Faith, and All Nations Pentecostal Assembly.²² These black-led interracial denominations were constituted by a set of transgressions related to race. Resisting the racial order with its hierarchy of races, in these black-led interracial denominations African Americans constituted the majority of the leadership and whites populated the ranks of the membership. The radical dissenting tradition of black-led interracial ²¹ Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, p. 193; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, ‘Religion, Politics, and Gender: The Leadership of Nannie Helen Burroughs’, in Judith Weisenfeld and Richard Newman, eds, This Far by Faith: Readings in African-American Women’s Religious Biography (New York, 1996), p. 147; Fredrick C. Harris, Something Within: Religion in AfricanAmerican Political Activism (New York, 1999), pp. 87–8. ²² See David D. Daniels, III, ‘Navigating the Territory: Early Afro-Pentecostalism as a Movement within Black Civil Society’, in Amos Yong and Estrelda Y. Alexander, eds, Afro-Pentecostalism: Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in History and Culture (New York; London, 2011), pp. 43–62.

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denominations subverted the racial order of African American subordination and white supremacy by erecting ecclesial structures where white clergy and congregations were subject to the religious authority of African American clergy. For instance, the Church of God in Christ, between 1909 and 1924, consisted of four groups of white clergy, congregations, and associations which joined the black-led Church of God in Christ.²³ Evangelical egalitarianism informed the radical dissenting tradition of black-led religious interracialism. An ecclesial statement that gave voice to Evangelical egalitarianism is the 1917 pronouncement on Christian unity and racial inclusion approved by the Church of God in Christ. The pronouncement articulated a robust vision of Christian unity in these terms: ‘Many denominations have made distinctions between their colored and white members. . . . The Church of God in Christ recognizes the fact that all believers are one in Christ Jesus and all its members have equal rights. Its Overseers, both colored and white, have equal power and authority in the church.’²⁴ Racial equality as an ecclesial concept challenges the lodging of the church and its members into a hierarchy of the races. It also rejects setting criteria for full participation in the life of the church being framed by race. This theological manoeuvre deems all believers as having equal rights, all races being ‘equal in power and authority’, that were given each member, regardless of their race, by Christ.²⁵ Established in 1907, the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World by 1931 was governed by an African American presiding bishop and an interracial board of bishops: three African Americans and three white Americans. By creating a more racially mixed denomination through these ecclesial practices, they inverted the dominant racial order. ²⁶ The ecclesial innovations of the radical dissenting tradition of black-led religious interracialism subverted the racial order of segregation, African American subordination, and white supremacy. By disengaging from the dominant racial equation of white superiority and black inferiority, the radical dissenting tradition of black-led religious interracialism subverted the dominant racial order in which whites submitted to the authority of African American leaders, associated with African Americans as equals, borrowed from black Pentecostal culture, suspended white supremacy, and, together with African Americans and under African American leadership, crafted new ²³ Ibid., pp. 56–8. ²⁴ William B. Holt, compiler, A Brief Historical and Doctrinal Statement and Rules for Government of the Church of God in Christ (c.1917), p. 9. ²⁵ Ibid., p. 9. ²⁶ Morris E. Golder, History of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (Indianapolis; reprint, Birmingham, AL, 1973; 1993), pp. 58–9, 70–2, 85; note that in 1937 almost all the African Americans who left PAoW in 1932 returned back to the denomination; also see Daniels, ‘Navigating the Territory’, pp. 56–7.

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interracial communities and structures by levelling racial hierarchy into egalitarian structures. Exercising social power in undermining the racial order of segregation, African American subordination, and white supremacy, the radical dissenting tradition of black-led religious interracialism interrupted the racial order and erected interracial sectors that subverted the racial order. It countered a way of organizing religion in the United States in which Christianity was allied to the racial order. It anticipated organizationally a post-segregation future by demonstrating that black-led interracialism was achievable.

Progressive Religious Dissent Trajectory of Civil Rights Activism The fourth current within the dissenting tradition of the Black Church is civil rights activism. The promoters of the progressive religious dissent approach called for the abolition of the racial order of segregation. Leaders such as Ida B. Wells, Revd Reverdy Ransom, Carter G. Woodson, and W. E. B. DuBois worked to undermine the racial order of segregation by dismantling it internally through civil disobedience, protest, boycotts, judicial rulings, federal labour policy, and legislation.²⁷ Central to the efforts towards racial justice, the Black Church organized and led many protests against racial injustice. Black activist clergy led and participated in boycotts of segregated streetcars in the early 1900s in cities such as Richmond (VA), Atlanta, Montgomery, Nashville, Jacksonville (FL), and New Orleans. These clergy along with black Protestant women leaders petitioned for racial justice.²⁸ The Black Church selected electoral politics as a main avenue to advance the agenda for racial justice. Church and politics became partners in the Black Church’s struggle to dismantle legalized racial segregation and edged the society towards interracial inclusion. In a number of cities, Black clergy and leaders played an influential role in electoral politics, more often in the Republican Party and, by 1910, even in the Democratic Party. African Americans retained their voting rights in the Black towns of such states as Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The small number of Black elected officials in these cities and towns was supported by the Black Church across the United States. For the most part, African Americans ²⁷ Dorrien, The New Abolition, p. 7; also see Clarence Taylor, Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight for Equality from Jim Crow to the 21st Century (New York; London, 2002) and Sean Dennis Cashman, African-Americans and the Quest for Civil Rights, 1900–1990 (New York; London, 1991). ²⁸ Blair Murphy Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy V. Ferguson (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010).

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were excluded from direct involvement in electoral politics during the early twentieth century because of the disenfranchisement due to racial segregation: inability of black citizens to vote.²⁹ Yet the political activity of clergy like Alexander Waters, Reverdy Ransom, Archibald J. Carey, Sr., E. R. Driver, Emma Cotton, and others set the course which activist clergy would pursue. This course did not create Black politics, but rather created a public space for the Black Church to play a pivotal role in the electoral process, a space where racial justice could be on the political agenda. Additionally, some local African American clergy associations passed resolutions to endorse specific political candidates during the early twentieth century. For instance, in 1914 the Chicago Colored Baptist Churches and the A. M. E. Preachers’ Union endorsed candidates.³⁰ During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the civil rights activism tradition of religious dissent within the Black Church would experience success through targeted economic boycotts, building legal precedents within the judicial system and securing federal government policies that slowly dismantled legalized racial segregation. As early as 1929 and throughout 1941, leaders within the dissenting tradition of civil rights activism mounted with other activists black consumer advocacy for job movements. These movements advanced black economic prospects through double dollar campaigns also called ‘Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work’ or ‘Buy Where You Can Work’ or ‘Jobs for Negroes’. These campaigns crossed key American cities focusing on securing the hiring of ‘black clerks in white-owned department stores’, department stores that catered to African American clientele. On the picket lines were leading black pastors such as Adam Clayton Powell, Jr in New York City. For instance, the Woolworth’s store chain hired 300 African Americans in response to these economic boycotts in cities such as Chicago, Omaha, Cleveland and Toledo (Ohio), Detroit, New York City, Baltimore, and, Richmond and Newport News (Virginia).³¹ The progressive dissenting approach garnered a judicial victory in 1938 when the US Supreme Court conferred the right of consumers to picket businesses with the aim of securing the employment of African Americans in those targeted businesses rather than being deemed as interfering in free

²⁹ Cashman, African-Americans and the Quest for Civil Rights, 1900–1990, p. 8; also see Dennis C. Dickerson, African American Preachers and Politics: The Careys of Chicago (Jackson, MS, 2010); David C. Tucker, Black Pastors and Leaders: Memphis, 1819–1972 (Memphis, TN, 1975). ³⁰ On Chicago’s Black Baptist Clergy and AME Preachers’ Union endorsing political candidates see, The Broad Ax (28 Nov. 1914), cited in Drake, Churches and Voluntary Associations in the Chicago Negro Community, p. 111. Cf. Miles Mark Fisher, The History of the Olivet Baptist Church of Chicago, MA Thesis, University of Chicago, (1922), p. 92. ³¹ Gary Jerome Hunter, ‘Don’t Buy from Where You Can’t Work’: Black Urban Boycott Movements During the Depression, 1929–1941, PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan, (1977).

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trade. This countered the perspective of white business people expressed in the words of one businessperson: ‘You cannot force us to hire anybody that we don’t want to hire.’ Supreme Court Justice Owens J. Roberts wrote that consumers had the right to organize, picket, and boycott a business related to concerns that ‘arise with respect to discrimination in terms and conditions of employment based upon differences of race and color’. In other words, the assumed right of white employers to discriminate had been undermined. Perspectives campaigns like ‘Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work’ and the US Supreme Court possessed legal grounds even prior to the anti-discrimination laws being legislated.³² Mary McLeod Bethune was an active African American Protestant lay leader who was shaped by the progressive religious dissent tradition of civil rights activism. In addition to being the president of a college in Florida, she founded the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) in 1935. An influential member of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Negro Women’s Cabinet that advised the First Lady on issues from the black women’s perspective and headed the Negro Division of the National Youth Administration within the federal government, Bethune led the NCNW into being a vital activist organization. The membership of the Council included Protestant women from the leading black denominations, ranging from Baptist to Methodist to Pentecostal and functioned as ‘an umbrella organization of non-partisan groups—educational, sororities, business, and professional’ as well as religious organizations with 800,000 African American women as members by the 1940s. ‘At the center of the organization’s reformist agenda was the push for labor equality’, according to gloria-yvonne. Black women’s organizations were key to the quest for economic justice.³³ Bethune as the head of the Negro Division for the National Youth Administration from a federal appointment from 1936 to 1944 was critical to employing increasing numbers of African American youth. During her tenure at NYA, the number of black youth who benefited from this programme exceeded 80,000; this number constituted more than 10 per cent of all youth hired by NYA. Bethune and other activists encouraged President Franklin ³² Carla DuBose, ‘The Brooklyn Urban League and Equal Employment Opportunity in New York’s War Industries’, in Michael Ezra, ed., The Economic Civil Rights Movement: African Americans and the Struggle for Economic Power (New York; London, 2013) and Derek Charles Catsam, ‘Early Economic Civil Rights in Washington, DC: The New Negro Alliance, Howard University, and the Interracial Workshop’, in Michael Ezra, ed., The Economic Civil Rights Movement: African Americans and the Struggle for Economic Power (New York; London, 2013), pp. 15, 48. ³³ gloria-yvonne, ‘Mary Mcleod Bethune, the National Council of Negro Women, and the Prewar Push for Equal Opportunity in Defense Projects’, in Michael Ezra, ed., The Economic Civil Rights Movement: African Americans and the Struggle for Economic Power (New York; London, 2013), p. 23; also see Joyce Ann Hanson, Mary Mcleod Bethune and Black Women’s Political Activism (Columbia, MO, 2003).

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Delano Roosevelt (FDR) to increase the number of African Americans working for the federal government. During FDR’s administration, African American federal employees grew from 50,000 to 150,000, growing from 5 to 10 per cent of federal employees. Bethune and others convinced FDR to implement a policy of race proportionality as a forerunner of the affirmative action.³⁴ A major strategy of the progressive dissenting approach challenges the racial order of African American subordination through public protest marches and rallies such as March on Washington Movement (MOWM). As a way to secure more federal jobs for African Americans as well as a means to diversify the range of these federal jobs the MOWM was supported by various African American organizations from the National Council of Negro Women to the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches to the Brotherhood of Pullman Porters, civil rights organizations, and black newspapers. During 1940, the NCNW along with NAACP, Urban League, and the Brotherhood of Pullman Porters ‘would shift their focus to equal opportunity in the defense industries’ and lobby for ‘a Federal non-discrimination policy’. NCNW compiled a set of labour demands that ranged from ‘job opportunities as clerical workers and in other white-collar positions’ to ‘black representation on the National Defense Board’. During 1941, a march was planned for the first of July of that year to occur in Washington, DC and other cities in the United States. NCNW supported the MOWM and used its clout with white and black women’s organizations—civic, religious, labour unions, social agencies—to pressure FDR to issue Executive Order 8802 in 1941 ‘that banned discriminatory hiring practices in industries with government war contracts and established what would become to be known as the Fair Employment Practices Commission’. When FDR’s White House agreed to sign an executive order that would ban ‘racial discrimination in government defense industries’ and create the Fair Employment Practices Commission ‘to enforce the law’, the March was called off; yet, local rallies were held in cities prior to and after the compromise with FDR. The local rallies and other activities of the MOWM were to keep pressure on FDR’s administration.³⁵ In 1941, Bethune convened a conference at Howard University after FDR had issued Executive Order 8802. The conference explored ways to leverage this executive order to challenge racial discrimination in employment. The ³⁴ gloria-yvonne, ‘Mary Mcleod Bethune, the National Council of Negro Women, and the Prewar Push for Equal Opportunity in Defense Projects’, pp. 22–3. ³⁵ Ibid., pp. 22–5, 29; Rhonda Jones, ‘A. Philip Randolph, Early Pioneer: The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, National Negro Congress, and the March on Washington Movement’, in Michael Ezra, ed., The Economic Civil Rights Movement: African Americans and the Struggle for Economic Power (New York; London, 2013), p. 14; Unfortunately, FDR’s ‘transference of FEPC oversight to Congress’ undercut the efforts toward fair employment practices because Congress was harder to pressure and lobby than FDR’s White House.

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conference passed a resolution calling ‘upon all Trade Unions, and their Women’s Auxiliaries’ to cease ‘discrimination against, particularly Negro women’. The resolution also advocated for ‘jobs for Negro Women in National Defense’. Bethune and others worked not only to expand black employment within the confines of the racial order; they sought to end racial discrimination in employment.³⁶ The progressive religious dissent approach also engaged ecumenical agencies to challenge the racial order. The five largest African American Baptist and Methodist denominations were members of ecumenical bodies such as the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches and the Federal Council of Churches. The Federal Council was a white-led organization with a majority white membership with approximately thirty predominately white mainline denominations. The representatives of the five African American member denominations worked to find allies among white member denominations by the late 1930s who got the Federal Council to advocate for racial justice. In 1942, the Federal Council of Churches adopted a platform that included the call to end Western colonialism. By this act, these white American denominations joined some of the African American denominations in advocating the end of the European colonization of Africa and other continents. Black clergy-activists and Protestant lay leaders also spoke against European colonialism during committee meetings related to the founding of the United Nations in 1945. In 1946, the Federal Council adopted a statement renouncing racial segregation and calling for a ‘non-segregated Church and a non-segregated society’.³⁷ Black activist clergy also channelled their political activism through the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches to challenge the legal system of racial segregation. The Fraternal Council of Negro Churches was a leading ecumenical organization of African American Protestant denominations and congregations that promoted racial justice prior to the rise of the modern civil rights campaign as a mass movement of the late 1950s and the 1960s. The Fraternal Council was founded in 1934, under the initiative of African Methodist Episcopal Zion clergyman Reverdy Ransom. Its membership included African American Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal denominations along with black congregations in predominately white denominations.³⁸ ³⁶ gloria-yvonne, ‘Mary Mcleod Bethune, the National Council of Negro Women, and the Prewar Push for Equal Opportunity in Defense Projects’, p. 30. ³⁷ David A. Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, NJ, 2013), pp. 67–9; The New York Age, 18 April 1959 (New York), p. 1; Mary L. Dudziak, Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey (Princeton, NJ, 2008), p. 192; Loescher, The Protestant Church and the Negro, p. 42; also see Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY, 1997). ³⁸ Mary R. Sawyer, Black Ecumenism: Implementing the Demands of Justice (Valley Forge, PA, 1994), pp. 15–34; Peter J. Paris, The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Philadelphia, PA 1985), p. 48; Hanson, Mary Mcleod Bethune and Black Women’s Political Activism, pp. 164–205.

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The progressive religious dissent tradition of civil rights activism launched the modern civil rights movement of 1955 to 1968. The progressive religious dissent tradition of the Black Church increasingly critiqued White Christianity’s embrace of racial segregation as a ‘scandal’ to the Christian Gospel and a ‘social sin’ warranting repentance, the rejection of racial segregation as a church practice. The Civil Rights movement of the era included a southern and northern campaign. The southern campaign received support from the clergy-dominated Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the layyouth dominated Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, much of the activity was led by local leaders and activists, including black clergy and laypeople. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was organized in 1957 as a broad-based agency to coordinate the campaign in the South and in 1960 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was founded. The southern campaign attacked the legal system of racial segregation. Established civil rights organizations supported by black churches such as the NAACP played a pivotal role in the southern and northern campaigns. The northern campaign, however, centred around de facto racial segregation, a social system that was not codified into the law. The civil rights struggle in the North consisted of strong local initiatives by grassroots leaders and activists in cities like Chicago where the Coordinating Council on Community Organizations led the campaign as well as groups such as local chapters of national groups like the NAACP.³⁹ The iconic leader of progressive religious dissent tradition of civil rights activism during the era of the modern civil rights movement was Revd Dr Martin Luther King, Jr (1929–68). King and other clergy and lay activists utilized the protest tradition of the religious dissent tradition of the Black Church. They reframed this tradition in terms of a commitment to nonviolent active resistance. Identifying this commitment as integral to the Christian gospel, they sought to interrupt the alliance of White Christianity and the racial order of African American subordination; in the theological perspective, the church must be politically involved in campaigns for racial justice. Nonviolent active resistance for these activists was a central instrument in the dismantling of the racial order of segregation. After the 1963 March on Washington, a watershed moment occurred within the Black Church and the civil rights movement, the progressive religious dissent tradition of civil rights activism in the Black Church gained the moral high ground in the church and society and was able to function as a significant agency of social change within the American society of the mid-1960s. The role of the Black Church in the civil rights movement must encompass more than the ³⁹ Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York, 1986 edn); also see Vicki L. Crawford et al.,eds, Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Bloomington, IN, 1993 edn).

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involvement of clergy. As Aldon Morris and James M. Washington note the role of black Christian laypeople as well as the discourse, facilities, networks, and culture of the Black Church must be calculated in the assessment of the Black Church’s participation. The landmark phase of the civil rights movement concludes in 1968.⁴⁰ During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the progressive religious dissent envisioned a church and society beyond the confines of legalized racial segregation. The civil rights movement, the Caribbean independence movement, and the African independence movement had successfully defeated their respective legal systems of racial subordination. The Black Church entered a new era that followed the legal dismantling of the racial order of segregation. The religious dissent tradition of the Black Church struggled to construct a ‘just’ church and ‘just’ society. The dissenting tradition crafted progressive political agendas that emphasized racial justice as a means of empowerment and liberation.

POST-LEGALIZED RACIAL SEGREGATION E RA: THE BLACK CHURCH AND NEW THEOLOGICAL TRADITIONS OF RELIGIOUS D ISSENT The modern Black Theology movement reframed the religious dissent of the Black Church during an era when legalized racial segregation was being disassembled. By 1966, the Black Church reframed religious dissent in its critique of the alliance between White Christianity and the racial order of African American subordination in terms of racial power dynamics. With the ‘doctrine of separate but equal’ being ruled as unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court and outlawed through the passing of two key civil and voting rights constitutional amendments in 1964 and 1965 by the US Congress, the religious dissent of the Black Church shifted from critiquing White Christianity’s embrace of racial segregation with its attendant theological doctrines of African American inferiority as a ‘scandal’ and a ‘sin’ to the integrity of the Christian faith to the scandal and sin of racism being expressed in the power inequality between white and black Americans. The Poor ⁴⁰ Peter J. Paris, Black Leaders in Conflict (New York; Louisville, KY, 1978; 1991, rev. edn), pp. 65–98; Joseph Harrison Jackson, A Story of Christian Activism: The History of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc (Nashville, TN, 1980); Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; James Melvin Washington, ‘Jesse Jackson and the Symbolic Politics of Black Christendom’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, CDLXXX, (July 1985), pp. 89–105.

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People’s Campaign with its call for economic justice for all races, especially poor people, registered this shift.⁴¹ Religious dissent of the Black Church deemed the mere outlawing of racial segregation as inadequate in achieving racial justice. Certain forms of integration were insufficient where the legal barriers to opportunities were lifted but whites still controlled the levers of power in the white majority denominations. To transition to a post-segregated society the racial order needed to be transformed: ‘A more equal sharing of power . . . is required as the precondition of authentic human interaction’ between the races.⁴² The gross imbalance of power between the races resulted in white males garnering more power than they could exercise in a just manner. Entrenched within the US power structures, ‘white power’ encountered limited ‘meaningful resistance’ from African Americans in tempering and restraining it in the cause of justice. Consequently, white males exerted inordinate amount of control over African American lives. Power had to be constrained by freedom, love, justice, and truth. Without power being constrained by freedom, love, justice, and truth, the African American ‘concern for justice was transmuted into a distorted form of love, which, in the absence of justice, becomes chaotic self-surrender’ on the part of African Americans; ‘powerlessness breeds a race of beggars’ who possess ‘conscience-less power’ and ‘powerless conscience’.⁴³ Charity or philanthropy became the approach to address the plight of African Americans rather than empowerment. In the process, the image of God in African Americans is marred by the power dynamics of anti-black racism. In concrete ways, the media was used to foster ‘a national consensus’ on race that was informed by the multiple perspectives within each race on the other race as well as on national issues; the goal was for ‘a national consensus’ to be grounded in truth. To strengthen African Americans as an economic block, the economic inequality between the races needed to be rectified; economic equality between the races needed to become the norm so that ‘a more equal sharing of power’ could have a solid basis.⁴⁴ Unchecked power distorted love and conscience within white Christians. Power itself became the ‘controlling element in power’ rather than love controlling power. Within White Christianity allied to a racial order of African American subordination, Christian love was unhitched from justice; White Christianity preferred to moralize love as a topic in reference to African Americans rather than understanding love and justice as intertwined; justice was key to controlling power in addition to love.⁴⁵ ⁴¹ Gerald McKnight, The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King, Jr, the Fbi, and the Poor People’s Campaign (Boulder, CO 1998); ‘Statement by the National Committee of Negro Churchmen, July 31, 1966’, in Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone, eds, Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979 (Maryknoll, NY, 1979), pp. 23–30. ⁴² ‘Statement by the National Committee of Negro Churchmen, July 31, 1966’, p. 25. ⁴³ Ibid., pp. 23–4. ⁴⁴ Ibid., pp. 28, 23. ⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 26.

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In challenging the alliance of White Christianity and the racial order of African American subordination and white supremacy, Black Theology as a movement of religious dissent also addressed various critiques of the Christian faith: Christianity as a ‘white man’s religion’ and African American Christianity as a tool of white racism. The challenge that Christianity was a white man’s religion came especially from African American Muslims. They contended that Christianity was the white man’s religion because of its historical development, legitimation of white supremacy, and delegitimation of humanity and self-determination of people of African descent. Christianity, according to these critics, had served as the ‘perfect slave religion’, as a religion that enslaved and pacified African peoples with its white Jesus and theology of submission; even, the Bible ‘in the white man’s hands and his interpretation of it’ had served as the ‘greatest ideological weapon for enslaving millions of non-white human beings’.⁴⁶ The religious dissent crafted by these African American theologians responded to this critique in a variety of ways. As this chapter has presented, African American Christians had for a long time critiqued the role of Christian doctrine in legitimizing white supremacy and delegitimizing the struggle for African American self-determination and liberation. They had denounced these white theological inventions as distortions of the Christian faith. According to Cornel West, these theologians argued for the negation of these distortions of the gospel along with other white misinterpretations of the gospel, the preservation of the ‘perceived truths of the biblical texts’, and transformation of ‘past understandings of the gospel’ into interpretations of the gospel that were biblically sound and relevant to the struggle for liberation. They challenged the theological complicity of Christianity with white supremacy in the United States.⁴⁷ A Christian apologetic espoused by modern black theologians contended that the Christian God objected to racism in addition to identifying with and standing in solidarity with the victims of racism, with the oppressed; the Christian God was the God of the oppressed. They asserted that the Christian gospel, as opposed to certain white Christian theologies, did not legitimate racism because the Gospel supported the emancipation of ‘black people from white racism, thus providing authentic freedom for both white and black people’.⁴⁸ Consequently, Christianity was not a white man’s religion and African American Christianity was distinct from the form of Christianity that ⁴⁶ Alistair Kee, The Rise and Demise of Black Theology (London, 2008 edn), p. 41; also see by Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York, 2011). ⁴⁷ Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Louisville, KY, 2002 edn) p. 109. ⁴⁸ National Committee of Black Churchmen, Black Theology (13 June 1969), quoted in James H. Cone, For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (Maryknoll, NY, 1984), p. 53.

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white racism constructed; if anything Christianity was a black religion, an emancipatory religion of the oppressed. The God of the oppressed participated in the liberation struggle of all oppressed people, an act signalized by the cross and resurrection where victory was won where all can ‘inhabit the world beyond racial and theological . . . closure’ and ‘inhabit the world beyond the theological problem of whiteness’.⁴⁹ As stated above, throughout the long twentieth century, the religious dissent tradition of the Black Church has found ways to resist the racial orders that it rejected, although it employed diverse strategies. It has sought to proclaim and embody the Christian faith in such a manner that Christianity emerged as a faith for all people, regardless of race or nationality.

CO NCLUSION As a movement within the Protestant Dissenting Tradition, the Black Church has resisted forms of Christianity that it understood as being against the Christian faith, envisioned a Church and society that embraced racial justice and political self-determination for the citizens of the Black Atlantic and other regions, and established a religious network that played a vital role in the Black Atlantic related to oppose colonialism. As the Black Church operated in the United States and the Black Atlantic, it proclaimed the Christian faith in such a manner that Christianity would be understood as a faith for all people, regardless of race or nationality. The religious dissent of the Black Church with its focus on defending the Christian gospel against being corrupted by the doctrine of racism marks the contribution of the Black Church to the wider dissenting tradition in the global context. Rejecting the alliance of Christianity and the race order with its racial hierarchies, it engaged in the religious delegitimation of the racial order of African American subordination and white supremacy, espousing a Christian egalitarianism that affirms the equality of the races, and envisioning a church where grace structures ecclesial life rather than racism. This chapter explored the dissenting tradition of the Black Church that challenged the alliance of White Christianity and the racial order, paralleling the anti-monarchist and anti-royalist currents of the post-Reformation era. It identified five aspects of the dissenting tradition: exposing the white alliance contorting Christianity into an instrument of anti-black racism and European colonialism, delegitimating the alliance between White Christianity as a corruption of Christianity, working to dismantle the racial order of segregation, ⁴⁹ James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (New York, 1975); J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York, 2008), p. 379.

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erecting ecclesial alternatives beyond the racial order, and privileging grace over race in the construction of Christian identity and communities. The dissenting tradition of the Black Church remained clear about the need for racial justice in constructing a just Church and just society. The Gospel, according to Black Theology, as a message of grace over race supported the emancipation of all races of people. The dissenting traditions of the Black Church hailed grace over race.

SEL E C T B I B L I OG R A P H Y Billings, Dwight B., and Shaunna L. Scott. ‘Religion and Political Legitimation.’ Annual Review of Sociology XX, 1 (1994): 173–202. Carter, J. Kameron. Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Cashman, Sean Dennis. African-Americans and the Quest for Civil Rights, 1900–1990 (New York; London: New York University Press, 1991). Catsam, Derek Charles. ‘Early Economic Civil Rights in Washington, DC: The New Negro Alliance, Howard University, and the Interracial Workshop’, in Michael Ezra, ed., The Economic Civil Rights Movement: African Americans and the Struggle for Economic Power (New York; London: Routledge, 2013). Cone, James H. God of the Oppressed (New York: HarperCollins, 1975). Cone, James H. For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984). Crawford, Vicki L., Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds. Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993 edn). Daniels, David D., III, ‘Navigating the Territory: Early Afro-Pentecostalism as a Movement within Black Civil Society’, in Amos Yong and Estrelda Y. Alexander, eds, Afro-Pentecostalism: Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in History and Culture (New York; London: New York University Press, 2011). Daniels, David D., III. ‘Reterritorizing the West in World Christianity: Black North Atlantic Christianity and the Edinburgh Conferences of 1910 and 2010.’ Journal of World Christianity V, 1 (2012): 102–23. Dickerson, Dennis C. African American Preachers and Politics: The Careys of Chicago (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010). Dorrien, Gary. The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2015). DuBose, Carla, ‘The Brooklyn Urban League and Equal Employment Opportunity in New York’s War Industries’, in Michael Ezra, ed., The Economic Civil Rights Movement: African Americans and the Struggle for Economic Power (New York; London: Routledge, 2013). Dudziak, Mary L. Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

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George, Carol V. R. Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Emergence of Independent Black Churches 1760–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). gloria-yvonne, ‘Mary Mcleod Bethune, the National Council of Negro Women, and the Prewar Push for Equal Opportunity in Defense Projects’, in Michael Ezra, ed., The Economic Civil Rights Movement: African Americans and the Struggle for Economic Power (New York; London: Routledge, 2013). Hanson, Joyce Ann. Mary Mcleod Bethune and Black Women’s Political Activism (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2003). Harris, Fredrick C. Something Within: Religion in African-American Political Activism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Harvey, Paul. Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865–1925 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. ‘Religion, Politics, and Gender: The Leadership of Nannie Helen Burroughs’, in Judith Weisenfeld and Richard Newman, eds, This Far by Faith: Readings in African-American Women’s Religious Biography (New York: Routledge, 1996). Hollinger, David A. After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). Hunter, Gary Jerome. ‘ “Don’t Buy from Where You Can’t Work”: Black Urban Boycott Movements During the Depression, 1929–1941.’ PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1977. Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982, 2012 edn). Jackson, Joseph Harrison. A Story of Christian Activism: The History of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc (Nashville, TN: Townsend Press, 1980). Johnson, Sylvester A. African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Jones, Rhonda, ‘A. Philip Randolph, Early Pioneer: The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, National Negro Congress, and the March on Washington Movement’, in Michael Ezra, ed., The Economic Civil Rights Movement: African Americans and the Struggle for Economic Power (New York; London: Routledge, 2013). Kee, Alistair. The Rise and Demise of Black Theology (London: SCM Press, 2008 edn). Kelley, Blair Murphy. Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy V. Ferguson (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Lincoln, C. Eric, and Lawrence H. Mamiya. The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). Little, Lawrence S. Disciples of Liberty: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Age of Imperialism, 1884–1916 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2000).

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Loescher, Frank S. The Protestant Church and the Negro: A Pattern of Segregation (New York: Association Press, 1948). Martin, Sandy Dwayne. Black Baptists and African Missions: The Origins of a Movement, 1880–1915 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1989). McKnight, Gerald. The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King, Jr, the FBI, and the Poor People’s Campaign (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). Melton, J. Gordon. A Will to Choose: The Origins of African American Methodism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007). Morris, Aldon D. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: The Free Press, 1986 edn). Newman, Richard S. Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the Ame Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008). ‘The Niagara Movement: Declaration of Principles 1905.’ scua.library.umass.edu/digi tal/dubois/312.2.839-01-07.pdf Paris, Peter J. Black Leaders in Conflict (New York; Louisville, KY: Pilgrim Press; Westminster/John Knox Press, 1978; 1991, rev. edn). Paris, Peter J. The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1985). Reimers, David M. White Protestantism and the Negro (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). Sawyer, Mary R. Black Ecumenism: Implementing the Demands of Justice (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994). ‘Statement by the National Committee of Negro Churchmen, July 31, 1966’, in Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone, eds, Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979 (Maryknoll, NY: 1979). Taylor, Clarence. Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight for Equality from Jim Crow to the 21st Century (New York; London: Routledge, 2002). Tucker, David C. Black Pastors and Leaders: Memphis, 1819–1972 (Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Press, 1975). Von Eschen, Penny M. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). Warnock, Raphael G. The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness (New York; London: New York University Press, 2014). Washington, James Melvin. ‘Jesse Jackson and the Symbolic Politics of Black Christendom.’ The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science CDLXXX (July 1985): 89–105. West, Cornel. Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002 edn). Winstead, Brandon. There All Along: Black Participation in the Church of the Nazarene, 1914–1969 (Lexington, KY: Emeth Press, 2013).

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11 Pentecostals and Charismatics in America Cecil M. Robeck, Jr

Pentecostals form a diverse movement found on every continent except Antarctica. Not many years ago, Pentecostals knew who they were; today the answers are far more complex. It has become necessary to think of Pentecostals as part of a pluralistic movement, that is, as a plural noun with scores of adjectival modifiers—Classical, Holiness, Finished Work, Oneness, Latino, Black, Apostolic, Neo, Progressive, Postmodern, etc. The adjectives seem to be almost endless. Recently, Pentecostals and Charismatics have been described as Renewalists and as of 2018 are numbered at 682,731,000 globally.¹ The clearest demonstration of the dissenting character of this family of Christians is found in The Doctrines and Discipline of the famous Azusa Street Mission. In 1563, the Anglican Church adopted the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. In 1784, John Wesley’s abridgement of twenty-five of these articles was adopted for use in American Methodist churches. In 1915, William J. Seymour, edited and published twenty-four of these articles for use by the Pentecostals at the Azusa Street Mission.² Both lineage and dissention are clear in Seymour’s work. The nineteenth century has been described as the century of Methodism. Certainly, the Methodist Church within the United States was one of two theological traditions that were able to take the advantage along the everexpanding western frontier of the United States. While Baptists grew because of their independent nature and their commitment to governance at the congregational level, Methodists grew through a system of circuit-riding preachers and class meetings. Different manifestations of spiritual life

¹ Todd M. Johnson and Kenneth R. Ross, eds, Atlas of Global Christianity, 1910–2010 (Edinburgh, 2009), p. 102; Todd M. Johnson and others, ‘Christianity 2018: More African Christians and Counting Martyrs’, International Bulletin of Mission Research, XXXXII, 1 (Jan. 2018), p. 24. ² W. J. Seymour, The Doctrines and Discipline of the Azusa Street Apostolic Faith Mission of Los Angeles, Cal. 1915 with Scripture Readings (Los Angeles, CA, 1915).

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emerged in newer forms among churches on the frontier. Those whose lives seemed always to be in transition often found themselves at odds with the traditions that had been their spiritual homes. Never was that more clearly marked than in the Methodist tradition. The Second Great Awakening beginning in the late eighteenth century contributed to the growing distance between Christians along the frontier and the more established churches in the nation’s northern and eastern cities. While Charles G. Finney’s ‘New Measures’ were a challenge to many urban churches, they played well across denominational lines along the frontier. Frontier Methodists were disillusioned by the rising institutionalization and cultural accommodation that they saw in urban Methodism. Increasingly, dissent among Methodists gave way to newer Methodist movements that championed holiness. The geographical distance between many frontier homesteads often meant that those who coveted Christian fellowship looked for ways to connect with one another. One of the primary means of doing so came through the development of regional camp meetings which often included protracted revivals and resulted in the establishment of camp meeting associations.³ Motivated by disillusionment with their parent organizations, many participants withdrew and urged others to withdraw with them. These dissenting ‘come outers’ frequently railed against actions among older churches that they believed were inconsistent with various holiness standards. Pressing Wesley’s concern for sanctification more concretely even than Wesley had taught, a new understanding of sanctification as an experience to be sought was soon enshrined within these churches. It became known as the second definite work of grace that was received in a post-conversion crisis experience. It was sustained by members living up to various lists of acceptable behaviours. Their dissent from denominations that they viewed as going too far in their cultural accommodation led to the rejection of things they identified with worldliness. Holiness codes soon governed personal actions (no dancing, card playing, smoking, use of alcohol, etc.), personal grooming (hair length and makeup) and attire (modesty standards defined by long dresses, high necks, long sleeves, no neckties or jewellery), personal speech (no obscenities, profanity, swearing, or cursing), gender relations (Victorian), and in some cases diet (no coffee, sodas, pork, or chewing gum). If Methodists allowed it, those who followed the Holiness codes typically rejected it. Arguments developed between these Holiness believers over how their sanctification experience was to be interpreted. Some saw it as the ‘Promise of the Father’ (Acts 1:8) and called it their Baptism in/with the Holy Spirit. But what was this baptism, they debated? Many related this baptism to cleansing or ³ Charles A. Johnson, The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religion’s Harvest Time (Dallas, TX, 1955); Paul K. Conkin, Cane Ridge: America’s Pentecost (Madison, WI, 1990).

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purification from sin. The more radical Holiness folk were convinced that sanctification stood for cleansing and purification, but they contended that baptism in the Spirit was something different, having to do with spiritual power. Some of them argued that it was a third work of grace, but that position was quickly condemned by most Holiness believers. Thus, the more radical believers finally viewed it as a gift of power upon the sanctified life.⁴ Beginning about 1885, there was a renewed interest in physical healing as the result of prayer. Dr Charles Cullis, an Episcopalian physician, taught faith healing. It was quickly embraced by many Holiness people. At the same time, encouraged by the Niagara Bible Conferences (1876–97) which introduced a dispensational, premillennial theology to many Evangelicals along the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909, many churches focused attention on eschatology and on world missions, while the work of Charles Darwin contributed to a ‘Christian Evidences’ movement that sought a tangible, even physical evidence for both sanctification and baptism in the Spirit.⁵ True conversion relied not only upon repentance, but also on the evidence of a transformed life. Sanctification was said to be evidenced most frequently by experiences of Divine love. Healing was evidenced through sickness vanquished and limbs restored. But Holiness people debated the evidence that one had been baptized in the Holy Spirit. The oldest Pentecostal groups were known as Holiness Pentecostals. They agreed with the Holiness movement that sanctification was a second definite work of grace, but they insisted that baptism in the Holy Spirit was something different, a gift of power upon the sanctified life, evidenced by speaking in tongues. Not all Pentecostals agreed on the doctrine of sanctification. Some were influenced more by Baptist and Reformed views. They shared many of the concerns for the holy life expounded by Holiness Pentecostals, but they dissented from the crisis view of sanctification, claiming that salvation was followed by a process of sanctification completed only at the Second Coming. At the insistence of William H. Durham, from 1911 onward they became known as Finished Work Pentecostals. In 1913, a third type of Pentecostalism emerged known as Jesus Name, Oneness, or Apostolic Pentecostalism. It developed in response to the observation that the Apostles of the New Testament always baptized ‘in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins’ (Acts 2:38). Later, it rejected classical Trinitarianism and adopted a Modalist understanding of God. While many of the earliest Pentecostals remained Holiness Pentecostals, others moved into the Finished Work camp, and still others kept the Finished Work position on ⁴ Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Peabody, MA, 1987). ⁵ Kenneth J. Archer, A Pentecostal Hermeneutic for the Twenty-First Century: Spirit, Scripture and Community (London, 2004), pp. 192–3.

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sanctification, but adopted a Modalist understanding of the Godhead and practiced baptism in Jesus’ Name. Pentecostals have been labelled with a host of pejorative designations such as ‘Holy Rollers’ through the years. The earliest Pentecostals, however, called themselves ‘Apostolic’ (many Pentecostal groups, not merely Oneness groups still include this term in their name), ‘Apostolic Faith’, ‘Latter Rain’, ‘Full Gospel’, or ‘Sanctified’ (seen most frequently among African Americans) Christians. Depending upon their emphases, some call their churches ‘Deliverance’, ‘Word of Faith’, or ‘Prosperity’ churches. Some choose to call themselves ‘Charismatic’, not to be confused with the Charismatic Renewal in historic churches, but to suggest that their boundaries are more flexible than those of other Pentecostals. Thus, multiple levels of dissention are readily apparent within Pentecostalism. In 1972, David du Plessis (1905–87), who had served as the organizing secretary of the Pentecostal World Conference from 1949–52 and 1955–8, gathered a group of Pentecostals to engage the Vatican’s Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity in dialogue. Pope Paul VI gave approval to this international dialogue between the Catholic Church and Pentecostals, but Catholics were not sure who these Pentecostals were or which churches they represented. In 1976, Fr Kilian McDonnell, the Catholic Co-chair of this dialogue, described them as ‘those groups of Pentecostals which grew out of the Holiness Movement at the beginning of the [twentieth] century’.⁶ For the first time, these Pentecostals were called ‘Classical Pentecostals’. While the term ‘Classical Pentecostals’ was useful in identifying those Pentecostals with whom the Secretariat, now Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, was in dialogue, it is not an adequate definition. On the one hand, it is too inclusive. Oneness Pentecostals may rightly claim that they are Classical Pentecostals according to this definition, but because of their position on the Godhead they are not participants in this Dialogue. Trinitarian and Modalist Pentecostals seldom recognize one another, typically requiring the rebaptism of converts from the other camp. At the same time, not all Pentecostals who might otherwise fall under the designation of Classical Pentecostals, such as the Assemblies of God which draws its doctrine of sanctification from Baptist sources, would easily claim the Holiness Movement as their antecedent. It was C. Peter Wagner (b. 1930), an entrepreneurial Professor of Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of World Mission using social scientific methods, who labelled North American Classical Pentecostals the ‘First Wave’, though he believed that it carried too much cultural baggage left over from the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition. He labelled the Charismatic

⁶ Kilian McDonnell, Charismatic Renewal and the Churches (New York, 1976), p. 2.

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Renewal the ‘Second Wave’, but he believed that it had not gone far enough in distancing itself from its denominational past. As newer Evangelical groups began to take seriously the person and work of the Holy Spirit, especially among groups such as the Vineyard, he coined the new term, ‘Third Wave’.⁷ These designations do not always hold up under close scrutiny. The same terms have been used in different ways, especially in Latin America. Similarly, in the USA, Catholics who experienced baptism in the Spirit and spoke in tongues during the 1960s called themselves ‘Pentecostals’. Later, they took the designation ‘Neo-Pentecostals’ to distinguish themselves from older Pentecostal groups. Today they are known as members of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. At the same time, the designation ‘Neo-Pentecostal’ is often applied to groups that teach prosperity as the right of believers, based upon the promises of God. For many outsiders the variety of designations and the multitudes of independent congregations and ministries present a confusing array of Pentecostals with little apparent cohesiveness. While all Pentecostals and most Charismatics hold much in common, they frequently emphasize their differences.⁸ Those Pentecostals, who have historically believed that their definition or brand of Pentecostalism is or should be considered normative, are troubled by this diversity. What is it that stands at the core of Pentecostal identity? In earlier years, and especially among North American Pentecostals and the missions that they established around the world, it was understood that a Pentecostal was one who believed that Christians should receive a post-conversion baptism in the Holy Spirit that provides divine power thereby enabling them to minister more effectively. The evidence of that baptism in the Holy Spirit was inevitably the ability to speak in other tongues. It was not, however, the only position that Pentecostals held even from their earliest years.⁹ More recently, there has been a decline in the practice of tongues speech in North American Pentecostal churches; for many this points to a troubling erosion of Pentecostalism’s core identity. But the common core that unites all Pentecostals may be more basic even than baptism in the Spirit with a physical evidence. At its core is a form of spirituality in which the participant typically anticipates that something extraordinary will transpire in a post-conversion encounter between that individual and the Spirit of God. It is a spirituality of ⁷ C. Peter Wagner, The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit: Encountering the Power of Signs and Wonders Today (Ann Arbor, MI, 1988), pp. 15–19; David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford, 2002), p. 1. ⁸ Allan Heaton Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge, 2014 edn), pp. 1–7. ⁹ Juan Sepúlveda, ‘Another Way of Being Pentecostal’, in Calvin L. Smith, ed., Pentecostal Power: Expressions, Impact and Faith in Latin American Pentecostalism (Leiden, 2011), pp. 45–50.

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Divine encounter, the result of which is often a meaningful transformation that has a profound effect upon the individual’s subsequent life and ministry.

EARLY PENTECOSTAL DISSENSION When Charles Parham¹⁰ (1873–1929), founded the Apostolic Faith Mission in the 1890s, all the pieces that would come together to form Pentecostalism were in place.¹¹ His life reflected the dissident trajectory from Methodist pastor who had ‘come out’ to form an independent Holiness work focused upon evangelization, sanctification, divine healing, and the imminent Second Coming. But it wasn’t until he had put the final piece of the puzzle into place that his work became Pentecostal. His insistence upon speaking in tongues as the Bible evidence of baptism in the Spirit became the wedge that separated the Holiness Movement from those who would become known as Pentecostals. The dissent from traditional Holiness teaching on baptism in the Spirit as sanctification to baptism in the Spirit as a gift of power evidenced by tongues ran so deep that it separated everything from families to congregations.¹² This baptism quickly subverted historic patterns of church leadership by calling attention to the gifts that all believers had been given along with the power of the Holy Spirit that they had received to use them. On 31 December 1900, in Topeka, Kansas, one of Parham’s students, Agnes Ozman, spoke in tongues while seeking to be baptized in the Spirit. Others quickly joined her. Parham described this manifestation of tongues as the ‘Bible evidence’ that they had been baptized in the Holy Spirit. His intention was to restore to the Church what the earliest Apostles had ‘once delivered to the saints’ (Jude 3, KJV).¹³ He claimed the title ‘Projector of the Apostolic Faith’, and in 1905 he moved to Houston, Texas to spread his message and establish a short-term Bible school. Among Parham’s students was a young African American preacher named William Joseph Seymour (1870–1922).¹⁴ Parham enrolled Seymour in classes ¹⁰ James R. Goff, Jr, Fields White Unto Harvest: Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism (Fayetteville, AR, 1988). ¹¹ For the international debate on the origins of Pentecostalism, see Cecil M. Robeck, Jr, ‘The Origins of Modern Pentecostalism: Some Historiographical Issues’, in Cecil M. Robeck, Jr and Amos Yong, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 13–30. ¹² Bishop Alma and Reverend Kent White illustrate the depth of this dissent. Alma blamed tongues for their long marital separation. See Alma White, My Heart and My Husband (Zarephath, NJ, 1923). ¹³ Edith L. Blumhofer, ‘Restoration as Revival: Early American Pentecostalism’, in Edith L. Blumhofer and Randall Balmer, eds, Modern Christian Revivals (Urbana, IL, 1993), pp. 145–16. ¹⁴ See Gastón Espinosa, William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism: A Biography and Documentary History (Durham, NC, 2014) and Cecil M. Robeck, Jr, The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement (Nashville, TN, 2006).

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and accompanied him as he visited, spoke, and preached to the African American community in Houston. Parham even toyed with the idea of investing Seymour with a leadership position among those African Americans who converted to the Apostolic Faith Movement. While Seymour was studying in Parham’s Bible school, however, he received correspondence from a Holiness congregation in Los Angeles, inviting him to serve as their pastor. Seymour accepted the invitation and arrived in Los Angeles on 22 February 1906. Over the next few days he preached a series of sermons. Mrs Julia W. Hutchins, the congregation’s founder, disagreed with Seymour’s interpretation of baptism in the Spirit and locked him out until local Holiness Church leaders could rule on his doctrine. These leaders concluded that sanctification was identical with baptism in the Spirit. It was for purity, not power, and speaking in tongues was not its evidence. With no job and no apparent future, Seymour was invited by Edward and Mattie Lee to stay in their home and participate in their cottage prayer meeting until he had a sense of direction. The prayer meeting grew and soon moved to the home of Richard and Ruth Asberry on nearby North Bonnie Brae Street. There, Seymour shared his message and those in the prayer meeting fasted and prayed that they might receive this baptism with the evidence of tongues. On 9 April 1906, Edward Lee spoke in tongues. Seymour and Lee walked to the Asberry home to tell the prayer meeting about Lee’s experience. Before the evening was over, Jennie Evans Moore and several others were also baptized in the Spirit. Word spread quickly and by 15 April 1906, they were holding services at 312 Azusa Street in downtown Los Angeles. The congregation adopted the Apostolic Faith Mission as their official designation, a name derived from Charles Parham and indicating that its teachings were rooted in the teachings of the New Testament Apostles. It was quickly nicknamed the Azusa Street Mission, from which a Pentecostal revival would emanate for the next three years. By July 1906, as many as 1500 people met there each week. All other African American congregations in Los Angeles had adopted worship patterns like those found in White churches. Pastor Seymour’s congregation could only be described as nonconformist. Its meetings were more like those in African American folk religion in earlier plantation brush arbours.¹⁵ From the beginning, its services were racially integrated, and no one was barred from ministering regardless of race, gender, age, class, or level of education. It democratized church leadership! Hundreds of people were converted, baptized, sanctified, healed, and baptized

¹⁵ Cecil M. Robeck, Jr, ‘The Azusa Street Mission and Historic Black Churches: Two Worlds in Conflict in Los Angeles’ African American Community’, in Amos Yong and Estrelda Y. Alexander, eds, Afro-Pentecostalism: Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in History and Culture (New York, 2011), pp. 21–41.

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in the Spirit. Scores were commissioned to carry the Apostolic Faith message as pastors, evangelists, and missionaries. New congregations were planted in Los Angeles and nearby communities. Others were established in towns and cities across the United States. Within a short time, even some existing Holiness denominations accepted this new teaching and withdrew from the Holiness movement. The Church of God in Christ (COGIC), founded by Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason in 1897 was among the first to do so. Mason returned from Azusa Street, having been baptized in the Spirit and spoken in tongues. He kept the COGIC name and the majority of people, and it became a Pentecostal denomination,¹⁶ while Jones rejected the teaching and left to form the Congregational Holiness Church.¹⁷ Gaston Barnabas Cashwell (1862–1916), a Holiness preacher from North Carolina, was baptized in the Spirit at Azusa Street, and in December 1906 he began meetings in Dunn, NC, where he shared his testimony.¹⁸ Leaders from several other Holiness groups embraced his message. The Fire-Baptized Holiness Church accepted the message and the Pentecostal Holiness Church merged with it to form the International Pentecostal Holiness Church. The Church of God of the Mountain Assembly joined the movement. The FreeWill Baptist Church split and the Pentecostal Free-Will Baptist Church was formed. Some members of the Church of God (Cleveland, TN) had spoken in tongues as early as 1886, but when Cashwell spoke at their January 1908 Assembly and the Church of God Overseer, Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson was baptized in the Spirit and spoke in tongues, the Church of God officially embraced the Pentecostal theology from Azusa Street and cast its lot with the Pentecostal Movement. That same year Mrs Florence Crawford, who had served as Seymour’s ‘State Director’, captured the allegiance of the various churches she had brought into the Apostolic Faith Movement on behalf of the Azusa Street Mission, and formed her own denomination, the Apostolic Faith Mission of Portland, Oregon.¹⁹ The revival lasted three years in Los Angeles, but the fire spread rapidly across North America and around the world. By 1930, these groups had been joined by many other newly established denominations—the Assemblies of God (1914), La Iglesia Apostólica de la Fe in Cristo Jesús (1914), Pentecostal Church of God (1916), Pentecostal Church of Christ (1917), Bible Standard ¹⁶ Ithiel C. Clemmons, Bishop C. H. Mason and the Roots of the Church of God in Christ (Bakersfield, CA, 1996). ¹⁷ Otho B. Cobbins, ed. History of Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A., 1895–1965 (Chicago, 1966). ¹⁸ Doug Beacham, Azusa East: The Life and Times of G. B. Cashwell (Franklin Springs, GA, 2006). ¹⁹ On these denominations see, Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, MI, 1997).

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Churches (1917), Apostolic Overcoming Holy Church of God (1917), Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (1912/1919), the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (1919), Church of God [Original] (1919), Church of our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith (1919), International Pentecostal Assemblies (1919), the Apostolic Church of Pentecost of Canada (1921), the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (1922), Church of God by Faith (1923), Church of God of Prophecy (1923), Pentecostal Assemblies of Newfoundland (1925), La Assemblia Apostólica de la Fe en Cristo Jesús (1925), and the Christian Churches of North America [Italian] (1927),²⁰ all of which developed missionary programmes. Congregations grew and from this point on, denominations did as well. Since that time, the Church of God in Christ in the USA has grown to 5.5 million members and adherents, the Church of God (Cleveland, TN) claims 1.1 million in the USA and 7 million worldwide, the Assemblies of God claims 3.1 million in the USA and 69 million worldwide, the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World claim 1.8 million in the USA, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel claims 260,000 members in the USA and 7.5 million worldwide, with several other groups claiming between 300,000 and 650,000 members and adherents in the USA.²¹

CONTINUING FORMS OF PENTECOSTAL DISSENSION From the beginning of the movement, evangelists like Charles F. Parham, William H. Durham, Aimee Semple McPherson, Raymond T. Richey, Fred F. Bosworth, and others, travelled the country, spreading the Pentecostal message in tents and auditoriums. Most of them preached salvation, baptism in the Spirit, Divine healing, and the Second Coming, but a growing number of evangelists strongly emphasized healing. Bosworth held such meetings from the 1920s through the mid-1940s.²² William Branham took centre stage in 1947.²³ He was quickly joined by Oral Roberts (1918–2009), who ultimately surpassed Branham as the nation’s pre-eminent healing evangelist and held the attention of Pentecostals for the next fifty years.²⁴ Branham and Roberts were soon joined by a host of imitators. ²⁰ See, Stanley M. Burgess, ed. The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002). ²¹ Eileen W. Lindner, ed. Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches 2012 (Nashville, TN, 2012), pp. 368, 370–5. ²² Eunice M. Perkins, Fred Francis Bosworth: His Life Story (Detroit, MI, 1927). ²³ David Edwin Harrell, Jr, All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America (Bloomington, IN,1975). ²⁴ David Edwin Harrell, Jr, Oral Roberts: An American Life (Bloomington, IN, 1985), and David Edwin Harrell, Jr, Oral Roberts: An American Life (San Francisco, CA, 1987).

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Most of these evangelists were independent, belonging to no denomination or functioning with a denomination, which they often held at arm’s length. An independent streak runs deep throughout Pentecostalism, in part, a throwback to its Holiness ‘come outer’ heritage, the recognition of a democratized leadership through the use of charisms, and because of its distrust of institutions, which Pentecostals believe bind the freedom of the Holy Spirit and cause revival to falter and die. Pentecostals throughout Scandinavian Europe were all strongly influenced by the Swedish Pentecostal leader, Lewi Pethrus (1884–1974). Pethrus, who had been a Baptist previously, viewed radical congregationalism as the ideal form for Pentecostal churches and that there should be only one Pentecostal church per country. All succeeding congregations were understood to be part of the original ‘Filadelfia’ congregation. All business was conducted annually when all congregations gathered in a single summer meeting. This idea was transplanted by Scandinavian Pentecostal immigrants to the USA. The ‘Latter Rain’ revival, which emerged first in Saskatchewan, Canada, spread rapidly especially among Scandinavian American Pentecostal ministers across the northern USA from Detroit to Seattle. Most of them came together around the theme of independence, following the lead of Lewi Pethrus, and rejected what they viewed as the encroachment of institutionalism into the Assemblies of God. Their claim to the restoration of the five-fold ministry (Ephesians 4:11–12), including contemporary Apostles and Prophets was viewed as a harbinger of the end of the age. The result was yet another dissenting movement within Pentecostalism known as the Latter Rain Movement, that from 1948, the Assemblies of God refused to recognize, and those in the Latter Rain Movement reviled the institution of Assemblies of God that rejected their claims.²⁵

USING TECHNOLOGY TO ADVANCE THE GOSPEL MESSAGE Pentecostalism has long been highly evangelistic, entrepreneurial, rewarding ingenuity. Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944) was a pioneer in the use of radio, for example. She became the first woman in the United States to receive a licence from the Federal Communication Commission to operate a radio station. Her station, KFSG (Kall Four Square Gospel), aired her services from Angelus Temple and was used to recruit aid during the Great Depression and ²⁵ D. William Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel: The Significance of Eschatology in the Development of Pentecostal Thought (Sheffield, 1996).

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during other natural disasters.²⁶ Many other Pentecostal preachers quickly followed her lead, filling the airwaves by purchasing time on local radio stations across the nation. Pentecostals and Charismatics went on to establish themselves early in television as well. Beginning in 1947, Roberts first aired his crusades on the radio, filmed them on 16 mm film for distribution to churches, and in 1954, entered television with his programme, The Abundant Life. In 1959, Pat Robertson, a Charismatic, purchased a defunct television station in Portsmouth, Virginia, and developed his popular ‘700 Club’, expanding the station into the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN).²⁷ In 1971, Paul Crouch, a Pentecostal, formed the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), building his first station in Santa Ana, California. He went on to produce several Christian films. Both CBN and TBN are now global networks, broadcasting twenty-four hours a day. In 1974, Pentecostals Jim and Tammy Bakker founded the Praise the Lord (PTL) network in Fort Mill, South Carolina with the ‘PTL Club’.²⁸ The PTL network is now known as the Inspiration Network. Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Baker, and Paul and Jan Crouch soon became household names in Pentecostal and Charismatic circles,²⁹ along with such preachers as Jimmy Swaggart, who began weekly broadcasts in the early 1970s and continue to the present.³⁰ Many of these evangelists as well as ‘Reverend Ike’ and Creflo and Taffi Dollar have become embroiled in scandal, giving rise to charges of hypocrisy and criticism over business practices not only of televangelists but to Pentecostal and Charismatic congregations as well.³¹

THE DISSENSION BROUGHT B Y C H A R I S M A TI C RE NE WAL In one sense, the Charismatic Renewal must be understood as a logical extension of the Pentecostal Movement.³² In another sense, it was an unexpected ²⁶ Edith L. Blumhofer, Aimee Semple Mcpherson: Everybody’s Sister (Grand Rapids, MI, 1993). ²⁷ David Edwin Harrell, Jr, Pat Robertson: A Life and Legacy (Grand Rapids, MI, 2010). ²⁸ Charles E. Shepard, Forgiven: The Rise and Fall of Jim Bakker and the Ptl Ministry (New York, 1989). ²⁹ Jeffrey K. Hadden and Charles E. Swann, Prime Time Preachers: The Rising Power of Televangelism (Reading, MA, 1981). ³⁰ Ann Rowe Seaman, Swaggart: An Unauthorized Biography of an American Evangelist (New York, 1999). ³¹ Jonathan L. Walton, Watch This!: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (New York, 2009). ³² Richard Quebedeaux, The New Charismatics II: How a Christian Renewal Movement Became Part of the Religious Manstream (San Francisco, CA, 1983). Cf. Michael J. McClymond, ‘Charismatic Renewal and Neo-Pentecostalism: From North American

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surprise to most Pentecostals. It came quickly, first to the Anglican and Protestant worlds, and then less than a decade later to the Catholic world. For the most part, Pentecostals were ill-prepared to see that happen. From the beginning they had prayed for a revival that would touch all the churches. But when it appeared, it did not come in the terms that they had expected, that is, Charismatics did not necessarily leave their prior churches to join Pentecostal congregations. Several factors contributed to this remarkable renewal. As early as 1951, an Assemblies of God layman named Demos Shakarian (1913–93), whose grandfather had attended the Azusa Street Mission shortly after he immigrated to Los Angeles, founded the non-denominational, Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International (FGBFI). The idea was simple and was fed by Shakarian’s frustration with the clergy-dominated Assemblies of God that seemed to ignore any real ministry role for gifted laymen. Shakarian provided a place where ‘Full Gospel’ businessmen could invite other men from their business world to dinner. Shakarian provided interesting speakers who were also ‘Spirit-filled’, and the business men could share their personal testimonies of how God had met their spiritual needs, and invite their guests to ask God to fill them as well. The idea caught on quickly, and many forward-thinking Pentecostal and Charismatic laymen readily brought their friends to these meetings. By 1960, FGBFI had spread across North America and around the world.³³ At the same time, David J. du Plessis, Secretary of the Pentecostal World Conference (PWC), was open to Christians of all kinds. His position in the PWC made it possible for him to travel widely. His friendship with Donald Gee, editor of the PWC’s monthly magazine, Pentecost, developed into one that was broadly ecumenical. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Gee and du Plessis, both Assemblies of God ministers, reached out to the larger church world. For du Plessis, that included the World Council of Churches and ultimately the Vatican.³⁴ Virtually all Christian churches were touched by the renewal, and most people did not automatically leave their historic churches to join Pentecostal denominations. Instead, many mainline denominations evaluated the claims of their now ‘Charismatic’ members. Those within historic and mainline congregations who encountered the Holy Spirit the same way Pentecostals had, integrated their experiences into their pre-existing theologies. Baptism in Origins to Global Permutations’, in Cecil M. Robeck, Jr and Amos Yong, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 31–51. ³³ Vinson Synan, Under His Banner: History of Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International (Costa Mesa, CA, 1992). ³⁴ David J. du Plessis, The Spirit Bade Me Go: The Astounding Move of God in the Denominational Churches (Plainfield, NJ, 1970 edn); David J. du Plessis and Bob Slosser, A Man Called Mr Pentecost (Plainfield, NJ, 1977).

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the Spirit came with conversion or was linked to baptism in water. Speaking in tongues was a valid charism of the Spirit, but not necessarily the evidence of baptism in the Spirit. While church leaders typically rejected classical Pentecostal explanations, some churches accepted these charismatic experiences as valid and made room for them.³⁵ Still, many church leaders found ways to marginalize their charismatic members and often moved charismatic pastors into parishes where they would ‘do less harm’. In spite of the many people who had been baptized in the Holy Spirit at Full Gospel Business Men’s meetings as well as David du Plessis’ roving ministry throughout the 1950s, the beginning of the Charismatic Renewal is usually traced to Passion Sunday, 1960, when Father Dennis Bennett of St Mark’s Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, California preached a sermon in which he acknowledged that he had spoken in tongues. His congregation split as a result of that revelation. As a result, Bennett resigned and was reassigned to a small, bankrupt congregation, St Luke’s Episcopal Church in Ballard, Washington. He would soon turn that congregation around and by the mid-1970s the congregation was regularly running 2000.³⁶ As other Christian leaders throughout North America became aware of the renewal, they often approached David du Plessis for guidance. Du Plessis was a master at weaving theology and great stories together in a winsome style.³⁷ He became sought after as a preacher, teacher, and conference speaker, providing advice to those seeking baptism in the Spirit, and those who had received this baptism but were now asking how best they could serve God in light of their encounter with the Holy Spirit. Du Plessis strongly advised them not to become open dissenters, but rather, to remain and renew their denominations. His ecumenical openness and explicit comments that God was at work in the ‘liberal’ churches of the World Council of Churches as well as in the Catholic Church resulted in conflict with leaders of the Assemblies of God as well as the National Association of Evangelicals. As a result, in 1961, du Plessis was defrocked by the Assemblies of God. This action did not deter him or his ministry. He remained a loyal member of his local Assembly of God, and he preached wherever he was invited to do so.³⁸ The 1960s were heady years in the Catholic Church. Shortly after Pope John XXIII was installed, he called for a Second Vatican Council. He opened it in 1962, invoking the fresh wind of the Spirit, but died before its conclusion. Pope Paul VI saw that his predecessor’s vision was fulfilled. During its ³⁵ Ninety-one of these studies were collected in a three volume set by Kilian McDonnell, ed. Presence, Power, Praise: Documents on the Charismatic Renewal (Collegeville, MN, 1980). ³⁶ Dennis J. Bennett, Nine O’clock in the Morning (Plainfield, NJ, 1970). ³⁷ David du Plessis, Simple and Profound (Orleans, MA, 1986). ³⁸ Cecil M. Robeck, Jr, ‘The Assemblies of God and Ecumenical Cooperation: 1920–1965’, in Wonsuk Ma and Robert P. Menzies, eds, Pentecostalism in Context: Essays in Honor of William W. Menzies (Sheffield, 1997), pp. 107–50.

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existence (1962–5), the bishops of the Catholic Church re-emphasized the role that Scripture and the writings of the early Church Fathers should play within the Church. They produced a number of significant documents and affirmed the charismatic nature of the Church.³⁹ It was not surprising that by January 1967, there were Catholics who sought and received their baptism in the Holy Spirit. More surprising was the fact that those who sought this baptism were first found among the faculty and student communities at Duquesne and Notre Dame Universities rather than among lower class and less-educated people.⁴⁰ Today, they number over 120 million worldwide and it is projected that the trend toward Pentecostalization is one of the most significant trends contributing to the revitalization of the Catholic Church now, and will remain so in the future.⁴¹ Many attempts were made during the 1960s and early 1970s to bring Pentecostals and Charismatics, closer together. Demos Shakarian continued to oversee and extend his organization. David du Plessis continued to participate in Pentecostal and Charismatic meetings, happily introducing participants in both movements to one another. Charismatics, especially Catholics, began to offer conferences in which Pentecostals were featured and Pentecostal groups offered conferences in which Charismatics were featured.⁴² Charismatics were eager to learn more about the person and work of the Holy Spirit. A plethora of Charismatic organizations were formed within existing denominations. A series of new periodicals and a host of publications were soon offered. Conferences also aided seekers in their quest for further teaching on Baptism in the Spirit as well as how to identify and use spiritual gifts. Some within the Protestant community left their churches to become true dissenters, not joining Pentecostal congregations either for theological or for sociological reasons. Efforts to find ways to coordinate their independent congregations and govern their relationships in newly established independent ministries and networks led to questions of authority and for many, to the ‘Shepherding Movement’. Derek Prince, Don Basham, Charles Simpson, and Bernard ‘Bob’ Mumford, a product of independent churches with ties to the Latter Rain Movement, established Christian Growth Ministries (CGM) in 1972. Their adoption of a discipleship programme with a strict accountability ³⁹ Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, p. 12. ⁴⁰ Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan, Catholic Pentecostals (Paramus, NJ, 1969); Donald L. Gelpi, SJ, Pentecostalism: A Theological Viewpoint (New York, 1971); Edward D. O’Connor, CSC, The Pentecostal Movement in the Catholic Church (Notre Dame, IN, 1971). ⁴¹ John L. Allen, Jr, The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church (New York, 2009), pp. 375–413. ⁴² Cf. David Manuel, Like a Mighty River (Orleans, MA, 1977); Gwen Jones, ed. Conference on the Holy Spirit Digest, Vols I–II (Springfield, MO, 1983).

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structure led to a crisis, when some leaders lacked wisdom while others became authoritarian. By 1977, CGM had failed.⁴³ While some Protestants were interested in developing life together in new communities, it was among Catholic Charismatics where covenant communities committed to a common charismatic life were most successful.⁴⁴ Two examples are the ‘Mother of God’ community, which began in Gaithersburg, Maryland (1966) and the ‘Word of God’ community in Ann Arbor, Michigan (1967).⁴⁵ During the 1960s and 1970s, many Evangelicals were reluctant to accept the growing influence of the Pentecostal Movement and did not trust the Charismatic Renewal that was being embraced by historic and mainline Christians. Many were committed to some form of cessationism, the idea that certain gifts had served a temporary purpose while the original Apostles were alive and the Bible was still being written. Subsequently these gifts were said to have passed away.⁴⁶ Others, influenced by the actions of the Fundamentalist tradition, which had labelled Pentecostals as fanatics or psychologically maladjusted or even demonically inspired, also distanced themselves from Pentecostals.⁴⁷ Still others did not accept Charismatic renewal even though it had contributed to the evangelicalization and revitalization of many members of these historic and mainline denominations, because they had broken from those denominations which they considered to be theologically liberal, in order to identify themselves as Evangelicals. During this same period, the Jesus Movement emerged. Like the beginning of the Charismatic Renewal, it received widespread media coverage. Among the leaders of this movement was Chuck Smith (1927–2013), the pastor of a small Pentecostal congregation in Costa Mesa, California affiliated with the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (ICFG). He welcomed the young ‘Hippies’ that began to attend, and informed his congregation that these were the kinds of people with whom the Church was to share their message. He presented Jesus to them in a simple manner, and soon hundreds of young people were being converted and mass baptisms were held in the nearby Pacific Ocean. Smith became their Bible teacher, leading new converts into the fullness of salvation. Leaving the ICFG to focus on ministry to these

⁴³ S. David Moore, The Shepherding Movement: Controversy and Charismatic Ecclesiology (London, 2003). ⁴⁴ Margaret Poloma, The Charismatic Movement: Is There a New Pentecost? (Boston, MA, 1982), pp. 135–56. ⁴⁵ J. Massyngberde Ford, Which Way for Catholic Pentecostals? (New York, 1982). ⁴⁶ Benjamin B. Warfield, Miracles: Yesterday and Today (Grand Rapids, MI, 1965 edn); Jon Ruthven, On the Cessation of the Charismata: The Protestant Polemic on Postbiblical Miracles (Sheffield, 1993). ⁴⁷ John MacArthur, Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship (Nashville, TN, 2013).

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‘Hippies’, he encouraged these disciples in turn to plant new congregations. The result was the birth of the Calvary Chapel network.⁴⁸ One of the men who worked closely with Smith was John Wimber (1934–97), a former Quaker, a musical performer with the Righteous Brothers, and a thoughtful leader. After Wimber was baptized in the Spirit, he and Smith disagreed on how prevalent charisms such as prophecy, tongues, and healing should be exercised in the services of Calvary Chapel. Eventually, they broke with one another. Chuck Smith ultimately authored a book in which he distanced himself from his Pentecostal past and from Wimber,⁴⁹ while Wimber moved out to form a congregation with Kenn Gullicksen that became the centre of a loose fellowship of similar congregations. It is now known as the Association of Vineyard Churches.⁵⁰ The same tensions that existed between Smith and Wimber, however, later came between Wimber and John Arnott, pastor of the Toronto Vineyard, when Arnott embraced what became known as the ‘Toronto Blessing’, a revival in which people came from around the world to enjoy extended periods of laughing during their ‘carpet time’. The question of how far charismatic phenomena should extend within the various ‘moves’ of God led to new calls for discernment.⁵¹ During the 1970s and 1980s, even conservative evangelical seminaries such as Dallas, Talbot, and Trinity began to look more intentionally at the supernatural, focusing first on the spirit world, especially the works of Satan and demons, the need for discernment, and the need to engage in exorcism and ‘spiritual warfare’.⁵² Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California rose quickly to the forefront in the study of these subjects by its openness to Pentecostal and Charismatic students and by offering a course on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. C. Peter Wagner explored the role of ‘signs and wonders’ in evangelism and mission. Charles Kraft (b. 1932), Professor of Cultural Anthropology, joined Wagner in addressing ‘spiritual warfare’, the demonic, and exorcism, leading to a seminary-wide study of ministry and the miraculous.⁵³ ⁴⁸ Donald E. Miller, Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium (Berkeley, CA, 1997), pp. 27–37. ⁴⁹ Chuck Smith, Charisma Vs. Charismania (Eugene, OR, 1983). ⁵⁰ Bill Jackson, The Quest for the Radical Middle: A History of the Vineyard (Cape Town, 1999); Thomas W. Higgins, ‘Kenn Gulliksen, John Wimber, and the Founding of the Vineyard Movement’, Pneuma, XXXIV, 2 (2012), pp. 208–28. ⁵¹ Guy Chevreau, Catch the Fire: The Toronto Blessing: An Experience of Renewal and Revival (Toronto, 1994); John Arnott, The Father’s Blessing (Orlando, FL, 1995); James A. Beverley, Holy Laughter and the Toronto Blessing: An Investigative Report (Grand Rapids, MI, 1995). ⁵² Jack Deere, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit: A Former Dallas Seminary Professor Discovers That God Speaks and Heals Today (Grand Rapids, MI, 1993), pp. 13–23. ⁵³ Lewis B. Smedes, ed. Ministry and the Miraculous (Pasadena, CA, 1987); Thomas D. Pratt, ‘The Need to Dialogue: A Review of the Debate on the Controversy of Signs, Wonders, Miracles and Spiritual Warfare Raised in the Literature of the Third Wave Movement’, Pneuma, XIII, 1 (Spring 1991), pp. 7–32.

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Since then, Wagner has turned his attention to the leaders in various independent ministries, congregations and megachurches, often stemming from the Latter Rain Movement. Based upon his belief that the apostolic office, now redefined, was being restored to the Church, he has named many of these leaders part of a New Apostolic Movement. Once again, controversy has spread between the claims of the more institutionalized denominations such as the Assemblies of God and these newer apostolic claims that the ‘apostolic office’ calls for no direct oversight by any institution but rather by a group of apostles acting in concert. And once again, Pentecostals believe many churches are now open to exploitation by domineering figures who adopt a radical form of government that does not work well with larger accountability structures.⁵⁴ Another manifestation that emerged in the 1990s was the so-called ‘prosperity’ teaching, which dominates the African landscape, especially in Nigeria and Ghana,⁵⁵ and has made a substantial contribution to certain forms of Latin American Pentecostalism.⁵⁶ Churches that emphasize this teaching are best described today as Neo-Pentecostal churches. In fact, theologically they are Pentecostals. They emerged first in the United States as a result of teaching by Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland, and they have been caricatured through such descriptors as ‘Positive Confession’, ‘Health and Wealth’, ‘Name it and Claim it’, or ‘Prosperity’ churches.⁵⁷ Classical Pentecostals have long emphasized the importance of stewardship, including the giving of tithes, offerings, and other sacrificial gifts. These actions play an important role in the Christian life and eventually some accounting will be given for how Christians have used what God has given to them. Pentecostals have also emphasized God’s promise of faithfulness to supply the needs of those who put their trust in Him (Proverbs 28:25). They have often noted that those who are generous in their giving and are good stewards, up to and including sacrificial giving, are often tangibly blessed or rewarded by God. They have not necessarily understood this tangible blessing simply in terms of a monetary return on an investment, but rather, in a sense of well-being, purposefulness in life, the number of people who have come to the Lord as a result, and a genuine openness to others in need. Indeed, any return on this investment was typically measured in souls rather ⁵⁴ C. Peter Wagner, ed. The New Apostolic Churches (Ventura, CA, 1998); David Cannistraci, Apostles and the Emerging Apostolic Movement (Ventura, CA, 1996); John Eckhardt, Moving in the Apostolic (Ventura, CA, 1999). ⁵⁵ Felix Dela Klutse, ‘Richest Pastors in Town’, Economic Tribune (26 Nov.–2 Dec. 2012), pp. 1, 17–18. ⁵⁶ Paulo Romeiro, Supercrentes: O Evangelho Segundo Kenneth Hagin, Valnice Milhomens E Os Profetas Da Prosperidade (São Paulo, 1993). ⁵⁷ Robert M. Bowman, Jr, The Word-Faith Controversy: Understanding the Health and Wealth Gospel (Grand Rapids, MI, 2001).

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than in dollars.⁵⁸ As we look at the motivation for why Pentecostals give, we find that most give faithfully in a cheerful and sacrificial manner because they believe that is what God wants of them (1 Corinthians 16:1–2; 2 Corinthians 9:7). Others give in faith, hoping that they will receive a tangible, even a monetary blessing in return (Luke 6:38), one that they believe might be guaranteed in Christ’s work on the cross. By way of contrast, many of those who represent current prosperity teaching frequently link the acts of giving and receiving, between tithing and financial prosperity, as though they stand in a simple cause and effect relationship parallel to the sowing and reaping that is found in Jesus’ ‘Parable of the Sower’ (Matthew 13:18–23; Mark 4:1–20).⁵⁹ Thus, this newer brand of Pentecostal and/or Charismatic practice has come under substantial criticism⁶⁰ even as these teachings have gained import in the minds of many throughout the developing world.⁶¹ Some give as though it were an investment in a kind of divine lottery in which they believe that they can become big winners. While the doctrine of prosperity has often been criticized theologically, Pentecostals are giving renewed thought to the underlying reasons that so many desperately poor, marginal, and disenfranchised people have embraced its message so fervently while others have rejected it just as strongly. This has led many Pentecostals to separate themselves from prosperity churches and teachers altogether, while many prosperity-based groups now avoid identifying with Classical Pentecostals in order to assert their distinct message. What seems most apparent is that the prosperity teaching thrives precisely where the ability of human institutions to make a meaningful difference in life does not seem to exist. While the Church may lose the opportunity to address future generations, as people become disillusioned by results that do not always look like those that have been promised in this theology, other Pentecostal and Charismatic churches from small to mega are finding ways to use ⁵⁸ Arthur M. Brazier, Tithing: Why Give? (Chicago, IL, 1996); George Brazell, This Is Stewardship (Springfield, MO, 1962); Christal Clayton, Stewards of Tithing (no city, 1978 edn). ⁵⁹ Oral Roberts, Miracle of Seed-Faith (Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1970); Oral Roberts, Receiving Your Miracle: Through Seed-Faith Partnership with God (Tulsa, OK, 1978); Kenneth Copeland, The Laws of Prosperity (Fort Worth, TX, 1974). ⁶⁰ J. N. Horn, From Rags to Riches: An Analysis of the Faith Movement and Its Relation to the Classical Pentecostal Movement (Pretoria, South Africa, 1989); The Assemblies of God, USA position on Positive Confession is at: The General Council of the Assemblies of God, http://ag. org/top/Beliefs/Position_Papers/pp_4183_confession.cfm. ⁶¹ Simon Coleman, The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity (Cambridge, 2000); Milmon F. Harrison, Righteous Riches: The Word of Faith Movement in Contemporary African American Religion (Oxford, 2005); Lawrence Nwankwo, ‘ “You Have Received the Spirit of Power…” (2 Tim. 1:7): Reviewing the Prosperity Message in the Light of a Theology of Empowerment’, Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association, XXII, (2002), pp. 56–77; Katherine Attanasi and Amos Yong, eds, Pentecostalism and Prosperity: The Socio-Economics of the Global Charismatic Movement (New York, 2012).

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their resources.⁶² It is also the case that while Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Movement have brought back to the church a renewed realization that the Holy Spirit is at work in the world and among Christians of all types, there is little doubt that these movements will continue to mutate further, producing yet more dissident options for those who look to distance themselves from the past. How they will look is anyone’s guess.

S E L E C T B I BL IO G R A P H Y Anderson, Allan Heaton. An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 edn). Arnott, John. The Father’s Blessing (Orlando, FL: Creation House, 1995). Bennett, Dennis J. Nine O’clock in the Morning (Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1970). Beverley, James A. Holy Laughter and the Toronto Blessing: An Investigative Report (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995). Blumhofer, Edith L. Aimee Semple Mcpherson: Everybody’s Sister (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1993). Burgess, Stanley M., ed. The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002). Chevreau, Guy. Catch the Fire: The Toronto Blessing: An Experience of Renewal and Revival (Toronto: HarperPerennial/Harper Collins Publishers Ltd., 1994). Dayton, Donald W. Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1987). du Plessis, David J. The Spirit Bade Me Go: The Astounding Move of God in the Denominational Churches (Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1970 edn). Harrell, David Edwin, Jr All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1975). McClymond, Michael J., ‘Charismatic Renewal and Neo-Pentecostalism: From North American Origins to Global Permutations’, in Cecil M. Robeck, Jr and Amos Yong, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism (Cambridge, 2014). McDonnell, Kilian. Charismatic Renewal and the Churches (New York: Seabury Press, 1976). McDonnell, Kilian. ed. Presence, Power, Praise: Documents on the Charismatic Renewal (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1980). Miller, Donald E., and Tetsunao Yamamori. Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). O’Connor, Edward D., C.S.C. The Pentecostal Movement in the Catholic Church (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1971). ⁶² Attanasi and Yong, Pentecostalism and Prosperity; Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley, CA, 2007).

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Poloma, Margaret. The Charismatic Movement: Is There a New Pentecost? (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1982). Quebedeaux, Richard. The New Charismatics II: How a Christian Renewal Movement Became Part of the Religious Mainstream (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1983). Robeck, Jr Cecil M. The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement (Nashville, TN: Nelson Reference & Electronic, 2006). Synan, Vinson. The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1997). Wagner, C. Peter, ed. The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit: Encountering the Power of Signs and Wonders Today (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1988). Wagner, C. Peter, ed. The New Apostolic Churches (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1998).

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12 Free Church Traditions in Twentieth-Century Europe Toivo Pilli and Ian M. Randall

The twentieth century was characterized by major political, cultural, and religious upheavals, with two world wars shaking practically every corner of Europe. National Socialism and Communism, two totalitarian systems, brought serious consequences throughout the continent. Secularism, industrialization, and urbanization, which all developed in the nineteenth century, also posed challenges.¹ Further shifts occurred towards the end of the century, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ending of Communism in many countries of Eastern Europe, the war in the Balkans, and European efforts to form a much-extended common economic and political space. In addition, Europe saw waves of migration from Africa and Asia, including people of different faith commitments. All of this had an influence on church life, including dissenting (Free Church) traditions, comprising Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, and others. In Britain, which had the most influential Free Church community of any country in Europe, there was much optimism at the beginning of the century within Free Churches. In 1906 the widely-read British weekly newspaper, the Christian World, predicted that ‘the future rests with the Free Churches’.² This confidence, however, was tested by the upheavals, indeed catastrophes, which Europe experienced.³ In addition, despite attempts to increase visible unity among Free Churches, new groups emerged less interested in cooperation. David Bebbington speaks of the ‘astonishing diversity’ of Free Church groups and fellowships at the end of the century.⁴ ¹ See Hugh McLeod, European Religion in the Age of the Great Cities, 1830–1930 (London, 1995). ² ‘Editorial’, Christian World (8 Feb. 1906), p. 11. ³ Paul Sangster, A History of the Free Churches (London, 1983), p. 171. ⁴ D. W. 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. 215.

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Free Church bodies in Europe were forced to react to a changing framework as the century took its course: to interpret and re-interpret their understanding of evangelistic witness, religious freedom and church–state relations, their theology and spirituality, their identity and relationships with other churches, and their social and global involvements. These are the themes that will be examined in this chapter. In scholarly literature, considerable attention has been devoted to developments within the main Free Church denominations in Britain, including in the twentieth century. The history of Methodism, the largest of these, is covered in four volumes.⁵ Baptists in England, with a history dating from the seventeenth century, have similarly had four volumes written on them.⁶ Attention has also been given to developments in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.⁷ In the twentieth century the Congregationalists, English Presbyterians, and Churches of Christ joined to become—in 1972—the United Reformed Church.⁸ The history of the Open Brethren movement in Britain and Ireland has had comprehensive coverage.⁹ This chapter will include material on the British Isles, but the aim will be to look at Free Church life as expressed in Europe-wide movements in the twentieth century.¹⁰ The coverage, inevitably, is not comprehensive: for example the Seventh-day Adventists would require separate attention.¹¹ But the overall approach used here follows the fine work of the Swedish historian, Gunnar Westin, in his substantial book on Free Church history, The Free Church Through the Ages (1954). It was first published in Swedish, with a German translation in 1956 and an English translation in 1958.¹² The perspective here, as with Westin’s study, is pan-national.

⁵ The four volumes were published from 1965 to 1988. The last volume is R. E. Davies et al., eds. A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, Vol. IV (London, 1988). ⁶ For the twentieth century see Ian M. Randall, The English Baptists of the Twentieth Century (Didcot, 2005). ⁷ See John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843–1945 (London, 1994). For the churches in Wales see D. Densil Morgan, The Span of the Cross: Christian Religion and Society in Wales, 1914–2000 (Cardiff, 1999). For Baptists in Scotland see Brian R. Talbot, ed., A Distinctive People: Aspects of the Witness of Baptists in Scotland in the Twentieth Century (Milton Keynes, 2014). ⁸ This was not without pain, with some Congregationalists and later some Churches of Christ deciding not to join the new church. For Congregationalism see Alan Argent, The Transformation of Congregationalism, 1900–2000 (London, 2013). ⁹ Most recently in Tim Grass, Gathering to His Name: The Story of the Open Brethren in Britain and Ireland (Milton Keynes, 2006). See also Roger Shuff, Searching for the True Church: Brethren and Evangelicals in Mid-Twentieth-Century England (Carlisle, 2005). ¹⁰ A wider theological as well as historical perspective in found in Nigel Wright, Free Church, Free State: The Positive Baptist Vision (Milton Keynes, 2005), pp. 205–15. ¹¹ For this movement see Hugh Dunton and others, eds. Heirs of the Reformation: The Story of Seventh-Day Adventists in Europe (Grantham, 1997). ¹² Gunnar Westin, The Free Church through the Ages (Nashville, TN, 1958).

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EVANGELISTIC WITNESS A central commitment for Free Church traditions in Europe has been engagement in evangelistic witness leading to conversion—the experience of the ‘new birth’. Early twentieth-century Baptist and Methodist proclamation of the Christian message received inspiration from nineteenth-century models. For example, the Baptist movement across mainland Europe began in the first half of the nineteenth century and grew significantly, largely through the work of Johann Gerhard Oncken (1800–84) and the German Baptist movement, and the impetus of that growth continued in the early twentieth century.¹³ Oncken’s evangelistic endeavours in Hamburg from the 1830s led to determined church planting outreach by German Baptists into countries across Europe. Oncken has been seen as ‘the Father of the Baptists on the Continent’.¹⁴ By 1920 the number of Baptists in mainland Europe was estimated at 222,000.¹⁵ Baptist growth continued in several parts of Europe in the inter-war years. Indeed one historian of Russian Baptist life refers to the 1920s as the ‘golden age’ for the Soviet Baptist and associated Evangelical Christian community.¹⁶ For much of the twentieth century, however, the overall numerical trend among the major church bodies in Northern and Western Europe has been downwards. Philip Jenkins talks about church membership and religious participation ‘declining precipitously’.¹⁷ That said, there has been a tendency to focus on statistics relating to certain denominations.¹⁸ The Free Church experience across Europe and across the century cannot be summed up as one of uniform decline. A Free Church movement which has seen significant growth in Europe (as well as elsewhere in the world) is Pentecostalism. According to Paul Schmidgall, in 2000 there were about three million Pentecostals in Europe,¹⁹ with charismatic churches that emerged from the 1960s adding significantly to these numbers.²⁰ The theological and inspirational basis for Pentecostal and charismatic growth since the early twentieth century can be found in ¹³ Richard V. Pierard, ‘Germany and Baptist Expansion in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, in D. W. Bebbington, ed., The Gospel in the World: International Baptist Studies (Carlisle, 2002), pp. 189–208. ¹⁴ Westin, The Free Church through the Ages, p. 284. ¹⁵ J. H. Rushbrooke, The Baptist Movement in the Continent of Europe (London, 1923), p. 5. ¹⁶ Konstantin Prokhorov, ‘The “Golden Age” of the Soviet Baptists in the 1920s’, in Sharyl Corrado and Toivo Pilli, eds. Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives (Prague, 2007), pp. 88–101. ‘Evangelical Christians’ is a technical term for a Slavic Baptist-like denomination which formally joined with the Baptists in 1944. ¹⁷ Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford, 2002), p. 94. ¹⁸ David Goodhew, ed., Church Growth in Britain: 1980 to the Present (Farnham, 2012), p. 12. ¹⁹ Paul Schmidgall, European Pentecostalism: Its Origins, Development, and Future (Cleveland, TN, 2013), p. 4. ²⁰ Stanley M. Burgess, ed., The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002), p. 287.

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nineteenth-century holiness movements. Early Pentecostals, however, did not uniformly emphasize continuity with holiness spirituality; in seeking their own identity their connections were controversial: this heritage was ‘both to unite and divide them’.²¹ Added evangelistic thrust came from the Welsh Revival of 1904–5 and from people in existing denominations (especially in Free Churches) looking for new dimensions of spiritual experience. A crucial connecting figure was the British Baptist, F. B. Meyer (1847–1929). A leading Free Church speaker at Keswick holiness conventions (named after the town of Keswick in England) and the Blankenburg conferences in Germany, Meyer was also an effective evangelist.²² In April 1905 Frank Bartleman, later a participant-historian of Pentecostalism, was ‘stirred’ as he heard Meyer speak about conversions during the Welsh Revival.²³ In the same period in Germany, evangelists such as Jonathan Paul and Jakob Vetter saw considerable success through mission tent meetings. In 1905, during what has been viewed as a ‘Pentecost season’ in Germany, it was reckoned that 3000 people experienced evangelical conversion. Such revivals were the seed-bed of German Pentecostalism.²⁴ While the Pentecostals cohered with other evangelicals regarding issues such as spiritual conversion, the authority of scripture, evangelism, and ethical lifestyle, they differed in their teaching on the baptism of the Holy Spirit as a second blessing, which was expected to offer gifts of speaking in tongues, healing, and prophecy for the Christian community. This was often accompanied with the sense of divine intervention in everyday life situations and with eschatological expectations. What became rapidly-growing Pentecostal movements in Norway and Sweden were indebted to Methodist and Baptist evangelistic thinking. Thomas B. Barratt (1862–1940), a Methodist and naturalized Norwegian of English birth, brought Pentecostalism from the USA to Scandinavia, starting with a series of revival meetings in Oslo in 1907–8. Thomas Barratt was involved in extensive travelling and preaching, as well as literature ministry and conferences.²⁵ He had the support of Lewi Pethrus (1884–1974), a powerful Baptist evangelist who soon became a leading figure in Swedish Pentecostalism. Baptist leaders in Stockholm and Göteborg responded favourably to this

²¹ See Melvin Easterday Dieter, The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, NJ, 1980); Stanley M. Burgess and Gary B. McGee, Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids, MI, 1993), p. 409. ²² Ian M. Randall, ‘ “To Evangelise the Great Masses of Our Population”: Meyer as a Pastor and Evangelist’, Spirituality and Social Change: The Contribution of F.B. Meyer, 1847–1929 (Carlisle, 2003). ²³ Frank Bartleman, How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles: As It Was in the Beginning (Los Angeles, CA, 1925), p. 11. ²⁴ Schmidgall, European Pentecostalism, pp. 126–7. ²⁵ For literature on Barratt see David Bundy, ‘Thomas Ball Barratt: From Methodist to Pentecostal’, EPTA Bulletin, XIII, (1994), pp. 19–49.

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new spiritual impetus.²⁶ Pentecostals emerged to a considerable extent from Free Church contexts. Filadelfia church, Stockholm, was reckoned to be the largest Pentecostal church in the world until the 1960s; and the Word of Life, ‘a prosperity and faith oriented charismatic church’, which grew rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, originated from Sweden.²⁷ In Britain, Barratt had an influence on Alexander Boddy, an Anglican vicar, but it was two brothers from Wales, Stephen (1876–1943) and George Jeffreys (1889–1962), who became the movement’s leading evangelists in Britain. In 1915, in Northern Ireland, George Jeffreys, who came from a Welsh Congregational mining background, formed an Evangelistic Band which became the Elim Pentecostal Church. Healing was seen as integral to evangelism. Stephen left Elim to work with what would become a major international Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God. It began in the UK in 1924; the equivalent body in the USA had existed since 1914. In Italy, Giacomo Lombardi became a Pentecostal evangelist, and by 1929, through his work, 149 Pentecostal churches had been started across Italy.²⁸ Pentecostals, therefore, brought new advance to Free Church life in Europe. In the Eastern parts of Europe this advance underwent a resurgence towards the end of the twentieth century. There was growth in Free Church membership in most Eastern European countries in the 1990s, with some instances of rapid growth in places like Ukraine and Romania. The Romanian Pentecostal community, for example, grew to a baptized membership of 380,000 in 1999.²⁹ In parts of Southern Europe where there has been Free Church growth it has been largely Pentecostal. In Italy the Pentecostals numbered 200,000 (including adherents) at the start of the twenty-first century, making them considerably larger than other main Free Churches with Waldensians, Methodists, Baptists, and Brethren combined.³⁰ The charismatic movement that spread in the established churches from the 1960s also stimulated evangelism. One of the leading evangelists in Europe from this milieu was the Anglican, David Watson (1933–84), whose contemporary approach to evangelistic ministry and his popular books on the subject affected many Free Churches.³¹ This is not to say that evangelistic growth happened only due to Pentecostal advance. Sharing one’s faith and leading others to conversion—either in personal

²⁶ Nils Bloch-Hoell, The Pentecostal Movement: Its Origin, Development, and Distinctive Character (London, 1964), pp. 66–72, 75–7. For more see Ian M. Randall, ‘ “Days of Pentecostal Overflowing”: Baptists and the Shaping of Pentecostalism’, in D. W. Bebbington, ed., The Gospel in the World: International Baptist Studies (Carlisle, 2002), pp. 82–7. ²⁷ Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 85–6. See also Jan-Åke Alvarsson, ‘The Development of Pentecostalism in Scandinavian Countries’, in William K. Kay and Anne E. Dyer, eds. European Pentecostalism (Leiden, Boston, 2011), p. 35. ²⁸ Schmidgall, European Pentecostalism, p. 258. ²⁹ Ibid., p. 213. ³⁰ Ibid., p. 259. ³¹ Teddy Saunders and Hugh Sansom, David Watson: A Biography (Sevenoaks, UK, 1992).

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encounters or in mass-evangelism events—is an inherent feature in Free Church spirituality. What Pentecostals did in the twentieth century is comparable to Baptist mission in the nineteenth—they offered a sense of urgency as well as visible expansion. The existing Free Churches—Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Salvation Army—also had evangelists who contributed to Free Church witness in Europe. Among the leading Methodist evangelists in the early twentieth century were Rodney (Gipsy) Smith (1860–1947), previously a Captain in the Salvation Army,³² and Samuel Chadwick (1860–1932), who had a notable ministry in Leeds, Yorkshire, and was then Principal of Methodism’s Cliff College, Derbyshire. Cliff College had a strong tradition of students going on mission and Chadwick spoke of them as an Order—‘Methodist Friars’. From 1925 many of them went out in bands each year to attempt effective outreach. Chadwick conceived of his Friars as following in the steps of Francis of Assisi, the Wesleys, and William and Catherine Booth.³³ Within the Salvation Army, Bramwell Booth, who succeeded his father as General in 1912, stressed the need for evangelistic power.³⁴ This emphasis continued. An important transatlantic figure early in the century was Reuben A. Torrey (1856–1928), an American Congregational minister and Bible teacher who modelled his ministry on Dwight L. Moody.³⁵ Torrey preached in almost every part of the English-speaking world in 1902–3, including in Europe. This endeavour not only led to conversions but also promoted ideas of a post-conversion baptism in the Spirit, especially as empowerment for ministry and service.³⁶ Baptist evangelists, for their part, often used experience gained in local church settings. Thus Douglas Brown, minister of an 800-member church in London, undertook significant evangelistic work in the 1920s, beginning with an interdenominational mission in East Anglia in 1921. The number of conversions in this local revival was reckoned to have been over a thousand.³⁷ By far the best-known promoter of evangelical conversion in the second half of the twentieth century was an American Southern Baptist, Billy Graham.³⁸ Graham worked as an evangelist after the Second World War for the organization Youth for Christ. In 1954, following several visits to Britain, he led a massive campaign in London, drawing 120,000 to Wembley Stadium on the

³² For the life of Gipsy Smith, see David Lazell, Gypsy from the Forest: A New Biography of the International Evangelist Gipsy Smith (1860–1947) (Bridgend, 1997). ³³ D. W. Lambert, ed., The Testament of Samuel Chadwick,1860–1932 (London, 1957), p. 52. ³⁴ The Officer (Feb. 1931), p. 92. ³⁵ For D. L. Moody and the approach that he shaped, see Timothy George, ed., Mr Moody and the Evangelical Tradition (London, 2004). ³⁶ Burgess, New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, p. 96. ³⁷ Stanley C. Griffin, A Forgotten Revival (Bromley, 1992), pp. 20–40. ³⁸ For Billy Graham, see William C. Martin, The Billy Graham Story: A Prophet with Honour (London, 1992).

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closing day—the largest religious meeting up to that time in British history. Adrian Hastings states that ‘it was the impact of Billy Graham that was really formative for the Evangelicalism of the subsequent decades’.³⁹ To focus on Graham’s impact in London, however, would not do justice to his wider European evangelistic influence. In 1955 he held meetings in Scotland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Norway, and Sweden. In later decades he took a particular interest in Eastern Europe, speaking in Czechoslovakia, Russia, Romania, Hungary, and Poland. From the 1950s onwards Free Churches, including the Brethren, were among those heavily involved in Graham’s missions. Although himself Free Church in outlook, he referred those converted in his campaigns to whatever church these people nominated, so that his influence extended to the state churches of Western Europe and to Orthodox churches. His high profile events gave significant impetus to local evangelism. Graham’s influence continued. At a national mission in Britain in 1984 the total attendance at stadium meetings across the country was over one million people, and approaching 100,000 responded to Graham’s evangelistic appeal.⁴⁰ In the 1990s in post-Communist Eastern Europe new freedoms meant that for a time mass evangelism was emphasized.⁴¹ In other parts of Europe Free Churches began to show more interest in Alpha courses than in large campaigns. Alpha, a product of the Anglican Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, London, provided an environment within which people from secular backgrounds were introduced to the Christian faith. In 1997 close to 5000 Alpha courses were being run all over the world, many in Europe, again across many denominations.⁴² By the later part of the century, evangelism was becoming increasingly relational, and also holistic, with a renewed awareness of social as well as spiritual needs.⁴³ In the traditionally Protestant areas of Northern and Western Europe where overall church decline was marked, the historic Free Churches—the Methodists, Congregationalists (in Sweden the Covenant Church), and Baptists—were not exempt. As an example of the extent of decline, whereas about 33 per cent of British people were members of a Christian Church in 1900, a hundred

³⁹ Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–2000 (London, 2001 edn), p. 454. ⁴⁰ Gavin Reid, To Reach a Nation: The Challenge of Evangelism in a Mass-Media Age (London, 1987), pp. 56, 61. ⁴¹ Toivo Pilli, ‘Baptist Identities in Eastern Europe’, in Ian M. Randall and others, eds. Baptist Identities: International Studies from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Milton Keynes, 2006), pp. 102–3. For a study of Free Churches under Communism in one country, Estonia, see Toivo Pilli, Dance or Die: The Shaping of Estonian Baptist Identity under Communism (Milton Keynes, 2008). ⁴² David Hilborn, Picking up the Pieces: Can Evangelicals Adapt to Contemporary Culture? (London, 1997), pp. 210–14; Stephen Hunt, Anyone for Alpha?: Evangelism in a Post-Christian Society (London, 2001). ⁴³ Paul W. Chilcote, ed., Making Disciples in a World Parish: Global Perspectives on Mission and Evangelism (Eugene, OR, 2011), pp. 137–86.

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years later the figure was 12 per cent, with church attendance significantly lower than that.⁴⁴ Growth in independent, charismatic, and Pentecostal churches in Britain, however, as in other parts of Western Europe, meant that in 1998 Free Church attendances were calculated to be two-fifths of all church-goers.⁴⁵ In the early twenty-first century the European Baptist Federation (EBF) could look back on growth; it had under its organizational umbrella about 730,000 Baptist members (and many more attending) in over fifty Unions or Conventions.⁴⁶ During the twentieth century Free Church evangelism faced challenges: wars, secularism, social changes, and atheistic ideology in Eastern Europe. Decline was evident. However, especially Pentecostal, and later charismatic evangelism gave additional energy to the central Free Church practice of sharing the gospel. In Communist countries the state control of evangelism lasted until new freedoms dawned at the end of the 1980s. Missional methods moved from mass-evangelism campaigns towards social ministries, and a holistic understanding of mission, while personal witness—typically—never lost its value among the dissenting traditions. Free Church evangelistic witness remained significant across Europe, albeit in new forms.

CHURCH AND S TATE In the field of church and state relations the Free Church traditions in Europe have had to address a number of issues: their position as minorities in society, questions of religious freedom, and in some countries the challenge of persecution and severe state-imposed restrictions. In the early years of the twentieth century, in continental Europe, Free Churches often had to strive to achieve recognized status in their countries. This was made even more complicated as the Free Churches often wanted to maintain freedom in making internal decisions. State authorities, in turn, usually imposed some requirements on church bodies, such as reporting and areas of compliance, which could be seen as limiting traditional internal church freedoms. Some Free Churches tried out more structured patterns. For example, J. H. Shakespeare (1857–1928), the powerful General Secretary of Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland, worked with Hungarian Baptists in 1907 to produce a framework for their Union which was more centralized, as a step towards Baptist unity and, crucially,

⁴⁴ Peter Brierley, Religious Trends 2000/2001 (London, 1999), p. 8; Peter Brierley, The Tide Is Running Out: What the English Church Attendance Survey Reveals (London, 2000), p. 27. ⁴⁵ Robin Gill, The ‘Empty’ Church Revisited (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 163–7. ⁴⁶ European Baptist Federation Directory 2014.

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state recognition.⁴⁷ Some, however, were of the view that governmental control was too high a price to pay for societal status.⁴⁸ Church and state relationships caused Free Church tensions. J. H. Rushbrooke (1870–1947), Baptist World Alliance (BWA) Commissioner for Europe, was active in the areas of freedom of religion and state recognition of Baptists and other Free Churches in the early decades of the twentieth century. At a European Baptist Congress held in Berlin in 1908, which attracted 1800 delegates, Rueben Saillens from France gave a muchacclaimed speech on ‘Baptists as Pioneers of Freedom of Conscience Today’.⁴⁹ Another speaker, Vasiliy Pavlov, a Baptist leader from Russia, recalled his years of persecution and exile and said that he felt, looking at the Berlin audience, that he was dreaming.⁵⁰ Three years earlier, at meetings in London at which the BWA was formed, Baron Woldemar von Üxküll from Estonia and D. I. Mazaev from Russia reported on behalf of Russian Baptist communities.⁵¹ They spoke of new freedoms but also of many of their members who had suffered severely at the hands of the Tsarist state.⁵² At the Second Baptist World Congress, in Philadelphia, USA, in 1911, Pavlov said: ‘In many places our members are beaten and their gatherings are dissolved by mob, as for instance, in Siberia a mob entered the house of one brother where was a prayer meeting, dissolved it by gun firing and tried to kill him.’⁵³ This was the picture of oppression that was to prevail in much of Eastern Europe. The First World War, and to a lesser extent the Second World War, brought to the fore divergent Free Church attitudes to war.⁵⁴ While many supported their countries when war was declared in 1914, the issue was raised of what freedom there was for those who refused to fight because of pacifist convictions. In both the First and Second World Wars the role of Quakers in supporting Conscientious Objectors (COs) was highly significant. In December 1914, one hundred and thirty people met in Cambridge for a conference at which the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FoR) was formed. ⁴⁷ Peter Shepherd, The Making of a Modern Denomination: John Howard Shakespeare and the English Baptists, 1898–1924 (Carlisle, 2001), p. 40. ⁴⁸ Rushbrooke, The Baptist Movement in the Continent of Europe, p. 156. ⁴⁹ ‘Baptists as Pioneers of Freedom of Conscience Today’, Baptist Times (4 Sept. 1908), p. 615. ⁵⁰ Tony Peck, ‘ “Against the Tide”: Episodes Highlighting the Situation of Religious Freedom for Baptists in Central and Eastern Europe, 1908–2008’, in John H. Y. Briggs and Anthony R. Cross, eds. Baptists and the World: Renewing the Vision (Oxford, 2011), pp. 107–8. ⁵¹ The Baptist World Congress, London, July 11–19, 1905: Record of Proceedings (London, 1905), pp. 7–8, 182–5. ⁵² ‘Baptist World Congress’, Baptist Times (21 July 1905), supplement, p. IX. ⁵³ The Baptist World Alliance: Second Congress: Philadelphia, June 19–25, 1911: Record of Proceedings (Philadelphia, PA, 1911), p. 233. ⁵⁴ See 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), pp. 240–63.

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Among the prime movers behind the conference were Henry Hodgkin, who was a Quaker and a medical doctor; Lucy Gardner, another Quaker; and Maude Royden, an Anglican who in 1917 became the Assistant Preacher at the Congregational City Temple in London. Major outcomes included the agreement that ‘as Christians, we are forbidden to wage war, and that loyalty to our country, to humanity, to the Church Universal, and to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Master, calls us instead to a life service for the enthronement of Love in personal, social, commercial and national life’. By November 1915, 1550 had registered as members of FoR.⁵⁵ Though Free Churches did not unanimously support the pacifist cause, there was a significant tendency to question military action. This view extended beyond Quaker circles. Free Church peace activists visited imprisoned COs and their families, shared ministry of compassion, and attempted to ground their positions theologically.⁵⁶ The issue of religious liberty in Europe was addressed at major Baptist events in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the Baptist World Alliance Congress in Stockholm in 1923.⁵⁷ Under Stalin’s repression, from 1929, the situation for Christians in Russia became desperate. The Baptist World Alliance Executive called on Baptists to engage in ‘continuous and united prayer for their fellowbelievers in Russia, and for all others who in that land in this twentieth century are denied religious liberty’.⁵⁸ The choice of Berlin as location of the 1934 BWA Congress caused considerable controversy. With the rise to power of the Nazi Party in 1933 some Baptist leaders felt that going to Germany was inappropriate, even though there was considerable ignorance about the Protestant scene in Germany.⁵⁹ After much debate, the view prevailed that the Congress should go ahead in Berlin as a demonstration of the freedom of the Baptist family to express itself. But the move remained divisive. British Baptists used the Congress, which attracted 8000 Baptists (all except 300 from continental Europe), to speak about freedom of conscience; but Carl Schneider of the Hamburg Baptist Seminary also used it to praise the Third Reich.⁶⁰ ⁵⁵ Vera Brittain, The Rebel Passion: A Short History of Some Pioneer Peacemakers (London, 1964), pp. 33–6. ⁵⁶ Jill Wallis, Mother of World Peace: The Life of Muriel Lester (Enfield, 1993), pp. 41, 43. For a history of the FoR see Jill Wallis, Valiant for Peace: A History of the Fellowship of Reconciliation 1914 to 1989 (London, 1991). See also Muriel Lester, It Occurred to Me (New York, 1937), pp. 79–80. ⁵⁷ Bernard Green, Tomorrow’s Man: A Biography of James Henry Rushbrooke (Didcot, 1997), pp. 98–100. ⁵⁸ Robert S. Wilson, ‘Coming of Age: The Post-War Era and the 1920s’, in Richard V. Pierard, ed., Baptists Together in Christ, 1905–2005: A Hundred-Year History of the Baptist World Alliance (Birmingham, AL, 2005), p. 69. For Russian Baptists 1905–29 see Heather J. Coleman, Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905–1929 (Bloomington, IN, 2005). ⁵⁹ K. W. Clements, ‘A Question of Freedom? British Baptists and the German Church Struggle’, in K. W. Clements, ed., Baptists in the Twentieth Century (London, 1982), p. 99. ⁶⁰ J. H. Rushbrooke, ed., Fifth Baptist World Congress: Berlin, August 4–10, 1934 (London, 1934), pp. 182, 192–3; Green, Tomorrow’s Man, pp. 118–21; ch. 8.

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Because of the Baptist links across Europe, the issues connected with National Socialism in Germany posed a particular challenge for Baptists; though other Free Church leaders were also affected. In 1932 the British Evangelical Alliance, with the support of many Free Church leaders, deplored the persecution of Jews in Germany, who were suffering ‘at the hands of those who profess and represent the Christian faith’. This resolution was received unfavourably by some Lutheran and Free Church leaders in Germany; but in June 1933 the Alliance reiterated that the discrimination against the Jews was ‘contrary to the basic principles of tolerance and equality which are accepted in the modern world in relation to the treatment of religious and racial minorities’.⁶¹ The majority of Free Church leaders in Germany were not equipped to deal with the massive Nazi propaganda and they had difficulty in seeing the fundamental conflict between the goals of the regime and Christian ideals.⁶² For Baptists, the situation was even further blurred by the fact that under Hitler’s regime they received a relative recognition which the Landeskirchen had never offered to them.⁶³ Similar thinking affected the Brethren. In his study of the Brethren movement in Germany, Andreas Liese concludes that the German Brethren movement as a whole ‘accommodated itself to a substantial degree to the Nazi regime’.⁶⁴ Pentecostals, who were suspected by National Socialism of being a danger to the social order, suffered direct persecution, although Schmidgall concludes that Pentecostalism did not resist National Socialism more effectively than any other Free Church in Germany. However, there were individuals who took a stand against the totalitarian powers.⁶⁵ Another test for Free Churches in Europe came with Communist expansion. Communist rule from 1917 in Russia was openly atheistic; though it initially exerted less pressure on ‘dissenters’ compared to the repressions against the Orthodox Church. However, the decade beginning in 1929 saw ‘the most savage persecution of religion in the entire Soviet period’,⁶⁶ as ‘Stalin made . . . the struggle against all religious belief into a state matter’.⁶⁷ The situation eased a little during the Second World War, in 1944, when the Soviet ⁶¹ ‘News from Europe’, Evangelical Christendom, July–Aug. (1933), p. 150. ⁶² Patrick Ph. Streiff, Methodism in Europe: 19th and 20th Century (Tallinn, 2003), pp. 176–7; see also Andrea Strübind, Die unfreie Freikirche: der Bund Der Baptistengemeinden im ‘Dritten Reich’ (Wuppertal, Kassel, 1995). ⁶³ Bernard Green, European Baptists and the Third Reich (Didcot, 2008). ⁶⁴ Andreas Liese, ‘The Brethren Movement in Germany During the National Socialist Era’, in Tim Grass, ed., Witness in Many Lands: Leadership and Outreach among the Brethren (Troon, Scotland, 2013), p. 286. ⁶⁵ Schmidgall, European Pentecostalism, pp. 47–8. ⁶⁶ Philip Walters, ‘A Survey of Soviet Religious Policy’, in Sabrina Petra Ramet, ed., Religious Policy in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, 1993), p. 13. ⁶⁷ Hans Brandenburg, The Meek and the Mighty: The Emergence of the Evangelical Movement in Russia (New York, 1977), p. 187.

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government allowed a pan-Evangelical body to be formed. This was the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB), which included Baptists and Evangelical Christians, as well as some Pentecostal and Mennonite churches.⁶⁸ But post-war policy put heavy taxation on churches, rejected Christian education for children, and prohibited evangelism. Church leaders were also monitored and intimidated. These issues generated complex responses among churches in the Communist countries in Europe. Some believers saw cooperation with an atheistic state as a serious aberration and chose active resistance. Others, perhaps more pragmatically, played within prescribed rules. Internal conflicts in the AUCECB over registration and compliance with the government led to a split in the 1960s.⁶⁹ Most Pentecostals preferred to remain unregistered, and continued to work as underground churches. Not until the 1970s, when the Soviet government allowed Pentecostal churches to be registered, did some groups legalize their existence.⁷⁰ When political changes dawned in the 1990s, and churches could start working more freely in the former Communist bloc countries, evangelical believers were increasingly involved in evangelism and social care, finding in this a way to re-confirm their place in society. Although fascist and atheistic regimes bitterly opposed ideas of faith operating free from state control, there were other oppressive forces in Europe with which Free Churches had to contend. Often traditional majority churches saw Free Churches not only as a dissenting voice, but as a dangerous voice which destabilized the established views on mission and state–church patterns in their region. Thus Free Churches were vulnerable on several fronts. A religious country such as Romania, with its commitment to Orthodoxy, was profoundly repressive: it is said that few countries in Europe, apart from Russia, placed greater religious restrictions on Baptists.⁷¹ Some majority Lutheran or Roman Catholic countries in Europe also sought to curtail Free Church freedoms. They criticized Free Churches for their congregational ecclesiology and for their unwillingness to submit to hierarchical church authorities. This was interpreted as divisive and as creating unwanted disorder. An example from Northern Europe of Lutheran dominance at the expense of wider religious freedom was Denmark, while in Southern Europe, for example in Italy, the Free Churches have developed a critical stance towards established power structures as well as an instinctively Protestant conscience in collision with a dominant Roman Catholic cultural norm. Italian Free Churches have often supported the political opposition in the country, including the Communists, ⁶⁸ Walter Sawatsky, Soviet Evangelicals since World War II (Kitchener, Ontario, 1981), pp. 49, 78. ⁶⁹ Ibid., pp. 155–95, 350–2. ⁷⁰ Burgess and McGee, Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, p. 276. ⁷¹ Rushbrooke Mss, ‘Baptists as Defenders of Religious Freedom’. Address by J. H. Rushbrooke to the Northern Baptist Convention at Milwaukee, USA, 28 May 1938, Rushbrooke Papers, Angus Archive, Regents Park College Oxford.

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as they have viewed the political majority as well as the religious majority as together acting in an oppressive way towards dissenters.⁷² The precise issues connected with church and state varied across the century and in different parts of Europe, but for Free Churches they were always issues with which they had to contend. Pressure from political powers has been a factor forcing Free Churches to revisit their role in society. In some cases, such as during Communist times in the Soviet Union, some dissenting groups preferred to work unregistered and distanced themselves from political structures; in other cases, such as in Britain, Free Churches were much more involved in the political scene. The church–state relation is a central question for Free Church identity, from the time of the early Radical Reformation groups and English separatists that mark the beginning of dissenting traditions. The challenge for Free Churches in Europe has often been keeping a balance between loyal citizenship and having the calling to exercise a criticalprophetic voice in society.

THEOLOGY AND S PIRITUALITY The early twentieth century saw Methodist leaders such as A. S. Peake (1865–1929), contributing to the theological world. Peake became Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis in the University of Manchester. His many publications gave attention to the Bible as a whole and to individual books, on which he wrote commentaries.⁷³ Equally important for the life of the churches were those who applied theology to major issues of the day. Among Methodists these include Scott Lidgett (1854–1953), a theologian, scholar, statesman, and ‘apostle of Social Christianity’⁷⁴; Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976), the influential minister of the Congregational City Temple, who wrote books on topics such as psychotherapy; and Donald Soper (1903–98), a notable exponent of the social gospel. Traditional Wesleyan emphases were also promoted through the Salvation Army and the Church of the Nazarene.⁷⁵ Later in the century, Methodism’s most famous international preacher was Donald English (1930–98), twice President of the Methodist Conference and also chair of the World Methodist Council. English was known for his clear expositions ⁷² Schmidgall, European Pentecostalism, p. 46; Walter J. Hollenweger, The Pentecostals (Peabody, MA, 1988), pp. 255–60. ⁷³ See John Tudno Williams, ‘The Contribution of Protestant Nonconformists to Biblical Scholarship in the Twentieth Century’, in Alan P. F. Sell and Anthony R. Cross, eds. Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century (Carlisle, 2003), pp. 1–32. ⁷⁴ Sangster, History of the Free Churches, pp. 190–1. ⁷⁵ Ian M. Randall, ‘Full Salvation: Traditional Wesleyan Spirituality’, Evangelical Experiences: A Study in the Spirituality of English Evangelicalism 1918–1939 (Carlisle, 1999).

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of scripture, which ‘left his hearers wondering why they had read that passage so often and never grasped its heart before’.⁷⁶ Within Congregationalism there was a strong scholarly tradition. Indeed Alan Sell, examining Free Church theology in the twentieth century, found the largest contribution among Congregationalists.⁷⁷ C. H. Dodd (1884–1973), a Congregationalist from Wales, became the influential Professor of Divinity in Cambridge University. Dodd’s work was mainly on the New Testament. His extensive writings were widely appreciated for their combination of scholarship and accessibility. There was also a respected Congregational preaching tradition. P. T. Forsyth (1848–1921), Principal from 1901 of Hackney College, London, and the epitome of a scholar-preacher, considered that ‘with its preaching Christianity stands or falls’.⁷⁸ He also described preaching the gospel as ‘a great sacramental deed’.⁷⁹ A new generation of Congregational theologians in the 1920s and 1930s emphasized the place of the Lord’s Supper, as well as of preaching. Within many Free Churches, the idea of the Supper as simply a memorial became common in the nineteenth century.⁸⁰ There was, however, a counter-movement among some Free Church leaders, notably Congregationalists such as Nathaniel Micklem (1888–1976), Principal of Mansfield College in Oxford, and J. S. Whale (1896–1997), President of Cheshunt College, Cambridge. This ‘Genevan’ movement (so termed because of a degree of indebtedness to John Calvin), or ‘Orthodox Dissent’, encouraged a higher view of both Word and Sacrament.⁸¹ At the Congregational Westminster Chapel in London, J. H. Jowett, followed later by Campbell Morgan and then by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, preached to large congregations. Campbell Morgan (1863–1945), one of the greatest preachers of his age, spoke ‘with every fibre of his being’;⁸² while Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981), a Welshman, described preaching as ‘Logic on fire! Eloquent reason . . . theology on fire.’⁸³ Within Baptist life in the first half of the twentieth century, leading scholars had Old Testament studies as their particular focus. These scholars included H. Wheeler Robinson (1872–1945), Principal of Regent’s Park College; T. H. Robinson (1881–1964), Professor of Semitic Languages in University College, Cardiff; and H. H. Rowley (1890–1969), who in 1935 became

⁷⁶ P. Smith, ‘Donald English: Preacher’, in Ronald W. Abbott, ed., Donald English: An Evangelical Celebration (Ilkeston, 1999), p. 20. ⁷⁷ Alan P. F. Sell, Nonconformist Theology in the Twentieth Century (Milton Keynes, 2006), p. 3. ⁷⁸ P. T. Forsyth, Positive Preaching and Modern Mind (London, 1907), p. 1. ⁷⁹ P. T. Forsyth, The Church and the Sacraments (London, 1947), p. 144. ⁸⁰ Michael J. Walker, Baptists at the Table: The Theology of the Lord’s Supper Amongst English Baptists in the Nineteenth Century (Didcot, 1992), p. 3. ⁸¹ See Randall, ‘Word and Sacraments’, Evangelical Experiences, pp. 174–205. ⁸² Sangster, History of the Free Churches, p. 188. ⁸³ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers (London, 1971), pp. 97–8.

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Professor of Semitic Languages and Literature, University of Manchester.⁸⁴ Across Europe, Baptists have related biblical theology strongly to biblical preaching. An example of someone who had significant influence on Russian Baptists and Evangelical Christians through his teaching and writing was Ivan Kargel (1849–1937), who drew to some extent from the thinking of the Keswick Convention.⁸⁵ His spirituality was similar to that of Graham Scroggie (1877–1958), a Baptist minister in Edinburgh and the dominant mind at Keswick in the first half of the century. Scroggie’s conviction was that without biblical instruction, spiritual uplift was transient. Focus on the scriptures, through personal Bible reading, sermons, and literature was central for many Free Church believers. At grassroots level, the Bible was often used as a tool for finding directions for Christian life, and sometimes interpreted rather literally. However, attempts to find a more nuanced and scholarly interpretation clearly became part of Free Church life in the twentieth century. In the second half of the twentieth century there was a fresh flowering of biblical and theological scholarship within evangelical circles, to which Free Church thinkers contributed. A pioneer in Britain in the 1940s was the New Testament scholar and member of the Brethren, F. F. Bruce (1910–90), at Manchester University.⁸⁶ Another significant figure, who played a role in wider European Baptist life, was George Beasley-Murray (1916-2000), Principal of Spurgeon’s College, London. He was one of the foremost evangelical New Testament scholars of the twentieth century. Among his more than twenty books were seminal works such as Jesus and the Future (1954), and Baptism in the New Testament (1962). Beasley-Murray demonstrated an ability to make biblical scholarship available in plain language, and became the foremost Baptist advocate of a sacramental approach to believer’s baptism.⁸⁷ From the end of the 1980s, Paul Fiddes, at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, emerged as the leading European Baptist theologian in the field of contemporary theological thought. His ideas were discussed widely, not least through his considerable participation in ecumenical dialogue.⁸⁸ In Germany the foremost Baptist scholar was Erich Geldbach, who wrote a significant volume on the basic principles of Free Church mode of Christianity,⁸⁹ and from 1997 to 2004 was Professor of Ecumenical Theology and Denominational Studies at ⁸⁴ Randall, English Baptists of the Twentieth Century, pp. 122, 131–3, 202, 299–300. ⁸⁵ For Kargel see Gregory L. Nichols, The Development of Russian Evangelical Spirituality: A Study of Ivan V. Kargel (1849–1937) (Eugene, OR, 2011). ⁸⁶ See F. F. Bruce, In Retrospect: Remembrance of Things Past (London, 1980). ⁸⁷ Anthony R. Cross, Baptism and the Baptists: Theology and Practice in Twentieth-Century Britain (Carlisle, 2000), pp. 225–7. ⁸⁸ Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford, 1988); Paul S. Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature (Oxford, 2000); and Paul S. Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 2000). See also Paul S. Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement (London, 1989). ⁸⁹ Erich Geldbach, Freikirchen: Erbe, Gestalt und Wirkung (Göttingen, 1989).

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Bochum University. More recently, a significant contribution to the wider theological field has been made by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen from Finland and Miroslav Volf from Croatia—both have Pentecostal backgrounds but reach beyond their denominational framework.⁹⁰ Throughout the twentieth century, the ways the historic Free Churches related to the Pentecostal and charismatic movements were often problematic. The 1909 Berlin Declaration, a document by fifty-six German church leaders condemning the Pentecostal movement arose from a fear of enthusiastic excesses.⁹¹ However, Donald Gee (1891–1966), a prolific Pentecostal writer, who was once a member of a Baptist church and a supporter of ecumenical cooperation, defended the theology of the movement.⁹² Gee argued in 1933 that in its assent to the fundamentals of the Christian faith the Assemblies of God (his own denomination) were ‘in agreement with all sections of the Church holding orthodox and evangelical views’.⁹³ In Germany, under the leadership of Jonathan Paul (1853–1931), a strand of Pentecostalism was developed which became known for some theological ideas which are not common among Pentecostals. For example, Jonathan Paul defended infant baptism, without rejecting believer’s baptism, and he strongly opposed the Fundamentalist understanding of the Bible, a view which became more widespread in the Pentecostal churches in parts of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.⁹⁴ Pentecostals have had slight variations in their emphases on their distinctive approach to speaking in tongues. Many consider speaking in tongues as the only sign of the baptism in the Spirit, while others have a more open view on this. In many cases, it has been the emphasis on tongues that has distinguished Pentecostals from other Free Churches. In 1919, Ivan E. Voronaev, a Russian Baptist pastor became convinced about the reality of speaking in tongues as a result of the experience of his daughter. He established a Russian Pentecostal church in New York. Soon afterwards, Voronaev left America for Russia, travelling via Bulgaria where his views affected several Baptist churches. By the late 1930s Pentecostal membership in Bulgaria was greater than the combined membership of the other main Free Churches.⁹⁵ Voronaev’s ⁹⁰ See, for example, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Pneumatology: The Holy Spirit in Ecumenical, International, and Contextual Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002), Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Christ and Reconciliation (Grand Rapids, MI, 2013), Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Trinity and Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI, 2014); and Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN, 1996), Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI, 1998), Miroslav Volf, A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good (Grand Rapids, MI, 2011). ⁹¹ Hollenweger, The Pentecostals, p. 231. ⁹² Ibid., pp. 208–13. ⁹³ Donald Gee, ‘Assemblies of God’, Redemption Tidings (May 1933), p. 7. For the British Assemblies of God see William K. Kay, Inside Story: A History of British Assemblies of God (Mattersey, 1990). ⁹⁴ Hollenweger, The Pentecostals, pp. 238–9. ⁹⁵ Albert W. Wardin, ‘The Baptists in Bulgaria’, The Baptist Quarterly, XXXIV, 4 (1991), p. 153.

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extensive ministry resulted in planting more than 300 churches of Pentecostal leanings, many in Ukraine, until he was arrested and imprisoned. Where such Pentecostal ministry drew members from Baptist churches, there was a Baptist reaction.⁹⁶ In the later part of the century, however, with the spread of the charismatic movement, many European Baptists were more open to the possibility of all the gifts of the Spirit being for today’s church. Nigel Wright has been a leading Baptist theological thinker arguing in favour of a view of charismatic renewal as embracing the whole church.⁹⁷ Earlier dividing lines between Established, Pentecostal, and Free Church spirituality and worship became less clear. During the twentieth century the European Free Churches have increasingly approved of women taking on ministerial responsibilities. Their roles, which at the beginning of the century were mostly limited to mission and evangelism, and in particular to children’s ministry and diaconal work (for example the deaconesses in Britain and Germany), have expanded to include pastoral, teaching, and leadership tasks. The Salvation Army’s thinking and practice were moulded by Catherine Booth (1829–90), who argued for gender equality in ministry.⁹⁸ There are early twentieth-century examples of denominations ordaining women ministers: among British Congregationalists, for example, Constance Coltman; Baptists, with Violet Hedger becoming best known; and the Church of the Nazarene’s Olive May Winchester. In 1918 Edith Gates became a Baptist minister in Oxfordshire, at a time when normal procedures in the churches had been affected by the First World War, and four years later she became the first woman on the list of Baptist probationer ministers in England.⁹⁹ When Regent’s Park College in London (the move to Oxford was later) and the two London Congregational colleges were re-opened after the war, women were admitted for training: ‘the war-time service of womanhood’, it was noted, ‘had made previous restrictions impossible’. Violet Hedger, who trained in this period, became a well-known Baptist minister.¹⁰⁰ There were women ministers, but ordained Free Church ministry in Europe was an almost exclusively male preserve in the first half of the twentieth century. However, the second half of the twentieth century saw considerable change taking place. Ruth Gouldbourne traces the changes among British Baptists and concludes that ‘the numbers of women in pastoral ministry as recognised ministers’ began to rise sharply in the 1970s.¹⁰¹ In a number of European countries such as Germany, Austria, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and ⁹⁶ Hollenweger, The Pentecostals, p. 268. ⁹⁷ Nigel Wright, The Radical Kingdom (Eastbourne, 1986), pp. 19, 140. ⁹⁸ John Read, Catherine Booth: Laying the Theological Foundations of a Radical Movement (Eugene, OR, 2013), pp. 156–67. ⁹⁹ Ruth M. B. Gouldbourne, Reinventing the Wheel: Women and Ministry in English Baptist Life (Oxford, 1997), p. 27. ¹⁰⁰ Douglas C. Sparkes, An Accredited Ministry (Didcot, 1996), p. 32. ¹⁰¹ Gouldbourne, Reinventing the Wheel, p. 28.

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others, it was quite common by the later twentieth century for women to be ordained to ministry in several Free Church denominations. Elsie Chamberlain (1910–91) was a Congregational minister who became a leading figure in British broadcasting. She was also the first woman chaplain to the British armed forces. She became the first woman to occupy the chair of the Congregational Union of England and Wales.¹⁰² As well as Congregationalists and Baptists, similar trends can be seen also among British Methodists, who in 1973 agreed to accept women as candidates for ministry.¹⁰³ However, the situation is different within the Eastern European scene, where women’s leadership roles are rarely recogniszd officially, even if they may fulfil leadership responsibilities. Partly, this is the result of conservative biblical interpretation which has its roots in the Fundamentalist influences reaching Eastern Europe from the USA and propagating complementarian views.¹⁰⁴ In all parts of Europe throughout much of the twentieth century leadership in the Free Churches, as in all the Christian denominations, has been predominantly male. However, when detailed attention is given to local congregations this always shows the crucial role that women have played in Free Church life. During the twentieth century in Europe the Free Church use and interpretation of the Bible was enriched by biblical and theological scholarship. This was especially to be seen among Methodists, Congregationalists, and Baptists. Spiritual experience was also a crucial factor for Free Churches. Towards the end of the century it became evident that the growth of Pentecostal life, including theological studies, was bearing notable fruit. Free Churches were challenged to deal with a range of theological issues, for example, ecclesiological questions in ecumenical theological discussion, positions on the Fundamentalist-liberal scale, and attitudes towards women in ministry.

ISSUES OF IDENTITY A number of European Free Church figures became involved in seeking a united Free Church identity in the twentieth century. One of the most outstanding proponents was the British Baptist, J. H. Shakespeare, who in 1910 made an eloquent plea for a United Free Church of England, embracing (at least) Methodists, Congregationalists, and Baptists. The most serious problem, for Shakespeare, was that the churches were not coping with ¹⁰² See Alan Argent, Elsie Chamberlain: The Independent Life of a Woman Minister (Abingdon, 2012). ¹⁰³ Brian Stanley, The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott (Downers Grove, IL, 2013), pp. 216–17. ¹⁰⁴ John H. Y. Briggs, ed., A Dictionary of European Baptist Life and Thought (Milton Keynes, 2009), pp. 529–31.

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evangelizing England. His far-sighted vision was that in every community there would be the Anglican Church, ‘with its helpful traditions’, and a Free Church—with ‘simpler worship’.¹⁰⁵ Shakespeare’s message to the Free Church Council in 1916, ‘The Free Churches at the Cross-Roads’, has been reckoned as ‘one of the most brilliant and penetrating papers ever delivered by a Free Churchman’.¹⁰⁶ ‘We have reached a stage in the religious life of this country’, Shakespeare said, ‘when, if we are simply denominations and not a united Church, we are doomed . . . The era of Union must begin.’ He believed that denominationalism did not express the mind of Christ and was ‘a decaying idea’.¹⁰⁷ Shakespeare travelled all over the country to make his case.¹⁰⁸ The vision never became a reality, although within Methodism, the Wesleyan Methodist, Primitive Methodist, and United Methodist branches united in 1932.¹⁰⁹ Cox notes the importance of ‘the disappearance of a distinctive Nonconformist social identity’ in the twentieth century and suggests that this phenomenon awaits its historian.¹¹⁰ Perhaps part of the reason was failure to embrace the possibilities put forward by Shakespeare. Whereas a sense of a united Free Church identity gradually declined in Britain, Baptists across Europe felt a growing sense of belonging to a pannational Baptist community. Connections across Europe after the Second World War led in 1950 to the formation of the European Baptist Federation.¹¹¹ Keith Jones has argued that in ecclesial terms Baptists ‘more than any other denominational grouping’ have sought to foster a pan-European ecclesial identity. He suggests that of the Protestant World Communions—Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, and Methodist—it is Baptists who appear to have the greatest spread across the nations of Europe. This Baptist presence, Jones notes, has often been unrecognized in studies of religion in Europe. Significantly, Grace Davie, in Religion in Modern Europe, does not mention Baptists.¹¹² Admittedly Baptists do not compare in any way with the overall European numerical strength of the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Churches, Anglicanism, ¹⁰⁵ ‘United Free Church of England’, British Weekly (10 Nov. 1910), p. 170. ¹⁰⁶ E. K. H. Jordan, Free Church Unity: History of the Free Church Council Movement, 1896–1941 (London, 1956), p. 128. ¹⁰⁷ British Weekly (9 March 1916), p. 464; Free Church Year Book (London, 1916), pp. 9–24. ¹⁰⁸ R. Hayden, ‘Still at the Crossroads?: Revd J. H. Shakespeare and Ecumenism’, in K. W. Clements, ed., Baptists in the Twentieth Century (London, 1982), p. 45. ¹⁰⁹ John A. Newton, ‘Protestant Nonconformists and Ecumenism’, in Alan P. F. Sell and Anthony R. Cross, eds. Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century (Carlisle, 2003), pp. 361–6. ¹¹⁰ Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (London, 2008), p. 258. ¹¹¹ For this story see B. Green, Crossing the Boundaries: A History of the European Baptist Federation (Didcot, 1999). For a theological-ecclesiological analysis see Keith G. Jones, The European Baptist Federation: A Case Study in European Baptist Interdependency, 1950–2006 (Milton Keynes, 2009). ¹¹² Jones, The European Baptist Federation, p. 67; see also Grace Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford, 2000).

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or Lutheranism. But Methodism and Congregationalism in Europe are concentrated in a few countries. The Methodist Church, although numerically larger than the Baptists in Britain, had only 63,000 members across the whole of continental Europe in the early twenty-first century.¹¹³ Alongside Baptists, Pentecostals and Brethren have a similar Europe-wide spread. From 1987 there has been a Pentecostal European Fellowship.¹¹⁴ However, through the EBF, with its decades of experience of facilitating European Baptist working together, Baptists have a remarkably strong European identity. One significant means through which identity has been built has been through theological training. Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists, Pentecostals, and the Church of the Nazarene have all invested in education designed to train leaders in Europe. A Methodist theological seminary for the whole of Scandinavia was opened in Göteborg in 1924.¹¹⁵ The ‘mother church of Methodism’ in Tallinn, Estonia, was destroyed by Soviet bombs in 1944, but after the end of Communist rule a large plot of land was purchased for a new complex, to include a sanctuary area for worship and the first Methodist theological seminary in Estonia (the Baltic Mission Centre). The centre began with hopes to train students to work through Methodism not only in Estonia but in other parts of Northern and Eastern Europe, though, over the years, not all these hopes fully materialized.¹¹⁶ An International Baptist Seminary was established by the Southern Baptist Convention (in the USA) in Rüschlikon, near Zürich, Switzerland, in 1949, and this became a centre for European Baptist life. In 1994 the seminary moved from Rüschlikon to Prague, Czech Republic; and from 1998 there was a crucial change of focus, to a concentration on postgraduate studies. The 1990s saw many theological schools established in Eastern Europe.¹¹⁷ Karl Heinz Walter, a former General Secretary of EBF, noted, however, that it was one thing to study and teach the Bible, but another to think in theological terms.¹¹⁸ Keith Jones, who was appointed Rector in Prague, was a British Baptist leader who was committed to applied theological and historical work. The seminary helped to train many younger leaders from across Europe.¹¹⁹

¹¹³ World Methodist Council, Statistical Information, http://worldmethodistcouncil.org/ab out/member-churches/statistical-information/, accessed 24 July 2014. ¹¹⁴ Schmidgall, European Pentecostalism, p. 23. ¹¹⁵ Streiff, Methodism in Europe, p. 164. ¹¹⁶ Brian Hoare and Ian Randall, More Than a Methodist: The Life and Ministry of Donald English (Carlisle, 2003), pp. 193–4. ¹¹⁷ Cheryl Brown and Wes Brown, ‘Progress and Challenge in Theological Education in Central and Eastern Europe’, Transformation, XX, 1 (Jan. 2003), p. 1. ¹¹⁸ Karl Heinz Walter, ‘The Future of Theological Education within the European Baptist Federation’, Religion in Eastern Europe, XXI, 3 (June 2001), p. 23. ¹¹⁹ Carol Woodfin, An Experiment in Christian Internationalism: A History of the European Baptist Theological Seminary (Macon, GA, 2013). In 2014 the Seminary moved to Amsterdam.

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This focus on identity across Europe does not mean that identity was uniform. Free Churches have often been influenced by the majority Churches in their settings, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox. Thus Free Churches in Slavic areas of Europe have borrowed some elements from Orthodoxy. These elements can be seen in Baptist church architecture, in worship music, and also in following the Julian calendar for celebrating Easter. In their understanding of salvation, Slavic Baptists rejected the Western Reformed view which emphasizes the juridical aspect of salvation. Instead, they find inspiration from some aspects of Orthodox soteriology, such as salvation understood as victory over death.¹²⁰ Constantine Prokhorov has shown the influence of Orthodoxy on Russian Baptists in several areas.¹²¹ At the same time, Eastern European Free Church life was affected in significant ecclesial ways during the times of Communism, when a hierarchical model of leadership and strongly centralized denominational structures were imposed. Walter Kolarz has stated that the aim of the Soviet religious policy was to make the churches ‘not only as docile as possible but also as centralised as possible’.¹²² After the collapse of Communism, the autonomy of local churches increased again. The ecumenical movement, as noted above, has also had an impact on Free Church identity, especially in Western Europe. In 1918, Shakespeare published his important The Churches at the Cross-Roads.¹²³ Shakespeare was now advocating unity with the Church of England. His own ‘grand passion’ had become ‘a Church truly holy, truly Catholic; a Church which can, if needs be, override its past’.¹²⁴ He had become convinced that reunion must take place ‘upon the basis of episcopacy’. Shakespeare described himself as the ‘wayfarer who has come into a larger country’.¹²⁵ In 1920 an Appeal to All Christian People was issued by the Anglican Churches, asking for conversations about unity to take place between representatives of the Church of England and the Free Churches.¹²⁶ Although these earlier proposals did not produce results, in September 1942 the British Council of Churches (BCC), representing most of the main Protestant bodies in Britain that ‘confess the Lord Jesus as God and Saviour’, was inaugurated. The setting was Free Church—Baptist Church House, London. A service of inauguration took place in St Paul’s ¹²⁰ See Donald Fairbairn, Eastern Orthodoxy through Western Eyes (Louisville, KY, 2002), p. 86. ¹²¹ Constantine Prokhorov, ‘Orthodox and Baptists in Russia: The Early Period’, in Ian Randall, ed., Baptists and the Orthodox Church: On the Way to Understanding (Prague, 2003), p. 111; and Constantine Prokhorov, Russian Baptists and Orthodoxy, 1960–1990: A Comparative Study of Theology, Liturgy, and Traditions (Carlisle, 2013). ¹²² Walter Kolarz, Religion in the Soviet Union (London; New York, 1961), p. 304. ¹²³ J. H. Shakespeare, The Churches at the Cross-Roads; a Study in Church Unity (London, 1918), p. 178. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–2000, p. 98, considers this book of great importance. ¹²⁴ Shakespeare, The Churches at the Cross-Roads, p. 58. ¹²⁵ Ibid., p. 208. ¹²⁶ G. K. A. Bell, ed., Documents on Chrisitan Unity 1920–4 (London, 1924), p. 5.

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Cathedral, and in his speech William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury and the first President of the BCC, looked forward, at least implicitly, to the coming together of Roman Catholics and Protestants.¹²⁷ A group of Free Church theologians had meetings to discuss the subject of Protestant Catholicity, and this produced a report and a book, The Catholicity of Protestantism, in 1950.¹²⁸ Free Church leaders were also involved in inter-church theological discussions around issues of baptism, the Eucharist, and ministry. In 1974 the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches (WCC), which was formed in 1948, produced a document, One Baptism, One Eucharist and a Mutually Recognized Ministry (1974). British Baptists Ernest A. Payne (1902–80), a leading ecumenical statesman, and Morris West, were among Free Church leaders playing important roles in the WCC. West’s arguments helped to shape the final version of Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (BEM), produced at Lima in 1982. BEM became the most widely-discussed ecumenical theological document of the century.¹²⁹ The European Baptist Federation (EBF) General Secretary, Knud Wümpelmann, from Denmark, encouraged study of this ‘very important document’.¹³⁰ Some European Baptists were open to such engagement. Keith Clements, for example, became General Secretary of the Council of European Churches in 1997. He wrote a significant book, The Churches in Europe as Witnesses to Healing.¹³¹ However, others were influenced by lack of such engagement by significant Baptist bodies in North America.¹³² The 1970s and 1980s saw various schemes for unity discussed in Britain. The United Reformed Church (URC) was one such scheme which succeeded. The URC declared its intention to ‘pray and work for such visible unity of the whole Church as Christ wills and in the way he wills’.¹³³ But what hopes some had for Methodist-Anglican union in that period were dashed. While Methodists were in favour of union, the Church of England did not approve the proposed scheme by a sufficient majority. Despite this, Methodist-Anglican conversations continued.¹³⁴ Another ecumenical initiative in the 1970s through

¹²⁷ F. A. Iremonger, William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury; His Life and Letters (London, 1948), pp. 413–14. ¹²⁸ Ernest A. Payne, The Baptist Union: A Short History (London, 1959), pp. 219–20. ¹²⁹ K. W. Clements, ‘The Larger Context: Morris West, Servant of World Ecumenism’, in W. M. S. West, ed., Baptists Together: Papers Published in Memory of W. M. S. West, JP, MA, DTheol, Hon LLD 1922–1999 (Didcot, 2000), pp. 19–29. ¹³⁰ Letter from the EBF General Secretary to all member Unions, Box 2, 8 Nov. 1984, EBF Correspondence 1982–1986, EBF Archive, International Baptist Theological Study Centre, Amsterdam. ¹³¹ K. W. Clements, The Churches in Europe as Witnesses to Healing (Geneva, 2003). ¹³² Jones, The European Baptist Federation, pp. 75–6. ¹³³ Sangster, History of the Free Churches, p. 181. ¹³⁴ In 2003 an Anglican-Methodist Covenant was signed, with hopes for closer collaboration between the two Churches.

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1980s of a broader nature was the Churches’ Unity Commission in Britain setting out (in 1976) The Ten Propositions for discussion. In 1982 the national covenant scheme that was proposed was accepted by the United Reformed Church and the Methodist Church, but narrowly rejected by the Church of England, and discussions about covenanting then ended. However, a Covenant was signed among Churches in Wales.¹³⁵ An ecumenical Inter-Church Process (ICP) was launched in May 1985 and implemented in 1990. This offered a broader expression of unity, to include not only Roman Catholics but also Black-led churches.¹³⁶ Although there are European Pentecostals involved in ecumenical work, such as Peter Kuzmic from the former Yugoslavia, Pentecostals in Europe have been less involved in ecumenical dialogue than have Methodists, Baptists, and Congregationalists (Mission Covenant Church)—who in Sweden have recently formed a new church structure, an ecumenical Uniting Church. Italian Pentecostals are very cautious about the ecumenical efforts which characterize Italian Free Churches such as the Waldensians.¹³⁷ However, European Free Churches developed their views on identity that expanded denominational boundaries. No doubt it was easier for them to find common ground with traditions that had a similar history or common experience and spirituality; for example, Free Churches have worked together in the European Evangelical Alliance. But a new aspect was that Free Churches became more involved in wider European ecumenical frameworks; for example, Baptists have contributed to the work of the Conference of European Churches.¹³⁸ In the Eastern European context, Orthodox theologian Vladimir Fedorov suggests that ecumenical trends have recently become weaker. He argues that there is an urgent task ‘that all the Eastern and Central European churches face: arousing in believers the spirit of mercy and love, encouraging charitable activities and interest in social ethics, and introducing these subjects in educational systems at different levels’.¹³⁹ This is a vision not only of identity but of social engagement.

SOCIAL AND G LOBA L INVOLVEMENTS Social involvement by Free Churches was a notable feature of the early twentieth century. Most Free Churches were concerned for the needy in society. The ¹³⁵ Newton, ‘Protestant Nonconformists and Ecumenism’, p. 375. ¹³⁶ Christopher J. Ellis, Together on the Way: A Theology of Ecumenism (London, 1990), pp. 4–5. ¹³⁷ Hollenweger, The Pentecostals, pp. 251, 256. ¹³⁸ Briggs, Dictionary of European Baptist Life and Thought, pp. 158–9. ¹³⁹ Vladimir Fedorov, ‘Ecumenical Missionary Needs and Perspectives in Eastern and Central Europe Today: Theological Education with an Accent on Mission as a First Priority in Our Religious Rebirth’, International Review of Mission, XCII, 364 (Jan. 2003), p. 5.

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Salvation Army was an outstanding example. Salvationists have been active in social ministries in countries in many parts of Europe. In France, by the end of the twentieth century, the Salvation Army had become the largest social institution.¹⁴⁰ In many deprived areas in Britain and in Germany, the work of Baptist deaconesses was crucial in the early decades of the twentieth century. In London a Baptist Deaconesses’ Home and Mission had been founded in 1890, and medical, social, pastoral, and evangelistic work was undertaken.¹⁴¹ British Free Churches also wanted to see change brought about through political means. They fought hard on behalf of the Liberal Party—the party of reform—in the 1906 British General Election.¹⁴² It seemed in 1906, when the Liberals achieved a huge majority in Parliament, that a great Free Church battle had been won, with many Free Church MPs in the new Parliament. A victory banquet was held in London. John Clifford (1836–1923), who was the leading Baptist public figure of the time and who was the epitome of what was called the ‘Nonconformist Conscience’, was among the speakers.¹⁴³ But Free Church leaders like Clifford began to discover that the new government was unable to implement its policies because of the Upper Chamber of Parliament, the House of Lords. Free Churches looked for changes in society and believed that they had a role in bringing those about. Almost one hundred years later, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a number of Eastern European Baptists were also inspired by similar hopes, participating in Parliamentary or governmental structures, for example in Latvia, Moldova, and Ukraine. Despite their principle of the separation of church and state in matters of conscience, the Free Churches saw themselves as contributing to the common good in society. Simon Coleman has pointed out that a non-established church ‘has more of a chance to engage actively with civil society, to protest against state policies, indeed to encourage the very spirit of voluntarism’.¹⁴⁴ Methodists have a tradition of consciously combining evangelism with social activism, perhaps more clearly than any other dissenting tradition. In 1925, Bishop John Nuelsen spoke of ‘the particular task of Methodism in Europe: to be a Church which is active in promoting the Kingdom of God in society’.¹⁴⁵ Quakers have been similarly active, with their significance being out of all ¹⁴⁰ Henry Gariepy, Christianity in Action: The International History of the Salvation Army (Grand Rapids, MI, 2009), pp. 149–50. ¹⁴¹ Doris M. Rose, Baptist Deaconesses (London, 1954), p. 10; Nicola Morris, Sisters of the People: The Order of Baptist Deaconesses 1890–1975 (Bristol, 2002), p. 10. ¹⁴² D. W. Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–1914 (London, 1982), pp. 142–7; D. A. Hamer, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery: A Study in Leadership and Policy (Oxford, 1972), p. 311. ¹⁴³ D. W. Bebbington, ‘Baptist Members of Parliament in the Twentieth Century’, The Baptist Quarterly, XXXI, 6 (April 1986), pp. 254–5. ¹⁴⁴ Simon Coleman, ‘Christianity in Western Europe: Mission Fields, Old and New?’, in Charles E. Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity (Chichester, 2012), p. 72. ¹⁴⁵ Streiff, Methodism in Europe, p. 173.

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proportion to their size, especially in times of war and the aftermath of war.¹⁴⁶ After the First World War, several groups conducted surveys of the state of affairs in countries in Europe. Following one survey, Baptist delegates from Britain, America, Canada, and Australia, and from eighteen continental European countries, met in London in July 1920 to hear reports.¹⁴⁷ Plans were made to give relief aid to the many devastated parts of Europe. J. H. Rushbrooke had engaged in constructive conversations with T. G. Masaryk, the President of the newly-formed country of Czechoslovakia, about reform.¹⁴⁸ Rushbrooke paid as many visits as he could in the 1920s to Eastern European countries, including the Soviet Union. Important relief efforts were undertaken. In the face of repression of Christians in the USSR, John Clifford signed a protest prepared by the Archbishop of Canterbury about attacks on the Orthodox Church.¹⁴⁹ An openness to help and to serve has been present in Western as well as Eastern European Free Church life: ‘Russian evangelicals never separated social ministry from gospel preaching and mission work, as one finds in some discussions on mission in western conservative groups that shape today’s Christians in the East.’¹⁵⁰ Certainly, during Communism, practical service was necessarily limited. It was directed predominantly to other church members, and even this was illegal. However, in the Soviet Union, evangelicals became known as those who took care of each other. This was a powerful message in a society that theoretically offered complete social care, but practically did very little. With the first signs of political and religious freedom, wider social ministry revived. Russian Baptists, for example, took up ministry with and for the deaf and for orphans.¹⁵¹ In the background was the wider movement of miloserdiye (mercy) during perestroika, in 1988–9.¹⁵² The believers were now allowed to do charitable work in hospitals, as there was a serious lack of hospital staff in the Soviet Union. The chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs remarked somewhat contemptuously: ‘If the believers want to carry bed-pans, let them.’¹⁵³ Social awareness has continued to be a

¹⁴⁶ See Thomas C. Kennedy, British Quakerism, 1860–1920: The Transformation of a Religious Community (Oxford, 2001). ¹⁴⁷ Green, Tomorrow’s Man, p. 80. ¹⁴⁸ J. H. Rushbrooke, ‘Relations of Baptists with European Governments’, in William Thomas Whitley, ed., Third Baptist World Congress: Stockholm, July 21–27, 1923 (London, 1923), p. 92. ¹⁴⁹ G. K. A. Bell, Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury (Oxford, 1952 edn), pp. 1079–80. ¹⁵⁰ Peter Penner, ‘Critical Evaluation of Recent Developments in the Commonwealth of Independent States’, Transformation, XX, 1 (Jan. 2003), p. 15. ¹⁵¹ See Pilli, ‘Baptist Identities in Eastern Europe’, pp. 103–4. ¹⁵² Michael Bourdeaux, ‘The Quality of Mercy: A Once-Only Opportunity’, in John Witte, Jr and Michael Bourdeaux, eds. Proselytism and Orthodoxy in Russia: The New War for Souls (Maryknoll, NY, 1999), p. 189. ¹⁵³ Jane Ellis, ‘Some Reflections About Religious Policy under Kharchev’, in Sabrina Petra Ramet, ed., Religious Policy in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, 1993), p. 88.

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guiding motif. In 1996 Hungarian Baptist Aid was established, which has become a significant organization providing international relief and humanitarian aid.¹⁵⁴ Peter Kuzmic has noted, referring to Eastern Europe: ‘Developing a spirituality for transformative social engagement remains one of the priority tasks of the churches.’¹⁵⁵ Involvement in overseas mission was a characteristic of all dissenting traditions. In the nineteenth century, as Diarmaid MacCulloch states, ‘a majority of British missionaries were members of Dissenting Churches or Methodists’.¹⁵⁶ The number of missionaries with the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), established in 1792, reached its peak in the 1920s. The result was that Baptist communities grew significantly in North-East India, Jamaica, Congo, and other countries. Also, since the late 1980s, the Society has been increasingly active in a number of European countries, and also in South-East Asia and Central America.¹⁵⁷ Baptists have been seeking to cooperate with other mission agencies. Methodist missions have also been significant. For example, Scandinavian Methodists gave substantial support to women missionaries in Angola, North Africa, and India.¹⁵⁸ The Pentecostal Missionary Union in Great Britain was founded in 1909 by Cecil Polhill (1860–1938), who was one of the ‘Cambridge Seven’ missionaries to China (with the China Inland Mission) in 1885. This organization was one of the earliest Pentecostal mission agencies. It joined the Assemblies of God.¹⁵⁹ Among early British Pentecostal missionaries, William Burton (1886–1971), with his multifaceted work in the Congo, was the most remarkable.¹⁶⁰ The Brethren were notable for their involvement in overseas mission, coordinated and publicized through a home office and a magazine, Echoes of Service. In the 1930s, up to 4000 people were attending the Brethren’s annual London Missionary Meetings.¹⁶¹ The Communist Revolution in China forced all foreign missionaries—the London Missionary Society (Congregational), the BMS, and the China Inland Mission among them—to leave the country by the early 1950s, and this had a profound impact on British Free Church involvement in world mission. More widely in Europe there was uncertainty about the role of Europeans abroad.

¹⁵⁴ Briggs, Dictionary of European Baptist Life and Thought, p. 252. ¹⁵⁵ Peter Kuzmic, ‘Christianity in Eastern Europe: A Story of Pain, Glory, Persecution, and Freedom’, in Charles E. Farhadian, ed., Introducing World Christianity (Chichester, 2012), pp. 86–7. ¹⁵⁶ Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London, 2009), p. 875. ¹⁵⁷ Briggs, Dictionary of European Baptist Life and Thought, p. 36. ¹⁵⁸ Streiff, Methodism in Europe, p. 164. ¹⁵⁹ Peter Hocken, ‘Cecil H. Polhill: Pentecostal Layman’, Pneuma, X, 2 (1988), pp. 131, 135. ¹⁶⁰ For aspects of Burton’s work, see David Maxwell, ‘Photography and the Religious Encounter: Ambiguity and Aesthetics in Missionary Representations of the Luba of South East Belgian Congo’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, LIII, 1 (2011), pp. 38–74. ¹⁶¹ Grass, Gathering to His Name, pp. 343, 489.

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Eastern Europeans, for their part, had no freedom to engage world mission. Within Britain, the end of the British Empire also contributed to a decline in overseas missionary activity. John Stuart suggests that just prior to the Second World War the number of Protestant missionaries from the UK was 9300 and that this number had fallen to 4475 by 1962.¹⁶² Also, the length of service overseas declined and the number of ‘life-long’ missionaries was reduced considerably. Despite these changes, the Free Church tradition continued to play its part in overseas mission. In 1966 the London Missionary Society and the Commonwealth Missionary Society combined to form the Congregational Council for World Mission. In 1977, as a consequence of the formation of the United Reformed Church, the Council for World Mission was inaugurated. In 1982 a periodic analysis of Protestant overseas missionaries from Britain, which included short-term missionaries, showed that 40 per cent were Anglican, with the remainder largely being from various Free Church denominations—Baptist (26 per cent), Brethren (10 per cent), Presbyterian (9 per cent), Pentecostal (6 per cent), Methodist (5 per cent) and other (4 per cent). The total number of British overseas Protestant missionaries was estimated at about 8000. By 1998 Baptists as a proportion had declined significantly to 16 per cent (Anglicans were still the largest group, at 34 per cent) and the most dramatic change was in the ‘others’, which was now 25 per cent, reflecting the growth of independent/charismatic evangelical churches and ethnically-based evangelical denominations.¹⁶³ By the beginning of the twenty-first century the ebullient expressions of nonconformity represented by the London Missionary Society and the BMS (by now called BMS World Mission) in the nineteenth century had long gone. Even among the Brethren the earlier level of missionary interest was not maintained, but even at the end of the century that proportion was higher than in any other Protestant denomination.¹⁶⁴ By the later decades of the twentieth century the key events in world Christianity were increasingly taking place in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.¹⁶⁵ The growth of the church in the non-Western world was having a highly significant impact in Britain and other European countries through large and growing Black majority and ethnically diverse churches—the phenomenon of ‘reverse mission’. Ethnic Free Churches in Europe became a widespread reality.¹⁶⁶ Many European cities found that they had very large Pentecostal ¹⁶² John Stuart, British Missionaries and the End of Empire: East, Central, and Southern Africa, 1939–64 [in English] (Grand Rapids, MI, 2011), p. 189. ¹⁶³ P. W. Brierley and Heather Wraight, eds. UK Christian Handbook, 2000/01 (London, 1999), pp. 258–9. ¹⁶⁴ Grass, Gathering to His Name, pp. 343, 489. ¹⁶⁵ Andrew F. Walls, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (Edinburgh, 2002), p. 69. ¹⁶⁶ Peter F. Penner, ed., Ethnic Churches in Europe: A Baptist Response (Schwarzenfeld, 2006).

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congregations composed of immigrants. The largest Pentecostal and Baptist churches in London were Black majority congregations, with Kingsley Appiagyei, for example, pastor of a congregation of 2000 people in West Norwood, London, seeing himself as a missionary seeking to strengthen the church in the UK. There was certainly evidence in the later twentieth century of continuing European Free Church commitment to mission elsewhere in the world, but as Israel Oluwole Olofinjana put it, the tables were being turned. Olofinjana, who comes from a Pentecostal background in Nigeria, is a Baptist minister in London. His book, Turning the Tables on Mission, documents the experiences of contemporary missionaries from the global south coming to Europe.¹⁶⁷ Free Churches have defined themselves as standing for the separation of church and state, and thus have sought to reserve a freedom for critical involvement in social and religious matters. However, this does not mean withdrawing from society. All through the twentieth century Free Churches in Europe have demonstrated political interest, especially in Britain and other parts of Western Europe, but after freedom dawned this has also been the case in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine, Moldova, and other countries. Combining an evangelical thrust with social compassion is inherent in Free Church identity; often this is expressed at a personal and congregational level, though the twentieth century saw also Free Church organizational structures in parts of Europe being born or strengthened in order to meet social needs in society and working for the common good. Global involvement—especially in missions— has acquired new features; European Free Churches are not only sending missionaries to other continents as they have done in the past, but a number of Free Church missionaries coming from Asia and Africa have made Europe their mission field.

CONCLUSIO N The European framework in which Free Churches have operated through the twentieth century has changed considerably. Against the background of secularism in society and numerical decline of some churches, a growth in membership of Baptists and Pentecostals, as well as new charismatic churches, is noticeable. Free Churches representing the historical dissenting traditions have faced new challenges. Europe is not only a missionary-sending continent, but now stands also in a receiving capacity: the number of ethnic churches is growing. Evangelistic patterns have moved from mass-events towards more relational patterns, such as Alpha courses and home groups. With a history of ¹⁶⁷ Israel Oluwole Olofinjana, Turning the Tables on Mission (London, 2013).

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fragile ethical and theological balance in their relations with the state, the Free Churches, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, are seeking for more positive ways of contributing to the common good in the society. The goal is to do this through political as well as social activities, but without losing their inherent stance of critical distance. The twentieth century also saw Free Churches making a contribution in applied theology and preaching. Ecumenical projects, though not all fully successful, have made Free Church voices better heard in the wider Church. There have also been new trends in worship, especially through charismatic spirituality. The story of European Free Churches is a story of transformation and change, but it is far from being a story of resignation or decline. Simon Coleman is bold enough to offer a promising perspective: ‘Some of the most vital and dynamic Churches in Western Europe (and elsewhere)’, he writes, ‘are those that require not birth into the Church, but an active decision to enter into the faith, often through a “born-again” experience.’¹⁶⁸

S E L E C T B I BL IO G R A P H Y Anderson, Allan. An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Bebbington, D. W. The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–1914 (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1982). Bebbington, D. W. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980 (London: Routledge, 1995). Bloch-Hoell, Nils. The Pentecostal Movement: Its Origin, Development, and Distinctive Character (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964). Briggs, John H. Y., ed. A Dictionary of European Baptist Life and Thought (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2009). Burgess, Stanley M., ed. The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Pub. House, 2002). Clements, K. W. The Churches in Europe as Witnesses to Healing (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2003). Coleman, Heather J. Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905–1929 (Bloomington, IN:, Indiana University Press, 2005). Cross, Anthony R. Baptism and the Baptists: Theology and Practice in TwentiethCentury Britain (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2000). Davie, Grace. Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Grass, Tim. Gathering to His Name: The Story of the Open Brethren in Britain and Ireland (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006). ¹⁶⁸ Coleman, ‘Christianity in Western Europe’, p. 72.

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Green, B. Crossing the Boundaries: A History of the European Baptist Federation (Didcot: Baptist Historical Society, 1999). Hastings, Adrian. A History of English Christianity, 1920–2000 (London: SCM Press, 2001 edn). Hoare, Brian, and Ian Randall. More Than a Methodist: The Life and Ministry of Donald English (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2003). Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Jones, Keith G. The European Baptist Federation: A Case Study in European Baptist Interdependency, 1950–2006 (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2009). Kay, William K. Inside Story: A History of British Assemblies of God (Mattersey: Mattersey Hall Pub., 1990). Kay, William K. and Anne E. Dyer, eds. European Pentecostalism (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011). McLeod, Hugh. European Religion in the Age of the Great Cities, 1830–1930 (London: Routledge, 1995). Nichols, Gregory L. The Development of Russian Evangelical Spirituality: A Study of Ivan V. Kargel (1849–1937) (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011). Penner, Peter F., ed. Ethnic Churches in Europe: A Baptist Response (Schwarzenfeld: Neufeld, 2006). Pilli, Toivo. ‘Baptist Identities in Eastern Europe’, in Ian M. Randall, Toivo Pilli and Anthony R. Cross, eds. Baptist Identities: International Studies from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006). Pilli, Toivo. Dance or Die: The Shaping of Estonian Baptist Identity under Communism (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008). Prokhorov, Konstantin, ‘The “Golden Age” of the Soviet Baptists in the 1920s’, in Sharyl Corrado and Toivo Pilli, eds. Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives (Prague: IBTS, 2007). Prokhorov, Konstantin. Russian Baptists and Orthodoxy, 1960–1990: A Comparative Study of Theology, Liturgy, and Traditions (Carlisle: Langham Monographs, 2013). Randall, Ian M. The English Baptists of the Twentieth Century (Didcot: Baptist Historical Society, 2005). Read, John. Catherine Booth: Laying the Theological Foundations of a Radical Movement (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013). Ruston, Alan, ‘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: Paternoster, 2003). Sawatsky, Walter. Soviet Evangelicals since World War II (Kitchener, Ontario: Herald Press, 1981). Schmidgall, Paul. European Pentecostalism: Its Origins, Development, and Future (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2013). Sell, Alan P. F. Nonconformist Theology in the Twentieth Century (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006). Stanley, Brian. The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013).

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Streiff, Patrick Ph. Methodism in Europe: 19th and 20th Century (Tallinn: Baltic Methodist Theological Seminary, 2003). Westin, Gunnar. The Free Church through the Ages (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1958). Williams, John Tudno, ‘The Contribution of Protestant Nonconformists to Biblical Scholarship in the Twentieth Century’, in Alan P. F. Sell and Anthony R. Cross, eds. Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2003). Wolffe, John. God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843–1945 (London: Routledge, 1994). Wright, Nigel. Free Church, Free State: The Positive Baptist Vision (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2005).

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13 Dissent by Default ‘Believing Without Belonging’ in Twenty-First-Century England Sylvia Collins-Mayo

The seventeenth-century English Dissenters earned their name from their refusal to conform to the doctrines, practices, and authority of the established Church of England. Today, the majority of the English population does not conform to official Church of England teachings and traditions or, indeed, to those of any other Christian denomination—including the Nonconformist denominations set up by the early Dissenters. In a sense ‘dissent’ against institutional religion has therefore become the norm. Drift and disengagement, however, are the main factors in this ‘nonconformity’ rather than active protest against the Church. This chapter discusses current attitudes and approaches to Christianity in England using Davie’s concept of ‘believing without belonging’ as the orientating concept.¹ Beyond this, the notion of dissent is also considered in the social sense of going against the prevailing norm in order to take Christianity seriously and actively engage with it, either for or against. The active ‘believing and belonging’ Christian minority falls into this category. Often willing to embrace practices from a variety of Christian traditions, this minority is increasingly post-denominational. Authenticity, community, and a meaningful lifestyle are key features of their faith commitment rather than institutional conformity. Opposing them, but nevertheless taking Christianity (and other faiths) seriously, are the active Atheist minority who are concerned enough to take a stand and campaign against religion in the public sphere.

¹ Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford, 1994).

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‘ BELIEVING WITHOUT BELONGING ’ ‘Believing without belonging’ was a phrase developed by Davie in the early 1990s to capture a mood of religion in Britain at the end of the twentieth century. It began with the observation that a large number of people who rarely, if ever, go to church (i.e. who therefore do not ‘belong’) nevertheless believe in God (or ‘something out there’) and, indeed, may well call themselves ‘Christian’. The phrase caught on and attracted much attention in academic and pastoral circles concerned with the fate of Christianity and religion more generally. At the time, Davie’s was something of a ‘dissenting voice’ against the view held by many sociologists that modern life necessarily meant religious decline and secularization. For Davie, approaches to religion were changing but nevertheless the Christian heritage of England continued to have a place in people’s lives and mattered to them. The nature of its place and the extent to which it mattered became the focus of subsequent research and debate. Today, twenty-or-so years on, the gap between the numbers who ‘believe’ and the numbers who ‘belong’ remains but the discussion has developed and benefits from more empirical evidence.

Christian Identity A key piece of evidence came in 2001 when the national Census for England and Wales included for the first time a question on religious identity. It was phrased simply and directly, ‘What is your religion?’ and gave six major world faiths plus ‘no religion’ from which to choose. Space was also provided to write any other religion not listed. The question was voluntary (around 8 per cent of people chose not answer it) and it was repeated in the 2011 Census. Religious identity does not directly measure belief or belonging, but it does give a sense of people’s point of religious reference. Looking at the data for England, the census showed that most people still called themselves Christian as Davie suggested; Christianity was and remains the dominant religious identity by some margin. However, the difference between 2001 and 2011 leaves little doubt that people are increasingly distancing themselves from a Christian cultural heritage. In 2001, 72 per cent of the population of England and Wales identified as Christian but by 2011 the proportion had fallen to 59 per cent. In the same period, the number of individuals identifying with other religions grew from 6 to 9 per cent. The greatest growth, however, came in the ‘no religion’ category which rose from 15 per cent of the population in 2001 to 25 per cent in 2011 and was especially strong among younger people.² ² Office for National Statistics, Full Story: What Does the Census Tell Us About Religion in 2011? (London, 2013), p. 2.

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The Office for National Statistics records, ‘Nearly a third (32 per cent) of people aged under 25 reported no religion in 2011 compared to a fifth (19 per cent) in 2001.’³

Denominational Identity The Census for England and Wales did not ask Christians a further question about denominational affiliation. The British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, however, does elicit this information.⁴ A representative sample of the adult population is asked: ‘Do you regard yourself as belonging to any particular religion?’ Respondents can identify their faith and their denomination if they choose to, or select ‘no religion’ or ‘don’t know’. The word ‘belonging’ in the question suggests at least some degree of ongoing subjective connection to the religious group or tradition chosen, which is not so apparent in the Census question wording, although this does not in itself demonstrate active commitment. The results of BSA surveys indicate that much of the distancing from Christianity relates to people disaffiliating from the Church of England, or at least being less inclined to describe themselves as nominal ‘C of E’, which has been a common default position in the past. Nearly a third of the British adult population in 2001 identified as Church of England/Anglican but in 2011 less than a quarter did so.⁵ Even so, the BSA survey also shows that more people continue to identify with the Church of England than with any other single Christian denomination. Roman Catholics constituted around 9 per cent of the population in 2011 and ‘Other Christian’ denominations grouped together made up around 16 per cent. Forty-four per cent of people described themselves as ‘no religion’.

Church Attendance Self-reports of affiliation or even of belonging gives interesting data, but fall short of saying what affiliated identities mean to people or how that affiliation fits into their lives. Day’s exploration of the meaning of ‘Christian’ identity in response to the 2001 Census identified several secular factors came into play as well as religious ones.⁶ Being born to Christian parents or having been ³ Ibid., p. 5. ⁴ The UK Data Service Nesstar Catalogue provides access to BSA survey data. UK Data Service, Nesstar Catalogue, Nesstar.ukdataservice.ac.uk/webview/. Last accessed 9 March 2018. ⁵ These figures were calculated from data provided through the UK Data Service Nesstar Catalogue. Neither the original data collectors, depositors, or copyright holders, the funders of the Data Collections, nor the UK Data Archive bear any responsibility for the accuracy, comprehensiveness, or interpretation of the data supplied. ⁶ Abby Day, Believing in Belonging: Belief and Social Identity in the Modern World (Oxford, 2011).

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baptized as an infant, for example, conferred an identity but not necessarily one that people gave thought or significance to. For some people, ‘Christian’ substituted for an ethnic identity of ‘white English’ rather than religious conviction; and some people said they were Christian in order to convey respectability. Other studies have found similar results. In the words of one teenager, ‘even though I don’t follow it, I am a Christian . . . It’s like everyone plays football but you support different teams, and you don’t support someone else’s team because you don’t live there.’⁷ Church attendance provides a ‘harder’ measure of belonging in that it suggests belief is at least worth getting out of bed for. Head counts of attenders are better than self-reports of churchgoing since self-reports can, if unwittingly, over- or under-estimate attendance. But accurately counting the number of people in a church service is easier said than done. Aside from the difficulties of keeping up with the comings and goings of people in services, what counts as a church service in the first place? Holy Communion on a Sunday morning is obvious, but what about the increasing number of mid-week informal services such as prayer meetings or so-called ‘fresh expressions’ of church developed by the Anglican and Methodist churches? These can range from ‘well blessings’ to arts-and-crafts-with-worship ‘messy church’. When to count is another issue. Counting the number of attenders at special services such as a Christmas carol service, Remembrance Day service, baptism service, or even an Easter service is likely to give a fuller impression than an ‘average’ Sunday attendance when there are no extra pulls to draw people in. Equally, bank holiday weekends and summer holiday times are likely to depress numbers. Who to count? Some churchgoers see themselves as committed attenders if they go to church once a month, others once a week, but some people go twice in one day, to a morning and evening service for example. Moreover, they may have different roles at those services. Account therefore has to be taken of attendance versus attenders if accurate figures are to be gained. None of this is easy. Notwithstanding all the difficulties above, Brierley’s church censuses, surveys, and collations of official church statistics, have been helpful in securing useful comparative data on attendance. For example, by collecting data from as many congregations and as many denominations as possible, his English Church Census provides data on ‘average’ Sunday attendance. This research indicates that average Sunday attendance fell from 11.7 per cent of the population in 1979 to 6.3 per cent in 2005 and that ‘the average size of a Protestant congregation in 2005 was 67 people which was about a quarter of the average Catholic Mass attendance’.⁸ To put the 2005 figure in perspective ⁷ Sylvia Collins-Mayo et al.,The Faith of Generation Y (London, 2010). ⁸ Peter Brierley, Pulling out of the Nosedive: A Contemporary Picture of Churchgoing; What the 2005 English Church Census Reveals (London, 2006), pp. 12, 47.

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Brierley notes that the number of people in church on an average Sunday (some 3.2 million) is greater than the number who attend Premier League football matches on a weekend but is only half the number of Britons who go to IKEA stores on Sundays.⁹

Denominational Attendance Within the overall downward trend, some denominations are shrinking faster than others, and some are actually growing. In England between 1998 and 2005, for example, Anglican church attendance on an average Sunday fell by 11 per cent, Roman Catholic by 28 per cent, and the United Reformed Church by 43 per cent. Methodist attendance fell by 24 per cent and Baptist by 8 per cent. On the other hand, the Orthodox Church grew its very small numbers by 2 per cent and smaller denominations grew by 9 per cent. The main success related to Pentecostal churches, which increased overall average Sunday attendance by 34 per cent from 214,600 attendance in 1998 to 287,600 in 2005 (although there was variation between different Pentecostal denominations too).¹⁰ Migration of people from more religiously active parts of the world to England account for some of the growth in ‘successful’ churches. This is especially so in London, where church attendance has declined at a slower rate than elsewhere in the country. Whereas for England as a whole the Christian population fell by 11 per cent between 2001 and 2011; for London the decline was just 5 per cent.¹¹ Brierley notes that the ‘combined Asian and Black population in London is 31 per cent of the total, against only 8 per cent in the rest of England’.¹² Migrants choosing to settle in the capital is one reason for the diversity of London’s population. Migrants whose countries of origin retain norms of active churchgoing are likely to join (and even set up) churches to address their spiritual and socio-cultural needs (including services in languages other than English). Brierley’s figures indicate that ‘some 9 per cent of London’s population attend church on a Sunday, [but] this varies from 8 per cent of the white population to 16 per cent of the Chinese, Korean and Japanese population and 19 per cent of the black population’.¹³ Anglican, Baptist, Orthodox, Independent, and (especially) Pentecostal denominations have seen an increase in the number of London churches in the period 1979–2012. Roman Catholic, Methodist, and the United Reformed Church denominations have reduced their number of London churches over the same period.¹⁴ Even when denominations have retained numbers, however, it is clear that across England ⁹ Ibid., p. 14. ¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 26, 31. ¹¹ Peter Brierley, Capital Growth: What the 2012 London Church Census Reveals (Tonbridge, 2013), p. 42. ¹² Ibid., p. 4. ¹³ Ibid., p. 4. ¹⁴ Ibid., p. 23.

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measured by attendance the majority of people are, as Davie says, ‘without belonging’.

Belief and Believing So much for belonging; what about believing? Surveys and opinion polls tend to show that religious and spiritual beliefs persist in the general population. Religiously active but also non-religious people still hold beliefs about God and the supernatural. A YouGov poll for the Westminster Faith Debates found 26 per cent of British adults believe there is definitely a God or some ‘higher power’ and a further 23 per cent believe that there is probably so.¹⁵ A poll conducted for the think tank Theos records 13 per cent of people believe in God as a personal being, 30 per cent believe in God as a universal life force; 30 per cent believe in spirits, 25 per cent in angels, and 12 per cent in a higher spiritual being that cannot be called God.¹⁶ Another study by Theos which focused exclusively on non-religious people found around a quarter of people who never participate in religious worship say they believe in life after death, 21 per cent believe in angels, and 44 per cent in the human soul. As might be expected, Atheists are less likely to believe in these things, even so 15 per cent said they believe in life after death, 7 per cent in angels, and 23 per cent in the human soul. Of those who identify as ‘no religion’ around a quarter believe in heaven, 15 per cent in hell and 20 per cent in the supernatural powers of deceased ancestors.¹⁷ Beliefs elicited through opinion polls such as the above suggest a heterodox constellation of ideas in the public’s religious imagination. However, as with the other measures of religion, caution is required. As Voas explains, ‘people are prepared to express opinions on almost anything, whether or not they have any knowledge of or interest in the topic’.¹⁸ The beliefs people express in opinion polls may not be very significant to them. Ruel makes a helpful distinction in this respect between beliefs as propositions (belief that) and believing as an act of faith (belief in).¹⁹ Thus somebody may say they believe ¹⁵ Data from the YouGov survey can be accessed through the Westminster Faith Debates website. Westminster Faith Debates, Research, http://faithdebates.org.uk/research. Last accessed 9 March, 2018. ¹⁶ Theos, The Spirit of Things Unseen: Belief in Post-Religious Britain (London, 2013), p. 11. https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/cmsfiles/archive/files/Reports/Spirit%20of%20Things%20%20Digital%20(update).pdf ¹⁷ Nick Spencer and Holly Weldin, Post-Religious Britain?: The Faith of the Faithless (London, 2012), pp. 6–7. ¹⁸ David Voas, ‘The Rise and Fall of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe’, European Sociological Review, XXV, 2 (2009), p. 161. ¹⁹ Malcolm Ruel, ‘Christians as Believers’, in John Davis, ed., Religious Organization and Religious Experience, A.S.A. Monograph 21 (London, 1982), pp. 9–31.

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that God exists, but this belief may have no impact on their life whatsoever. Nor is it always clear what people understand by the beliefs they express. Belief propositions expressed in similar words may mean different things to different people and different things to the same person at different times. Believers themselves may not be able to fully articulate what they mean by their beliefs either. There is nothing particularly unusual in this, of course. Language is constraining and putting understandings of God or other religious concepts into words is not easy even for the most articulate theologians and poets. More likely, however, understandings are constrained by lack of thought. Towler makes the point: ‘When you ask the question “Do you believe in an afterlife?” what you may actually be asking is “When you stop and consider it, even though you have never done so before, do you believe in any sort of afterlife?” And that is an entirely different matter.’²⁰ Those who belong to a church and attend acts of worship may be more in the habit of giving religious belief thought than the non-religious insofar as they are in a context which encourages it. Occasions to think about one’s religious beliefs may otherwise be relatively rare in the normal course of day to day living and be more in the nature of private musing than spiritual searching. Churchgoers are also more likely than others to hold beliefs in line with Christian orthodoxy. This is unsurprising since church teachings marshal beliefs in a particular direction and validate them; the sheer presence of other believers is helpful in making one’s own beliefs plausible. Even so, as the authority afforded to priests and church leaders has declined, so church teachings and edicts are not taken at face value but are subject to the scrutiny of individual worshippers and therefore subject to change. Writing about the adult Catholics in England, Hornsby-Smith describes this as ‘customary Christianity’: ‘derived from “official” religion but without being under its continuing control . . . the beliefs and practices that make up customary religion are the product of formal religious socialization but subject to trivialization, conventionality, apathy, convenience and self-interest’.²¹ Day has made an important sociological contribution to understanding the nature of religious belief and the practice of believing. Based on empirical work she argues that beliefs are socially constructed and believing is performed in a social context to accomplish different things on different occasions. She proposes a model of belief comprising at least seven dimensions: content, source, practice, salience, function, place, and time.²² Separating belief and belonging in an analysis of contemporary religion is problematic

²⁰ Robert Towler, Homo Religiosus: Sociological Problems in the Study of Religion (London, 1974), p. 159. ²¹ Michael P. Hornsby-Smith, Roman Catholic Beliefs in England: Customary Catholicism and Transformations of Religious Authority (Cambridge, 1991), p. 90. ²² Day, Believing in Belonging, p. 206.

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from this perspective since there is a complex relationship between the two. Davie concurs and has developed the notion of ‘vicarious religion’ to turn attention back onto the relationship between individual believers, the Church, and wider Christian culture.²³ Before considering vicarious religion in detail, it will help contextualize the religious ‘mood’ to say a little more about social factors that have rendered churches of all denominations less significant to people. Doing so will also illustrate why drift and disengagement, rather than active dissent, is a major feature of Christianity in contemporary England.

DRIFT AND DISENGAGEMEN T The numerical decline of mainstream Christian denominations has occurred most sharply in the post-war period. The shift reflects wide social changes which have affected individual priorities and social values that have left the Church increasingly irrelevant to people’s day to day lives, rather than discontented with the Church per se. In this respect, unlike in some other European countries, England has experienced relatively little anti-clerical and anti-church sentiment to fuel church decline. The anthropologist Kate Fox refers to the English attitude towards religion as ‘benign indifference’.²⁴ This seems an apt description of everyday practice, although it is worth noting that indifference may disguise a more complex relationship to Christianity below the surface. Even so, there is not much overt hostility articulated towards the Church in England.

Changing Values in the 1960s Brown’s detailed account of the fate of Christianity in Britain through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, identifies the 1960s as a key decade for church decline. He argues, ‘the range of the changes in demography, personal relationships, political debate and moral concerns was so enormous that it did not so much challenge the Christian churches as bypass them’.²⁵ For many people, especially teenagers and young adults (the ‘baby boomer’ generation), Christianity and the Bible seemed unconnected to newly emerging ethical concerns relating to environmentalism, nuclear weapons, gender and racial ²³ Grace Davie, The Sociology of Religion (London, 2007). ²⁴ Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour (London, 2004), p. 355. ²⁵ Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London, 2001), p. 190.

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equality, and so on. It was the liberalizing of social attitudes towards women’s lives, however, that is the most salient factor in Brown’s analysis. Women, who had been largely responsible for maintaining the social presence of Christianity in national life through their own church participation and the religious socialization of their children, in the 1960s began to have a greater say in their lives. New contraceptive choices gave them more control over their sexuality and motherhood; increasing opportunities in the workplace provided them with greater financial independence; new laws on divorce offered them more freedom in their personal relationships. As such, the roles and values traditionally ascribed to women by the mainstream churches seemed out of date and women became more like men in their religious habits. In other words they became less inclined to go to church and therefore less able to maintain the nation’s Christian heritage.

Welfare State and Loss of Distinction Woodhead points to other factors contributing to the declining public significance of churches in England, in particular the development of the welfare state. Whilst Christian individuals and institutions were among the contributors, architects, and supportive partners of the welfare state, as state welfare provision expanded so the Church’s involvement in it became increasingly controlled by secular authorities and therefore less visible. As Woodhead puts it: ‘Some of the welfare state’s greatest beneficiaries neither saw nor cared how it had been brought about, and believed that it represented secular enlightenment throwing off the shackles of the past.’²⁶ At the same time, technological and scientific advances were happening apace which left people less inclined to interpret their world through a religious lens. Berger refers to a ‘default secular discourse’ as characteristic of modern society and the modern mind.²⁷ The secular discourse does not replace religious discourses but does dominate them. Even those with strong religious convictions find themselves switching between secular and religious thinking as they go about their lives. Thus the person diagnosed with an illness is likely to seek the help of medicine first even if they pray second. The secular discourse continues to dominate even when the limitations or problems of science are recognized. Churches of different hues responded to social change by trying to modernize and stay ‘relevant’. Liberal Christian thinking with its emphasis on reason over revelation and tradition provided one way of making theology more compatible with secular discourse and received much attention through ²⁶ Linda Woodhead, ‘Introduction’, in Linda Woodhead and Rebecca Catto, eds, Religion and Change in Modern Britain (Abingdon, 2012), p. 15. ²⁷ Peter L. Berger, ‘Further Thoughts on Religion and Modernity’, Society, XLIX, 4 (2012).

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Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God.²⁸ Liturgical change and ecumenism were two other responses.²⁹ None of these measures, however, did much to gain churches ground. Indeed, in some respects they could be seen as counterproductive as mainstream Christianity lost more of its distinctiveness as a social institution, blending with the secular rather than standing out as sacred.

Neoliberalism of the 1980s Woodhead notes the religious climate changed again during the economic difficulties of the 1970s and election and premiership of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 1980s. For Thatcher, over-reliance on the state in matters of business and welfare was not in the interests of national prosperity. Influenced by her Methodist background with its emphasis on personal virtue and salvation, she advocated instead the free market in which individuals take responsibility for themselves through hard work and enterprise.³⁰ State subsidy to traditional industries and welfare benefits were cut. The result was an increase in social inequality; some people grew wealthy but many suffered unemployment and dislocation. Mainstream churches were openly critical of Thatcher’s policies but lost in the ideological stakes and the logic of the market has come to dominate social life ever since, whilst the ties between church and state have weakened further. Under these circumstances, religion, like much else, has become something of a consumer affair in that nobody is obliged to go to church or to be a member of a congregation. There is no public disapproval for not doing or being so and there are no public sanctions, save perhaps failure of children to achieve a place at a popular church school. Nor is it necessary to marry or mark births and deaths with church services since other options are readily available. Thus, those who go to church or are otherwise religiously active do so because they choose to. Indeed, if any view on religion is sacrosanct amongst the majority English public it is that everybody has the right to choose their own faith and to practice it as they want to, but nobody has the right to impose their religion on other people. Under these conditions active dissent in the sense of rejecting the institutional Church or being selective in one’s involvement with it simply becomes ‘doing your own thing’. If people do not feel comfortable with a church they can just go somewhere else or stop going altogether. Furthermore, the gap between values expressed by churches and wider social values continues. Woodhead’s analysis suggests that on ²⁸ John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (London, 1963). ²⁹ Mathew Guest and others, ‘Christianity: Loss of Monopoly’, in Linda Woodhead and Rebecca Catto, eds, Religion and Change in Modern Britain (Abingdon, 2012). ³⁰ Woodhead, ‘Introduction’, p. 19.

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matters of personal morality self-identified Anglicans are more liberal and egalitarian than clergy, believing that individuals should have freedom to choose how to live their lives for themselves. By contrast, the Church takes a more authoritarian, paternal, and communitarian approach that requires the surrender of individual choice to a higher authority—Church, God, or society. However, in relation to social ethics, Anglican laity tends to be more conservative than clergy; thus more suspicious of social welfare and more in favour of selfreliance.³¹ It is therefore not surprising that people have less engagement with the Church in their personal religious lives and their public lives. They drift away and become indifferent to it. That is, until life throws up circumstances that seem to demand something more than the secular day-to-day discourse of ordinary life. Then religious beliefs, values, and identities may be invoked from the remains of the Christian heritage. What determines such cause is situated in individual contexts. This is in the nature of ‘vicarious religion’.

VICARIOUS RELIGION As mentioned above, Davie’s notion of ‘vicarious religion’ extends the sociological exploration of believing and belonging to focus on the relationship between the nominal, ‘believing without belonging’ majority and the active ‘believing and belonging’ minority. Vicarious religion conveys ‘the notion of religion performed by an active minority but on behalf of a much larger number, who (implicitly at least) not only understand, but, quite clearly, approve of what the minority is doing’.³² The suggestion from this definition is that disengaged nominal Christians and even some non-religious, ‘no religion’, people still expect the Church to be there for them should they ever need it; hence the need for a minority to keep the faith alive and the tradition going. In this respect Davie suggests churches, particularly the established Church of England, are treated by the majority as a utility— somewhat taken for granted, usually ignored, but still available at the point of need. Davie draws on a range of observations to make her case. She notes, for example, that church services still play an important role in marking and coping with significant life events, such as births, deaths, and marriages. Even though demand for these occasional offices is falling, the Church of England, for example, baptized over 130,000 people in 2013 (80,000 infants, 42,000 children, and the rest adults).³³ Just under 30 per cent of all marriages in England and ³¹ Linda Woodhead, ‘A Gap Is Growing within the Church’, Church Times (20 Sept. 2013). ³² Davie, The Sociology of Religion, p. 22. ³³ Archbishops’ Council, Statistics for Mission 2013 (London, 2014).

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Wales during 2011 had a religious ceremony (around 74,000).³⁴ A third of deaths were marked by a Church of England service in 2013.³⁵ Another observation is the public consternation and media reports invoked when clergy occasionally seem to deny elements of orthodox Christian belief such as the physical resurrection of Christ or the Virgin birth. Equally, clergy misdemeanours such as divorce or drunkenness make newspaper headlines in a way that they would not for other professions. If the Church and Christianity did not mean anything to people why would church professionals be subject to such scrutiny and judgement? Finally, Davie also suggests that church debates on matters such as same-sex marriage, women in leadership, euthanasia, debt, etc., attract media attention because they are a means for society to vicariously work out its own unresolved issues. In sum, ‘public attention demands that we understand how religious institutions matter even to those who appear not to be “participants” in them’.³⁶ As with ‘believing without belonging’ the idea of vicarious religion has drawn attention from sociologists of religion in England. Bruce and Voas contest the notion with some vigour and sketch out a range of non-religious reasons why people might engage with Christianity.³⁷ For instance, church services at critical times may be explained by family or cultural tradition, the need for ritual to create gravitas, and a desire for the professional manner in which clergy mark these events. The expectation that clergy uphold orthodox beliefs, they say, is because it is their job to do so. Public interest in clergy failure to model moral standards may be better explained by a dislike of hypocrisy and a delight in spectacle rather than disappointment that clergy are letting Christian values slide. Notwithstanding these secular dimensions to nominal Christianity, if Day’s notion of performative belief is taken into account then glimpses of the Christian sacred can still be found in the mix too. Whilst one might choose a religious ceremony for a wedding because churches are picturesque or because of family tradition, for example, this does not preclude the possibility that partaking in the ceremony itself may create and provide an experience of the sacred—of being ‘blessed’—even if this experience is short-lived. Liturgy, language, and physical setting combine to connect individual lives with transcendent themes of love and hope, life and death, good and evil, etc. That people may not be able to articulate faith, but are willing to be ‘carried’ by those that are, is just what vicarious religion is about.

³⁴ Office for National Statistics, Marriages in England and Wales (Provisional): 2011 (London, 2013). ³⁵ Archbishops’ Council, Statistics for Mission 2013. ³⁶ Davie, The Sociology of Religion, p. 25. ³⁷ Steve Bruce and David Voas, ‘Vicarious Religion: An Examination and Critique’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, XXV, 2 (2010).

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One point to note above is that whilst most people tend to regard religion as a personal choice, they do not necessarily look far from home for their own religious commitments. Vicarious religion keeps Christianity open in the public mind as a valid way to make sense of and cope with life’s contingencies. One way this happens is through the ‘presence ministries’ of chaplains and others in the active Christianity minority who have an overtly Christian role outside of church in secular settings. Chaplains occupy positions in a wide variety of public and private institutions including, among others, hospitals and hospices, prisons, the military, educational establishments, airports, railway companies, sports clubs, and many more. Their role bridges the sacred and the secular. To quote Davie, they ‘embody a religious tradition’ and ‘exist to “look after” those who find themselves in the institution or environment in question. In other words the role is both prophetic and pastoral.’³⁸ They stand up for particular values within the secular institution when serving on organizational committees of different sorts, working with staff and maintaining worship and sacred spaces; as well as care for those in emotional and/or spiritual need. Many of the people chaplains are in contact with are part of the nominal and non-religious majority who find themselves in difficult and vulnerable positions outside their normal experience or control. In such situations it can be heartening to have somebody available who is recognized for his or her caring role, who knows institutional procedures, who can listen to fears and offer counsel, comfort, and solace. In this context, the practice of belief, including formal liturgies offered by chaplains, may be used to carry people through difficult experiences, engaging them on an emotional and symbolic level even when belief is lacking. Another example is prayer. The prevalence of prayer amongst the nominally religious and the nonreligious as well as the actively engaged has been recognized in surveys and opinion polls. The BSA survey for 2008 indicates that around 45 per cent of people pray at least occasionally outside religious services. Those who actively belong to a religious group are more likely to pray than those who do not. Even so, around 15 per cent of those who said that they did not regard religion as at all important in their daily lives still said that they pray occasionally.³⁹ Prayer can be important for young people too. This is of interest because, as noted above, young people are more likely than older people to be non-religious. One study which explored prayer amongst churchgoing and nonchurchgoing teenagers found that schools were a key site for learning how ³⁸ Grace Davie, Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox (Chichester, 2015), p. 114. ³⁹ Data accessed via UK Data Service Nesstar website. UK Data Service, Nesstar Catalogue, http://nesstar.ukdataservice.ac.uk/webview/. Neither the original data collectors, depositors, or copyright holders, the funders of the Data Collections, nor the UK Data Archive bear any responsibility for the accuracy, comprehensiveness, or interpretation of the data supplied. Last accessed 9 March 2018.

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to pray.⁴⁰ All state-funded schools in England are obliged to include regular (technically daily) acts of worship in their activities. Unless the school has a preponderance of pupils from other faiths, the nature of that worship tends to be Christian. Indeed, schools are one of the main carriers of the Christian tradition in British society. Not all young people join in with school prayers, finding them irrelevant and boring, but they do learn that prayer is one way to engage with life and gain a feel for it. Consequently, even some of the young people in the study who hardly, if ever, went to church and were unsure about their belief in God, would pray in times of difficulty and regard prayer as a distinct, legitimate, and practical response to a tough situation. In the main, their prayers were petitionary, asking for help for family and friends or their own personal circumstances, but they could also be ‘confessional’ in the sense of unburdening anxieties or ‘getting things off your chest’, and very occasionally, thanksgiving. Prayers were seen to ‘work’ insofar as external circumstances changed or, subjectively, the young person felt better. In this respect prayer was always seen as a tool for good. As one young man put it: ‘Regardless of whether He [God] exists or not, if you’re going through a problem and you’re explaining them to whoever you believe in, it’s got to be good.’⁴¹ If changes for the better did not happen, that is, if prayers were not ‘answered’ then the young people were put off praying in the future. The nominal and non-religious young people in the study were in contact with Christian youth workers through youth and community outreach projects. These youth workers were part of the active Christian minority. It was largely because the young people regarded prayer as a benevolent act and associated it with caring relationships that when the youth workers offered to pray for them they generally took this in a positive way (although they would not necessarily want to pray with the youth worker). The same is true in other contexts. For example, Street Pastors offer a presence ministry in a growing number of towns and cities around England. Street Pastors are adult Christian volunteers from local churches who work in conjunction with local authorities and the police to keep streets safe at night. They tend to work in areas where there is a thriving night life and alcohol consumption is high. They are involved in practical work such as clearing debris that could be used in a street fight or otherwise be a source of injury, administering first aid to people who are ill or injured after a night out drinking, and they provide a ‘listening ear’ to people in distress. On the whole nominally Christian and non-religious young people do not recognize or are indifferent to the fact that Street Pastors are actively Christian, but very occasionally when they do understand this to be the case they initiate conversations with the Pastors about their own ⁴⁰ Collins-Mayo and others, The Faith of Generation Y. ⁴¹ Sylvia Collins-Mayo, ‘Young People’s Spirituality and the Meaning of Prayer’, in Abby Day, ed., Religion and the Individual: Belief, Practice, Identity (Aldershot, 2008), p. 40.

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spiritual beliefs or existential questions. Sometimes in this case prayers are also requested by the young people and the Street Pastors are happy to oblige.⁴² These examples illustrate how the active Christian minority maintain and embody Christian faith and provide opportunities for those outside the Church to engage with it. The fact that the nominal and ‘no religion’ majority do sometimes respond, suggests the normative dissent of disengagement is not absolute.

DISSENT AND N ONCONFORMITY Given that a benignly indifferent attitude towards Christianity and the Church can be said to be the prevailing social norm in England, the minorities who take Christianity seriously enough to ‘believe and belong’, or seriously enough to consciously distance themselves from it, form in their own way active dissenting groups.

Active Christian Minority Young people who are active Christians may be described as ‘nonconformists’ in the sense of going against the social norm. As already noted, English teenagers and young adults are the least likely age group to identify as Christian or attend church. Voas’ analysis of religious trends indicates this is a generational rather than an age effect.⁴³ Religious commitment is largely settled by twenty years of age and does not usually change much thereafter, a point that is troubling for churches which are losing touch with young people and becoming unsustainable as a result. Indeed, data from the English Church Census indicate that in 2005 39 per cent of churches had nobody attending under the age of eleven, 59 per cent had nobody between eleven and fourteen years of age, and 59 per cent had nobody aged fifteen to nineteen years.⁴⁴ One factor influencing the decline is that parents—even churchgoing parents— seem reluctant to pass on their faith and churchgoing habits to their children for fear of ‘imposing’ religion on them. In this respect, the idea that religion should be a personal choice runs deep. So what choices are practicing Christians making in terms of faith? As already hinted at, the historical factors which contributed to the declining ⁴² Unpublished evaluation report: Sylvia Collins-Mayo and others, Faith in Action: Street Pastors Kingston Social and Spiritual Impact Project, Kingston University (2012). ⁴³ David Voas, ‘Explaining Change over Time in Religious Involvement’, in Sylvia CollinsMayo and Pink Dandelion, eds, i (Farnham, 2010). ⁴⁴ Brierley, Pulling out of the Nosedive, p. 118.

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salience of the Church in public life were accompanied by a wider ‘cultural turn’ which undermined obligations towards institutions, roles, and social duties. In their place greater emphasis came to be placed on what Heelas and Woodhead call ‘subjective-life’. Subjective-life is concerned with emotions, bodily experience, inner conscience, and so on. It is also concerned with relationality, connection, and moral sentiments such as compassion.⁴⁵ Churches which foster subjective-life would be expected to do better than those which do not and there is some evidence that this is the case. The English Church Census for 2005 suggests that charismatic churches are not declining as fast as other churches. Churches which afford an aesthetic experience that enables the worshipper to sense the sacred, for example through music, artefacts, and language, also do relatively well. Looking at young adults in the United States who embrace Christian orthodoxy, Carroll notes particular characteristics of the young ‘faithful’ which transcend denominational differences and, indeed, make them more similar to each other than to nominal members of their own denomination. These characteristics include an attraction to faith which is experienced as authentic to themselves as individuals; they want their faith to make a difference to their personal and public lives; they are prepared to challenge the values of secular culture; they resist compromise and are repelled by hypocrisy.⁴⁶ Similar sentiments about authenticity and faith needing to make a difference were found amongst young people in England too.⁴⁷ In this respect, evangelical churches which emphasize faith as a personally chosen commitment, which have a theological perspective that offers a distinctive worldview to secular norms and values, and which have an agenda for social action and social justice do better among young people than more liberal, middle-of-the-road churches. Having a faith that makes a difference does, however, come at a cost. Breaking with normative peer activities and views can make young Christians the butt of jokes or worse. Shepherd quotes a young Christian who described himself as putting his Christian identity ‘under a safety catch’⁴⁸ at school to avoid problems. In this respect Christian youth clubs and supportive congregations are important to young people. They provide safe places, practices (prayer, bible study, etc.), and a language through which young Christians can reflect on their beliefs, develop their Christianity, and work out the implications of faith for the dilemmas they face in their daily lives. ⁴⁵ Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford, 2005), p. 3. ⁴⁶ Colleen Carroll, The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy (Chicago, Illinois, 2002). ⁴⁷ Collins-Mayo et al.,The Faith of Generation Y. ⁴⁸ Nicholas M. Shepherd, ‘Religious Socialisation and a Reflexive Habitus: Christian Youth Groups as Sites for Identity Work’, in Sylvia Collins-Mayo and Pink Dandelion, ed., Religion and Youth (Farnham, 2010), p. 154.

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The significance of subjective experience and belonging to a community for younger Christians is seen in Flory and Miller’s analysis of post-boomer religion in the United States and their description of ‘expressive communalism’. Young adult Christians engage in expressive/experiential styles of worship (be that through embracing popular art and culture in contemporary services or reclaiming traditional rituals and liturgies from the past) but also seek, create, and commit to a faith community. ‘It is in the context of these faith communities where one can be both personally fulfilled, and where one can serve others, whether in one’s own religious community, or with the homeless in Los Angeles, or AIDS victims in Africa.’⁴⁹ Expressive communalism is also a good description of young people’s engagement in pilgrimages to places such as Lourdes, Santiago de Compostella, Taizé, and large youth gatherings and summer festivals such as Soul Survivor. Harris, for example, describes how young adult Catholic pilgrims to Lourdes found themselves gaining a deeper appreciation of liturgy as they journeyed with fellow pilgrims.⁵⁰ The new monastic movement takes this commitment to community a stage further. In this respect it is worth noting that the Church of England’s Archbishop Justin Welby started a three-year project in 2015 to establish a praying residential community for young adult Anglicans at Lambeth Palace. As hinted at above, denomination is less important to young Christians than authenticity and experience. Indeed, rather than align with a named denomination, many young Christians prefer just to be ‘Christian’. They are therefore not confined by institutionally specific theologies and practices and are freer to avail themselves of elements from the riches of the whole Christian tradition. Thus prayer and worship styles from across denominations can be drawn upon on different occasions as seems appropriate to the individual and community of which they are a part. Denomination is also less important than the social and cultural capital a particular congregation has to offer. Denominational ties may be eschewed by young people, for example, in order to be with friends in a church of a different denomination, or by families who prefer the children’s provision in one church over another.

Active Atheist Minority Another dissenting group from the disengaged but benignly indifferent are the ‘substantively non-religious’⁵¹ who are conscious and active in their ⁴⁹ Richard Flory and Donald E. Miller, ‘The Expressive Communalism of Post-Boomer Religion in the USA’, in Sylvia Collins-Mayo and Pink Dandelion, eds, Religion and Youth (Farnham, 2010), p. 14. ⁵⁰ Alana Harris, ‘‘A Place to Grow Spiritually and Socially’: The Experiences of Young Pilgrims to Lourdes’, in Sylvia Collins-Mayo and Pink Dandelion, eds, Religion and Youth (Farnham, 2010). ⁵¹ Lois Lee, Recognizing the Non-Religious: Reimagining the Secular (Oxford, 2015).

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expression of non-belief and rejection of religion. In the 2011 Census, around 28,000 people self-identified as ‘Atheist’ within a ‘no religion’ category of over 13 million. So-called ‘New Atheists’ as represented by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens among others, are a smaller group still, but are very much dissenters. New Atheists are intolerant of religion, especially in public life, and vigorously campaign against it. Public funding for faith schools in England, the practice of prayers at the start of local authority council meetings, government grants for the maintenance of church buildings, and much more have drawn their attention in recent years. In their hostility towards religion New Atheists are unusual, but as the public visibility of religion grows and different faith groups make claims for religious expression dissenting voices among the more tolerant non-religious may well grow. A less aggressive but interesting development is the growth of organized Atheism, which offers people alternatives to religious forums and groups. Catto and Eccles make the point that atheist, secular, and humanist organizations have existed for many years.⁵² In recent times, however, new organizations have been established such as the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist, and Secular Student Societies (AHS) in 2008 which caters to young people in higher education, and the Sunday Assembly in 2013 which is open to people of all ages. The Sunday Assembly has attracted much media and increasing scholarly attention. Styled as a ‘godless congregation’ the format of the meetings is consciously derived from church services with a familiar format of songs (pop songs rather than hymns), a talk and time for reflection, followed by coffee afterwards. Congregation members are encouraged to meet in the intervening times between services and to make a positive difference to those around them by actively engaging with their communities and neighbourhoods. The Sunday Assembly’s public charter sets its motto: ‘live better, help often and wonder more’, which captures an upbeat, celebratory tone.⁵³ Aided by social media, the Sunday Assembly has grown rapidly. At the beginning of 2015 the London congregation was attracting around 300 people to its meetings; over 3000 active members are registered on its website and over 200 groups established worldwide. Non-religious gatherings happen in other ways too. For example, Catto and Eccles’ found the Internet was important for providing young atheists with information about atheism and for providing a community. This is important because the persistence of the Christian heritage in wider culture means to ‘become an atheist in Britain today requires a conscious effort’.⁵⁴ In some ⁵² Rebecca Catto and Janet Betty Eccles, ‘(Dis)Believing and Belonging: Investigating the Narratives of Young British Atheists’, Temenos, XLIX, 1 (2013). ⁵³ Sunday Assembly, Our Story, http://www.sundayassembly.com/story Last accessed 9 March 2018. ⁵⁴ Catto and Eccles, ‘(Dis)Believing and Belonging’, p. 56.

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ways, the young people have to work out how to be an atheist as they go along. Online communities and godless congregations provide a context in which atheist identities can be explored and developed in much the same way that religious gatherings help in the formation of religious identities. Moreover, some of the young atheists had felt discriminated against because of their nonbelief and had difficulties expressing their atheist position to others. Dissent is never comfortable.

C ONCLUDING REMARKS Religion in England is changing and becoming increasingly complex. There is more religious diversity and those who are actively religious are becoming more visible in the public sphere. At the same time, the number of people who see themselves as Christian is declining in favour of those who are of no religion. Insofar as it does not conform to institutional Christian belief and practice, nominal Christianity—‘believing without belonging’—in effect is dissent by default. It is a form of dissent characterized for the most part by benign indifference, associated with drift and disengagement from the Church rather than active protest against it. The Christian heritage runs deep and continues to linger on. Churches are still kept busy meeting the occasional spiritual and social needs of the wider population, including among the nonreligious, but it is on an increasingly precarious footing as it relies on a dwindling number of active Christians to maintain it. In this context active dissent against prevailing religious attitudes falls to those who take Christianity seriously—seriously enough to live their lives by it, often eschewing denominational constraints as they do so; or seriously enough to live their lives against it, challenging the very legitimacy of religion of any sort. The active Christian minority (particularly those who are teenagers or young adults) and the active atheist minority are examples of dissenters of this nature. The religious landscape is very different from that known by the English Dissenters of the past, but their emphasis on religion as a matter of personal conscience and choice has a great deal of resonance with current religious sensibility.

SEL E C T B I B L I OG R A P H Y Brown, Callum G. The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2001). Collins-Mayo, Sylvia and Pink Dandelion, eds, Religion and Youth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

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Collins-Mayo, Sylvia, Bob Mayo, Sally Nash, and Christopher Cocksworth. The Faith of Generation Y (London: Church House Publishing, 2010). Davie, Grace. Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Davie, Grace. The Sociology of Religion (London: Sage, 2007). Davie, Grace. Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox (Chichester: John Wiley, 2015). Day, Abby. Believing in Belonging: Belief and Social Identity in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Day, Abby, ed. Religion and the Individual (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Day, Abby, and Mia Lövheim. Modernities, Memory and Mutations (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Day, Abby, Giselle Vincett, and Christopher R. Cotter. Social Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2013). Heelas, Paul, and Linda Woodhead. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). Hornsby-Smith, Michael P. Roman Catholic Beliefs in England: Customary Catholicism and Transformations of Religious Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Lee, Lois. Recognizing the Non-Religious: Reimagining the Secular (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Madge, Nicola, Peter Hemming, and Kevin Stenson. Youth On Religion (Hove: Routledge, 2014). Savage, Sara, Sylvia Collins-Mayo, Bob Mayo with Graham Cray. Making Sense of Generation Y (London: Church House Publishing, 2006). Theos. The Spirit of Things Unseen: Belief in Post-Religious Britain (London: Theos, 2013). Woodhead, Linda, and Rebecca Catto, eds. Religion and Change in Modern Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).

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Part IV Latin America

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14 Historical and Ideological Lineages of Dissenting Protestantism in Latin America Stephen Dove

Dissenting Protestantism occupies an ambiguous space in the Latin American religious field. Institutionally, dissenting denominations are undeniably foreign enterprises that have gained limited traction, and yet as a concept, dissension is intimately familiar to millions of religious practitioners spread across the region. The alien nature of dissenting traditions is best understood in the temporal and geographic separation between Latin American Protestants and English dissenters. By 2014, 19 per cent of Latin America’s 600 million people identified themselves as Protestants,¹ but the vast majority of these belonged to churches and denominations that have existed for less than a century.² Most of these new Latin American church bodies are Pentecostal— a Christian tradition founded in the early-twentieth century that emphasizes the direct action of God in individual believers’ lives, often manifested in physical signs such as speaking in tongues. Although Pentecostals often identify their movement as a direct product of divine intervention, historians attribute its origins in part to Wesleyan Holiness movements and so place it in a broad stream of English dissenting traditions.³ However, the historical links between contemporary Latin American Pentecostals and English dissenters is far from straight. Rather, the movement of ¹ Very few people in Latin America actually use the term Protestant to refer to themselves. Evangélico, cristiano, and creyente (crente in Portuguese) are more common. Each of these terms refers broadly to Christians who are not Catholic including mainline Protestants, evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Pentecostals. Because the cognates of these Spanish and Portuguese words carry a narrower meaning in English, this chapter opts for the term Protestant, broadly defined to include all non-Catholic Christians in the region. ² Pew Research Center, Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region (Washington, 13 Nov. 2014). Available online, http://www.pewforum.org/files/ 2014/11/Religion-in-Latin-America-11-12-PM-full-PDF.pdf ³ Walter J. Hollenweger, Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide (Peabody, MA, 1997), p. 2.

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ideas and people across four centuries, three continents, and an exponentially greater number of cultures and sub-cultures has mediated between these two poles. This mediation by missionaries, institutions, and theological innovation has made Latin American Protestantism something all its own, with only a thin—albeit still visible—thread leading back to the historical dissenting churches of England. While institutional links are tenuous, Latin American Protestants’ relationship to modern political, social, and legal realities bears an indisputable similarity to the core ideological positions of historical dissenters. Because of Latin America’s history of magisterial religious monopoly, any deviance from orthodoxy in the region—and especially opting for Protestantism—was long a mark of nonconformity and dissent. In addition, Protestantism entered Latin America in the nineteenth century as a bit player in a larger debate about state–church relations, political calls for disestablishment, and the need for religious freedom; all innovations that owe their origins at least partially to the English dissenters. Despite the eventual legal implementation of religious tolerance in Latin America and the often-extreme disestablishment of Catholicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, voluntary alignment with any form of Protestantism remains a radical departure from the historical status quo in much of the region. With few exceptions, conversion has marked, and continues to mark, Protestants as members of a radical social and religious minority whether their particular denomination affiliation is Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, or even—somewhat ironically—Anglican. Because of this complex relationship between Latin American Protestantism and dissent, tracing an identifiable family tree is an impossible, and tangential, exercise. The core question surrounding dissenting Protestant traditions in Latin America is not how specific institutions arrived and prospered in the region but rather how the ideals of dissenting traditions trickled into the area from several diverse sources and then blossomed into a local model of dissent that both owes a great deal to historical dissenting churches and also defines a new and unique version of dissent with its own role to play in modern Christianity. This dissemination of dissenting religious ideas in the region occurred within three broad stages that highlight the shift over time of Protestantism from a foreign to a local enterprise. The first of these phases rested on missionary endeavours from North America and Europe that brought Protestantism to the region for the first time. While there are exceptional outlying cases in earlier periods, this effort was primarily a phenomenon of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In this early stage, clear institutional connections to traditional dissenting churches remained evident. However, in the second phase, which covers the early- to mid-twentieth century, those clear lines began to blur into more impressionistic connections to dissenting tradition. Transition was the key characteristic of this second stage, particularly two historical transitions within regional

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Protestantism that dramatically changed the identity of the movement. The first of these transitions was toward autonomy as the majority of Protestant churches officially separated from their parent missionary organizations. The second transition was that Pentecostalism emerged as a locally rooted phenomenon that maintained the general character of Protestantism while moving it in new directions. The final stage of the historical spread of dissenting Christianity in Latin America began in the late-twentieth century and continues into the twenty-first century. Phenomenal numerical growth and Pentecostalization are the most apparent and best-reported attributes of this era. However, more fundamental trends toward religious voluntarism underlie both of these external manifestations, and these foundations are integral to the dissenting heritage of Latin American Protestantism. This tripartite division of Latin American Protestant history is a well-worn path in scholarly literature on the topic. However, few historians or social scientists have been concerned with dissent as a discrete category of analysis. Instead, major studies of Protestantism in the region have focused either on demography or on social issues within specific national contexts. There are two notable variations from this dominant approach. The first is sociologist David Martin’s seminal book Tongues of Fire, which along with David Stoll’s Is Latin America Turning Protestant? brought widespread scholarly attention to Latin American Protestantism for the first time in the early 1990s.⁴ Although Protestantism—and particularly Pentecostalism—is Martin’s focus, his argument hinges on a much broader claim that Anglo and Iberian societies have been engaged in a four-century-long conflict that began in the political realm but that has since become a struggle between cultures. He argues that religion was one of the chief sites of difference between these two cultural models with the Iberians favouring a close relationship between Church and state while England and its former American colonies opted for a range of more decentralized, voluntary religious systems. Martin argues that the growth of Latin American Pentecostalism in the late-twentieth century was an outgrowth of Anglo dominance in this conflict, and he specifically claims that the movement is the most recent link in a religious chain that began with English Puritanism, travelled across the Atlantic in the evangelical (especially Methodist) revivals of the eighteenth century, and took on a uniquely American form with the emergence of Pentecostalism in the twentieth-century United States.⁵ For Martin, Pentecostalism is to Catholic Latin America what Methodism and other dissenting movements were to Anglican Britain. They are movements that ‘widened the rent in the “sacred canopy”,’ Peter Berger’s ⁴ David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant?: The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley, CA, 1990) and David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Cambridge, MA, 1990). ⁵ Martin, Tongues of Fire, pp. 9–46, 273–4.

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canonical metaphor for religious structures that intertwine with political structures to organize a society, and then provided alternatives to members of society no longer covered by the canopy.⁶ Martin’s analysis provides a useful foundation for understanding the ideological contributions that dissenting religions have made to Latin America. However, his comparisons of specific religious movements on either side of the Atlantic belie the difficulty of tracing direct lineages from Latin America back to England, even taking into account the United States as a mediating zone of theological and institutional change. As such, this chapter will attempt to maintain a focus on the parallel theoretical realities that Martin notes between these two areas while also offering a more concrete history of the people and movements within the region. This more concrete history of dissenting institutions in Latin America does have historiographical precedent, and this body of literature represents the second variation from the dominant demographic and social-issue approaches to Protestantism in the region. Most of the literature on religious groups descended from dissenting traditions consists of internal denominational histories written by foreign missionaries or local leaders.⁷ In general, these histories provide numerous details about the genealogical connections of people, events, and places, but they offer little analysis of dissent as a concept. They also tend to be hagiographic and celebratory, and in turn they often fail to turn a critical eye toward central contextual and ideological issues. Even those authors such as Baptist missionary Justice C. Anderson who do express awareness of the genre’s predilection for ‘triumphalism and sectarianism’ still frame their histories in terms of ‘heroic pioneers’ and overcoming ‘insurmountable odds’, narrative cues that can obscure deeper—and messier— questions about state–church relations, nonconformity, and voluntarism.⁸

M I S S I O N A R Y O R I G I N S O F PR O TE S T A N T I S M IN LATIN AMERICA Although twentieth- and twenty-first century Protestantism in Latin America is largely autochthonous, to address these conceptual questions about the role and history of dissent in Latin America it is important to begin with the ⁶ Ibid., p. 27; and Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY, 1967). ⁷ For a few examples, see Justice C. Anderson, An Evangelical Saga: Baptists and Their Precursors in Latin America (Longwood, FL, 2005); Roberto Domínguez, Pioneros de Pentecostés: en El Mundo de Habla Hispana, 3 vols. (Barcelona, 1990); and Virgilio Zapata Arceyuz, Historia de la Obra Evangélica en Guatemala (Guatemala, 1982). ⁸ Anderson, An Evangelical Saga, pp. xxii–iv.

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movement’s origins from outside the region. These beginnings highlight the rather obvious—though unconventional—way in which Latin American Protestantism is by definition a dissenting movement. As a region, Catholicism has dominated Latin American religion since the sixteenth century, and the historic Catholic hold on the region was so strong that Protestants did not make significant inroads among local populations until the final decades of the nineteenth century, nearly 400 years after the Reformation. Thus, if dissenters are simplified to a minority religious group reacting to a privileged and entrenched institutional religion then Latin America is a clear case study. This facile reading of Protestantism as dissent to Catholic privilege has served as a common trope in a variety of histories of Latin American Protestantism.⁹ However, the dichotomy between privileged Catholicism and marginalized Protestantism breaks down upon closer examination of the actual instances of Protestant arrival in Latin America. It is true that until the dissolution of Spain and Portugal’s American empires in the early-nineteenth-century that the Catholic Church was so closely allied to the Iberian monarchies that any religious dissent, including Protestantism, opened the door to state-sanctioned punishment through the Inquisition.¹⁰ However, this does not mean that the few Protestants who did manage to come to Latin America in this era represented an ideologically contrary outlook. Instead, the majority shared the Iberian assumption of state–church relations. They merely had allegiances to different state–church complexes. The earliest documented Protestant incursion into Latin America came in the 1550s when Calvinists participated in the construction of French fortifications near Rio de Janeiro. This short-lived experiment was followed by the Dutch invasion and settlement of North-eastern Brazil from 1630 to 1654 and the failed Scottish colonization of Panama in 1698.¹¹ In all three cases, the colonizers’ motives had more to do with their European political allegiances than with their religious beliefs, and none reflected a desire to create a haven for the free practice of religion. In the first instance, the Huguenot members of the French expedition were certainly a vulnerable religious minority. However, they were also closely allied with John Calvin’s Geneva, where by the

⁹ For examples of this, see Benjamin F. Tillman, Imprints on Native Lands: The MiskitoMoravian Settlement Landscape in Honduras (Tucson, AZ, 2011), p. 1; Zapata Arceyuz, Historia De La Obra Evangélica En Guatemala, p. 5; and Robert E. Brenneman, Homies and Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America (New York, 2012), p. 50. ¹⁰ John F. Chuchiak IV, ed. The Inquisition in New Spain, 1536–1820: A Documentary History (Baltimore, MD, 2012), pp. 257–73. ¹¹ It is possible that Protestants participated in the colonization of Venezuela from 1528 to 1546 when Charles V ceded control of the area to the Welser banking family of Augsburg, which allied with Lutheranism in the same period. However, there is no definite record of the religious allegiances of the colonists, whose primary motivation was economic. Jean-Pierre Bastian, Historia Del Protestantismo En América Latina (México, D.F., 1990), pp. 47–8.

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1550s Calvin espoused an alliance between religion and secular government.¹² The Dutch and Scottish settlements also imported versions of state-sanctioned Calvinism to Latin America, with the Dutch staying long enough to establish more than twenty congregations and to extend some measure of religious toleration to non-Calvinists, including Jews. However, in each case, the ultimate demise of these Protestant colonial experiments was rooted in competition between empires more than in religious intolerance.¹³ In only one case did this competition between church–imperial alliances produce a lasting Protestant presence in Latin America, one that later adopted certain principles of dissenters. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the British and Spanish battled each other for control of Caribbean trade routes, and part of British strategy was infiltrating the Spanish mainland by establishing diplomatic relations with indigenous communities on the Miskito Coast of modern Nicaragua. As part of this relationship, the Church of England sent missionaries in 1743. Despite the success of the religious mission, which baptized hundreds of Miskito indigenous people, the British abandoned the effort in 1785 due to health concerns and changing political priorities. Nonetheless, an autochthonous church continued in the missionaries’ absence, and in 1849 a Prussian prince sent Moravian missionaries to the Miskito Coast in hopes of developing a colony. The colony never came to fruition, but by the end of the century a majority of the indigenous population had joined the Moravians and created a religious-ethnic connection that remains strong into the twenty-first century. In fact, this connection was a flashpoint during conflicts with the Sandinistas in the 1980s over the region’s integration into the Nicaraguan state.¹⁴ This case was an exception, however. Concentrated Protestant attempts to evangelize rather than to colonize parts of Latin America only began in the nineteenth century with the arrival of traveling Bible sellers known as colporteurs. Only about a dozen colporteurs worked in the region, and they left few measurable results. However, they did serve an important role because they preached not only Protestantism but also religious toleration. This focus on religious freedom stemmed largely from most colporteurs’ roots in Baptist and Congregational churches in Great Britain, and it found a ready audience among the new leaders of independent Latin American countries, many of whom were attempting to construct their new states on classical liberal principles that included reducing the power of the Catholic Church. ¹² John McGrath, ‘Polemic and History in French Brazil, 1555–1560’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, XXVII, 2 (1996), pp. 385–97. In addition to outlining the history of Calvinist participation in this expedition, McGrath also casts legitimate doubts on reports about religious persecution in Brazil from Genevan Calvinists. ¹³ Bastian, Historia Del Protestantismo En América Latina, pp. 54–6. ¹⁴ Tillman, Imprints on Native Lands, pp. 17–35; Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant?, pp. 230–3.

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The earliest and most prolific colporteur was James Thomson (1788–1854), a Scottish Baptist, who travelled through Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, and the Caribbean three times between 1818 and 1844 selling Bibles for the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) while also consulting with newly formed national governments about implementing Lancasterian education systems, which encourage advanced students to serve as monitors and tutors for their peers. Thomson reported to his supporters in Great Britain that his educational work was a pretext for introducing scripture on behalf of the Bible Society.¹⁵ A Protestant distributing and teaching the Bible was clearly antithetical to the firmly entrenched power of Roman Catholicism—or ‘popery’ in Thomson’s words. However, Thomson did not labour from a completely weak position. Instead, his efforts had the direct support of the liberal political leaders of newly independent states including Argentine president Bernardino Rivadavia, Chilean supreme director Bernardo O’Higgins, and Peruvian military protector José de San Martín. The latter two were particularly close to Thomson with O’Higgins serving as the patron of Thomson’s educational society in Chile while San Martín personally petitioned Thomson to come to Peru and consulted with him on several occasions.¹⁶ Not all colporteurs had such a close relationship with state authorities. From 1841 to 1846, the Belgian-born Baptist Frederick Crowe travelled throughout Guatemala, first as a teacher in a short-lived British colony and then as a colporteur for the BFBS during which time he established a school in Guatemala City. Unlike Thomson, who operated in a region ruled by anti-clerical liberals, Crowe worked in a country ruled by conservative dictator Rafael Carrera, who was closely allied with the Catholic Church. Crowe’s Protestantism and the popularity of his school among liberal dissidents attracted the attention of Guatemala’s archbishop who convinced Carrera to confiscate the colporteur’s books and to expel him from Guatemala.¹⁷ Crowe’s brief tenure in Guatemala did not leave any lasting religious or educational institutions, but it did have a lasting effect on several pupils who later became leaders in the country’s 1871 liberal revolution that, among other things, stripped the Catholic Church of its legal protections. The most prominent of these students was Lorenzo Montúfar, the lead author of Guatemala’s 1879

¹⁵ James Thomson, Letters on the Moral and Religious State of South America: Written During a Residence of Nearly Seven Years in Buenos Aires, Chile, Peru, and Colombia (London, 1827), p. 15. ¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 23, 34, 70, 268, 276, 278. ¹⁷ Frederick Crowe, The Gospel in Central America: Containing a Sketch of the Country, Physical and Geographical–Historical and Political–Moral and Religious: A History of the Baptist Mission in British Honduras and of the Introduction of the Bible into the Spanish American Republic of Guatemala (London, 1850).

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constitution who credited Crowe’s teaching as an important factor in ending Catholicism’s ‘theocratic’ domination in the country.¹⁸ It was this political turn toward anti-clerical liberalism that proved to be the most important regional factor in opening Latin America to Protestantism through foreign missionaries. In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, liberal constitutions across the region ushered in guarantees of religious toleration and the partial or full disestablishment of Catholicism. The most famous of these were the 1857 Reform Laws of Mexico that abolished clerical legal privileges, confiscated Church property, and created civil authority over registration of births, marriages, and deaths.¹⁹ By the early 1900s, most countries in the region had followed suit with similar laws.²⁰ This liberal anti-clericalism dovetailed with Protestant anti-Catholicism of the period that derided the region’s dominant religious institution as ‘misnamed Christianity’ and ‘popery’.²¹ Building on these common positions—and ignoring that they were derived from different ideologies—Protestant mission boards heralded liberal political changes as an opening in an area that had long been ‘inaccessible to the Christian missionary’.²² With little sense of irony, the same mission agencies who lamented the perils of Catholic religious establishment were quick to celebrate the pendulum moving to an extreme in the other direction. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, national governments in Latin America actively supported and sponsored Protestant missionaries, even those aligned with dissenting traditions whose foundational beliefs opposed the alignment of church and state interests. This alliance between foreign missionaries and national governments was not entirely new as James Thomson’s travels earlier in the century showed, but the level of integration was greatly increased. In Chile, for example, the first Protestant missionary, Congregationalist David Trumbull, arrived in 1845. During his four-decade tenure, he not only opened churches and schools but also operated a printing press that advocated for secular reforms ranging from ¹⁸ Lorenzo Montúfar, Memorias AutobiográFicas (Guatemala, 1898), pp. 82–3. ¹⁹ Articles 13 and 27 address religious reforms directly. ‘Constitución Política De Los Estados Unidos De México’ (1857). Available online: http://www.diputados.gob.mx/biblioteca/bibdig/ const_mex/const_1857.pdf ²⁰ One of the last countries to adopt such laws was Peru in 1915. John Frederick Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: From Conquest to Revolution and Beyond (New York, 2011), p. 203. ²¹ American Baptist Home Mission Society, Proceedings of the Convention Held in the City of New-York, on the 27th of April, 1832, for the Formation of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, with the Constitution of the Society, and a List of Its Officers; Accompanied by an Address of the Executive Committee to the Baptist Churches of the United States (New York, 1832), p. 28; Presbyterian Church in the U S A, Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, in the United States of America. Presented May 1838 (New York, 1838), p. 8. ²² Society, Proceedings of the Convention Held in the City of New-York, on the 27th of April, 1832, for the Formation of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, with the Constitution of the Society, and a List of Its Officers, p. 28.

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civil marriage to religious tolerance. This bolstered the cause of Protestants, but it also strengthened rising liberal politicians, some of whom eulogized Trumbull on the floor of the Chilean senate after his death in 1889.²³ To the east in Brazil, the first successful missionary work began in 1855 under Scottish Congregationalists Robert and Sarah Kalley who targeted the aristocracy of the Brazilian monarchy, which under Emperor Pedro II was known for its efforts to modernize and liberalize the economic policies, if not always the social realities, of Brazil. The Kalleys built a personal friendship with the emperor and baptized several members of the court. Further north, in Mexico, individual missionaries such as Presbyterian Melinda Rankin made efforts to introduce Protestantism to the country as early as the 1850s, but officially sanctioned efforts did not begin in earnest until the end of civil wars on both sides of the Rio Grande River—Mexico’s Reform War, which ended with liberal victory in 1861, and the US Civil War, which ended in 1865. During both the presidency of liberal Benito Juárez and the dictatorship of positivist Porfirio Díaz from 1876 to 1911, Protestant missionaries—including Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists— received favourable treatment because the government viewed them as allies in instilling modern values in the peasant and indigenous populations of Mexico. Díaz even personally befriended several leading missionaries.²⁴ Perhaps the most blatant patronage of Protestant missionaries by Latin American liberals came in Guatemala in 1882, where only a few decades earlier a more conservative administration had expelled Frederick Crowe. By this later date, however, liberals were firmly in control of the Guatemalan government, and autocratic president Justo Rufino Barrios had guaranteed religious freedom as a way to encourage investment and immigration from Protestant Europe and North America.²⁵ When news reached Barrios that the Presbyterians were planning to send missionary John C. Hill to Guatemala, he personally escorted Hill from the US to Guatemala City, provided bodyguards and housing, and reserved an expropriated piece of Catholic property one block from the capital’s central plaza for the construction of the first Protestant church in the country. More than 130 years later, a Presbyterian congregation still meets in this location surrounded by the offices of the executive branch of the Guatemalan government.²⁶

²³ H. McKennie Goodpasture, ‘David Trumbull: Missionary Journalist and Liberty in Chile, 1845–1889’, Journal of Presbyterian History, LVI, 2 (1978), p. 149. ²⁴ Deborah J. Baldwin, Protestants and the Mexican Revolution: Missionaries, Ministers, and Social Change (Urbana, IL, 1990), p. 17; and George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York, 1993), p. 153. ²⁵ Quoted in Virginia Garrard-Burnett, ‘Liberalism, Protestantism, and Indigenous Resistance in Guatemala, 1870–1920’, Latin American Perspectives, XXIV, 2 (March 1997), p. 38. ²⁶ John C. Hill to F. F. Ellinwood, 46, 12 Jan. 1883, Presbyterian Board of Foreign Mission Microfilm, 1833–1911 Microfilm (PBFM); John C. Hill to F.F. Ellinwood, 46, 27 July 1883, PBFM.; Helen J. Sanborn, A Winter in Central America and Mexico (Boston, 1886), p. 118.

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As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Protestants—led by many denominations from the US with historical ties to dissenting traditions—had gained a firm foothold in a region long-dominated by Catholicism. In doing so, they became advocates, test cases, and sometimes even the impetus for the weakening of established Catholicism and for legal protections of religious freedom. However, this process did not result from a pure application of dissenting ideology. Instead, it often resulted from Protestants’ own close alliances with governing powers, either in the form of competing church–state imperial alliances before the nineteenth century or in the form of alliances of convenience with liberal governments during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The results of these compromises were most evident in three areas. First, it meant that historically dissenting churches played a different role in Latin American society than they did in the North Atlantic, often serving as allies (albeit relatively weak ones) to state authority against the newly disestablished Catholic hierarchy. Second, because the interests of liberal political allies were more economic and political than they were religious, this compromise meant that Protestant churches in the nineteenth century found themselves tethered to elite interests and so had trouble attracting local converts, especially the vast majority of Latin Americans who were poor peasants or recent migrants to urban areas. Finally, and not surprisingly considering the second point, Protestant groups remained numerically small throughout the region and attracted converts numbering in only the dozens or, at best, hundreds in each national context.

TRANSITIONS TO LOCAL AUTONOMY These three trends that crystallized in the late-nineteenth century broke down at different rates in the twentieth century, with the first two—alliances with liberal governments and a focus on evangelization among elites—dissipating early and the slow numerical growth only changing later. As a whole, the twentieth century was a period of transition from missionary-led Protestantism to locally led Protestantism, but this shift happened in stages. The first stage was a move toward local autonomy that began around the turn of the century and had multiple causes. By far, the most dominant aspect of this transition was a move toward Pentecostalism among local populations, which is particularly noteworthy in relation to dissenting religion because of both its theology and its heritage. However, Pentecostalism was neither the first nor the only way that local autonomy surfaced among Latin American Protestants. One of the earliest non-Pentecostal examples of a shift to local leadership within Protestantism, and also of interpretation of ideological dissent, came from Mexico. In the late-nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries had taken up dictator Porfirio Díaz’s invitation to engage working class, peasant,

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and indigenous populations on the social and geographic margins of the country, which at the time was still not a common missionary tactic in the region. In the political realm at the same time, a substantial dissident opposition was arising to challenge Díaz’s rule, and the social groups that produced this opposition overlapped significantly with those targeted by missionaries. Historians Jean-Pierre Bastian and Deborah Baldwin have demonstrated that socially marginalized converts to Protestantism, particularly Methodism, were among the many groups that allied to challenge Díaz. Mexican converts in these groups drew on their ‘extreme minority status’ and a sense of nationalism that contradicted prevalent assumptions about the elite and foreignnature of Protestantism to create multiple challenges to the Díaz regime.²⁷ On a social level, these challenges included becoming leaders of education movements and of anti-re-election political clubs, but some of the challenges were also politically violent and including taking up arms to overthrow the government during the Mexican Revolution (1910–17).²⁸ These politically dissident positions challenged secular authority, but they also challenged relationships between converts and foreign missionaries, the latter of which tended to espouse apolitical positions and, as Congregationalist missionary James Eaton wrote, ‘the maintenance of public order’.²⁹ The Mexican case was unique in that Protestant participation in armed revolution was not an experience that translated to other contexts. However, despite this singularity, these events are also instructive more generally for understanding the power dynamics of Protestantism in early-twentiethcentury Latin America and for analysing how traditions of dissent translated into these contexts. Although converts in Mexico remained antagonistic to Catholicism, their primary forms of dissent were aimed at political power and, somewhat unexpectedly, at foreign missionaries since most missionaries did not fully approve of converts’ interpretation and application of their faith in the revolutionary context. These trends—convert dissension from missionary norms and converts’ use of dissenting ideas such as individual freedom of conscience—were also evident in other transitions toward autonomous local Protestantism, especially those that involved Pentecostalism.

PENTECOSTAL REVIVALS The first Pentecostal revival in Latin America occurred in a Methodist congregation in Valparaiso, Chile in 1909. Following the path opened by ²⁷ Jean-Pierre Bastian, Los Disidentes: Sociedades Protestantes Y Revolución En Me ́xico, 1872–1911 (Meexico, D.F., 1989), p. 303. ²⁸ Ibid., pp. 73–85, 105–45, 225; Baldwin, Protestants and the Mexican Revolution, pp. 67–86. ²⁹ Quoted in Baldwin, Protestants and the Mexican Revolution, p. 72.

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Trumbull and the triumph of the liberal party in Chile, missionary William Taylor (1821–1902) opened a Methodist mission in Chile in 1877.³⁰ By the end of the century, the mission was well established and, like many of its counterparts, primarily focused on ministering to middle class and elite populations. However, the missionary pastor of the country’s largest Methodist congregation in Valparaiso, Willis Hoover (1858–1936), saw the growing number of poor migrants seeking work in the port city as a new opportunity, and he began actively seeking new methods to evangelize these poor and working class populations. In 1909, he found that method in Pentecostalism, which he adapted based on communication with a fellow Methodist missionary in India. The Pentecostal revival in Valparaiso began in June 1909, and by August nightly services were full to overflowing with more than 800 in attendance each time the church opened its doors. Concerning the nature of the revival, Hoover reported: (T)he revival was accompanied by various and unusual manifestations: laughter, weeping, shouts, singing, strange tongues, visions, ecstasies in which persons fell to the floor and felt themselves transported to other places—to heaven, to paradise, to beautiful fields—and with various experiences. They spoke with the Lord, with angels, or with the devil.

Although he admitted that these actions were ‘strange’, he argued that since they were accompanied by ‘good fruits’, including hundreds of new Chilean converts, that they should be encouraged.³¹ His superiors in the Methodist Church disagreed and denounced the revival as a ‘false doctrine’ that was ‘anti-Methodist, contrary to Scriptures, and irrational’.³² Hoover’s response to these accusations was to claim that it was he and his followers who were in line with John Wesley’s vision for Methodism and that the institutional leadership was the anti-Methodist party.³³ As a result of this conflict between the Pentecostal revivalists and the Methodist missionary hierarchy, several congregations seceded from missionary control to form a new National Methodist Church in 1910. These congregations consisted largely of non-elite Chileans, and they invited Hoover to serve as their pastor. By 1933 the national church itself split into two groups, one led by Hoover and the other strictly Chilean. Members of both of these organizations began referring to themselves as criollo (home grown) Pentecostals later in the ³⁰ William Taylor, Story of My Life: An Account of What I Have Thought and Said and Done in My Ministry of More Than Fifty-Three Years in Christian Lands and among the Heathen (New York, 1896), pp. 660–1, 674–81. ³¹ Willis Collins Hoover, History of the Pentecostal Revival in Chile: The Famous First-Hand Story by the Founder of the Pentecostal Work in Chile, trans. Mario G. Hoover (Santiago, Chile, 2000), p. 36. ³² Ibid., p. 73. ³³ Ibid., p. 71.

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century in order to differentiate themselves from newer Pentecostal converts won over by later-arriving US missionaries.³⁴ On the surface, this story is not concerned with dissent in its most technical form since no state authority was mandating orthodoxy among the Methodists. However, the formation of the first national Chilean Protestant church does illustrate the important dual themes of dissenting lineages among autochthonous Latin American Protestant churches and of the centrality of the broad concepts that define dissenting traditions among those churches. In the first category, the line from Wesleyanism to Methodism to Pentecostalism is evident in the narrative arc of the arrival and dissemination of Protestantism in Chile. In the second category, nonconformity and voluntarism played central roles in the thought processes and actions of both the missionaries and local populations who separated from established Methodism. In this case, nonconformity related to the norms imposed by foreign missionary structures not the norms of state-sponsored religion, but the strict regulation of orthodoxy and orthopraxy in early-twentieth-century Protestant missions did require a conscious opting out of the established system and the creation of new alternative religious structures with less certain sources of both social authority and funding, a theoretical parallel to more traditional dissenting Protestantism. In addition, the lack of social capital or prestige among early Chilean Pentecostals should not be overlooked. This class positioning, similar to that in Mexico, placed converts on the outside of both secular and religious power structures, and in fact, many converts to Chilean Pentecostalism in the decades immediately following the formation of a national church came not only from the social periphery but also from geographic periphery of Chile long ignored by the Catholic Church hierarchy.³⁵ This connection between Pentecostal revival and local conflict with foreign missionary hierarchies was not unique to Chile. For example, the origins of Pentecostalism in both Brazil and Guatemala followed similar trends. In Brazil, Pentecostalism traces its roots to 1910 when two different immigrant-led Pentecostal groups infiltrated existing Protestant denominations, challenged their leadership, and in turn led an exodus of Brazilian members to form new Pentecostal churches. In the north of the country, two Swedish Baptists who had already experienced Spirit baptism, Daniel Berg and Gunnar Vingren, immigrated to the state of Pará in response to a prophetic revelation they received and, once in Brazil, partnered with the local Baptist missionaries. By that time, Baptists were well established in the country. The first Baptists came not as missionaries but as part of a settlement of former Confederate soldiers ³⁴ Edward L. Cleary and Juan Sepúlveda, ‘Chilean Pentecostalism: Coming of Age’, in Edward L. Cleary and Hannah W. Stewart-Gambino, eds, Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America (Boulder, CO, 1998), pp. 99–100. ³⁵ Ibid., p. 100.

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who immigrated to Brazil—where slavery was legal until 1888—after their defeat in the US Civil War. Those Baptist settlers were integral in recruiting the first Baptist missionaries in 1881, and by the time Berg and Vingren arrived, the denomination had more than eighty churches and 5000 members spread across the country.³⁶ By May 1911, Berg and Vingren had led a small group of Brazilian Baptists to begin speaking in tongues and to eschew modern medicine in favour of prayer. The Baptist missionaries responded by excommunicating the pair along with eighteen of their followers, and so the newly churchless group formed their own congregation. In 1918, this group adopted the name Assembly of God (Assembléia de Deus), and by 1930 this was a completely Brazilian organization, free from foreign missionary personnel or funding.³⁷ In southern Brazil, Italian immigrant Louis Francescon also arrived after receiving a prophecy in 1910, and he joined a Presbyterian congregation in São Paulo. Like the Baptists, the Presbyterians also were well established by the early 1900s, having first begun missionary efforts in Brazil in 1859. Also like the Baptists, they viewed the Pentecostal message as unorthodox. After Francescon preached the doctrine of speaking in tongues, the Presbyterians expelled him, and he left with twenty members of the church to form the Christian Congregation (Congreação Cristã). Like the Assembly of God, the Christian Congregation positioned itself as a national church and resisted attempts by foreign missionary groups, including other Pentecostals, to influence its development.³⁸ In Guatemala, unlike in Brazil, Pentecostalism began in rural areas rather than in urban centres. Independent Pentecostal missionaries arrived in Guatemala as early as 1910, but these initial evangelists found progress slow. The one missionary couple who did have success among the K’iche’ Maya of the highlands—Charles and Carrie Furman—were aligned with the Primitive Methodist Church even though they were Pentecostal and that denomination was not. However, the Furmans were not late arrivals to that mission. Rather, they were its founding missionaries in Guatemala. This meant that the mission tolerated their Pentecostal preaching rather than expelling them, as had happened in Brazil. That changed in 1932 when an indigenous revival led to several hundred K’iche’ converts speaking in tongues and to those converts seeking to convince members of other missions to join the Pentecostal movement. By 1935, the Primitive Methodists had relieved the Furmans from their

³⁶ Anderson, An Evangelical Saga, pp. 134–48; Cyrus B. Dawsey and James M. Dawsey, eds, The Confederados: Old South Immigrants in Brazil (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1995), ³⁷ Ivar Vingren, Despertamento Apostólico No Brasil (Rio de Janiero, 1987), pp. 36–7; Daniel Berg, Enviado Por Deus (Rio de Janeiro, 1982), pp. 45–7; R. Andrew Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (New Brunswick, NJ, 1997), pp. 26–30. ³⁸ Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil, pp. 29–31.

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post, and fourteen formerly Methodist congregations left to form their own Pentecostal denomination, the first in Guatemala.³⁹

SOCIAL CONTEXTS OF PENTECOSTALISM The dissenting nature of Pentecostals in relation to established Protestant missionary groups became more evident in the long-term responses to these schisms. The most common tool that non-Pentecostal denominations used to attempt to limit the spread of Pentecostalism was the comity agreement, a contract between several mission agencies that assigned geographic regions of countries to each agency and that served as a sort of ‘mutual defence pact’ against any new Protestant missionaries. In Guatemala, informal arrangements existed as early as 1902, but a formal comity agreement only came in 1936 after the Pentecostal split in the Methodist mission. The timing was not coincidental as the rationale for the contract among five non-Pentecostal missions was precisely to shut out Pentecostals.⁴⁰ US mission boards signed similar agreements in this period for countries throughout the region and in parts of Asia and Africa. The result was a growing divide between an alliance of Protestant denominations that sanctioned one another as orthodox and a growing number of Protestants who dissented to those establishment definitions of orthodoxy. In the early- to mid-twentieth century, Pentecostalism also functioned as another form of religious voluntarism and dissent in Latin America. Although theological conflicts with established denominations play prominent roles in official or institutional histories of Pentecostalism, for the growing number of new converts to Pentecostalism in the period, such conflicts were, at best, a secondary concern. Rather—as is evident in the Chilean, Brazilian, and Guatemalan cases— Pentecostalism offered a response to the growing social dislocation of marginalized populations in an era of modernization, industrialization, and urbanization. Sociologist Christian Lalive d’Epinay and anthropologist Emilio Willems were the first outsiders to study this trend in depth and to offer social rather than theological analyses of these conversions. They reached slightly different conclusions about the reasons for conversion. Writing in 1967 about Brazil and Chile, Willems argued that Pentecostalism was a forward-looking adaptation by those whose social fabric was torn by modernization. Analysing Chile one year ³⁹ Stephen Carter Dove, Local Believers, Foreign Missionaries, and the Creation of Guatemalan Protestantism, 1882–1944, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, TX (2012), pp. 217, 223–31. ⁴⁰ Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (Austin, TX, 1998), pp. 29–32, 40.

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later, Lalive d’Epinay hypothesized that Pentecostalism was not an adaptation but rather a retreat from society in the face of social anomie. In both cases, however, the pair agreed that Pentecostalism was growing autochthonously among populations pushed to the social and economic margins by industrialization and urbanization.⁴¹ Pentecostalism’s appeal in the early- to mid-twentieth century is particularly noteworthy in relation to the position of the Catholic Church at the time. The anti-clerical liberalism that dominated the region in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries severely impacted Catholicism, not only disestablishing the Church in most countries but also placing limits on the training of new priests. The result was a significant decline in the number of clergy across the region by the time of the Great Depression, an economic crisis that hit Latin America particularly hard.⁴² More than 98 per cent of Latin Americans identified as Catholic in the first half of the twentieth century, but the Church was not able to provide enough clergy to serve the religious needs of that population. In Mexico, the deportation of foreign priests and the nationalization of religious property grew so intense that in 1926 the archbishop of Mexico ordered all churches closed and all religious services suspended, including administration of the sacraments.⁴³ In Guatemala, the 1921 census counted only 102 priests to serve a population of 2 million, with three of the country’s twentytwo departments not reporting any resident clergy.⁴⁴ In 1941, Chilean priest Alberto Hurtado wrote a book titled ¿Es Chile un país católico? (Is Chile a Catholic Country?) in which he lamented that although more than 98 per cent of Chileans were baptized Catholics, fewer than 10 per cent attended mass. Hurtado blamed this in part on reduced numbers of clergy—1615 for a population of 4.6 million— but he placed equal blame on the Church itself for identifying with the wealthy elite rather than with the lower classes during a time of intense social and economic hardship.⁴⁵ In this context of social dislocation and religious vacuum, Pentecostalism emerged as a way to opt out of official religious systems and to align voluntarily with an alternative faith. While not dissent in the traditional sense, this option was certainly a nonconformist option on many levels, and Pentecostalism was not the only form of religious dissent that marginalized populations began opting for in this period. Within Protestantism, many non-Pentecostal denominations such as the Brazilian Baptist Convention and the National ⁴¹ Emilio Willems, Followers of the New Faith: Culture Change and the Rise of Protestantism in Brazil and Chile (Nashville, TN, 1967); Christian Lalive d’Epinay, El Refugio De Las Masas: Estudio SociolóGico Del Protestantismo Chileno (Santiago, 1968). ⁴² Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America, p. 214. ⁴³ Ibid., p. 193. ⁴⁴ Dirreción General de Estadística, ‘Censo De La Población De La República Levantado El 28 De Agosto De 1921, 4o Censo’ (Guatemala, 1924), p. 269. ⁴⁵ Alberto Hurtado, ¿Es Chile Un País Católico? (Santiago, 1941).

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Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Guatemala, also nationalized and removed themselves from missionary control, sometimes amicably and in other cases after years of conflict. Outside of Protestantism, non-Christian religions also began attracting (or at least publicly attracting since many had a history of underground practice) converts from the social margins. This was particularly true in Brazil and the Caribbean where African-derived religions offered an alternative to more established religious options. Even within Catholicism, the mid-twentieth century saw the rise of communities that pushed back against the traditional demands of the hierarchy. These included both syncretic indigenous forms of Catholicism and grassroots movements such as Catholic Action and Ecclesial Base Communities, which received a boost after the 1968 Latin American Bishops Conference and the advent of Liberation Theology.⁴⁶

PRO TE S TANTI S M’ S DEMOGRAPHIC BOOM In the latter half of the twentieth century, poor social and economic conditions in Latin America continued and even worsened during an era of military dictatorships, civil wars, and financial boom and bust cycles. At the same time, religious options such as Pentecostalism and African-derived religions that had long been relegated to the margins of society in Latin America became viable alternatives for large numbers of people. From the 1960s to the early 2000s, Protestantism—and particularly Pentecostalism—experienced an unprecedented period of demographic growth in the region that sociologist David Martin famously characterized as an ‘explosion’ when he helped popularize the modern study of the movement in 1990.⁴⁷ The rapid growth of Protestantism in the late-twentieth century is evident in the statistical data, but it bears noting that statistics about religious affiliation in Latin America are notoriously fickle and complicated. Some countries such as Brazil and Mexico ask religious questions on their national censuses while others do not. Even where religious questions are asked either for national censuses or by independent pollsters, certain groups such as the poor and indigenous populations face chronic undercounting that skews the data. On the other hand, polling by religious bodies often tends the other direction by over-counting membership—sometimes dramatically so—in order to build a triumphant narrative of spiritual conquest. This caveat does ⁴⁶ For a discussion of Pentecostalism in relation to Umbanda, a Brazilian religion that draws on African-derived spirituality and Catholicism, see Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil. For a comparison of Pentecostalism and Ecclesial Base Communities, see Cecília Loreto Mariz, Coping with Poverty: Pentecostals and Christian Base Communities in Brazil (Philadelphia, PA, 1994). ⁴⁷ Martin, Tongues of Fire.

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not mean that late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century statistics are useless in evaluating changes in Protestantism, only that they should be gauged impressionistically and longitudinally to demonstrate trends and not to pinpoint specific numbers of adherents. The most comprehensive survey of religious affiliation in the region as a whole comes from The Atlas of Global Christianity, a product of several Protestant missionary consortiums that provides a useful bird’s eye view of change in the past century. According to this data, in 1910 Protestants accounted for 2.6 per cent of the population of Latin American and the Caribbean (including British and Dutch colonies), and by 2010, that number had risen to 18.8 per cent.⁴⁸ A 2014 study by the Pew Research Center reached a similar conclusion that 19 per cent of Latin Americans were Protestant. The Pew survey also found that only 9 per cent of Latin Americans reported being raised Protestant, indicating that much of Protestant growth is a recent phenomenon. By contrast, 69 per cent of Latin Americans reported Catholic affiliation even though 84 per cent were raised Catholic.⁴⁹ These rates of conversion are not even across the region. Some countries such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras have rates of Protestant affiliation as high as 40 per cent while in others such as Mexico and Paraguay rates are less than 10 per cent.⁵⁰ Within countries there is also significant variation. In Mexico, for example, Protestants account for only 7.4 per cent of the national population, but they represent 19.2 per cent of the population in the southern state of Chiapas.⁵¹ In all of these national cases, both large and small, Protestants accounted for less than 2 per cent of the population in the early 1900s, indicating a rapid rate of growth for Protestants later in the century. Although a handful of social scientists led by Lalive d’Epinay and Willems began noticing this demographic shift in the 1960s, it first drew widespread attention in the late 1980s. In 1987, the New York Times reported that there were 12 million Protestants and another 12 million regular attendees of Protestant services in Brazil, double what the numbers were just seven years prior.⁵² In the 1980s and 1990s, ⁴⁸ Todd M. Johnson and Kenneth R. Ross, eds, Atlas of Global Christianity, 1910–2010 (Edinburgh, 2009), p. 176. ⁴⁹ Center, Religion in Latin America, p. 14. Other religions and those with no affiliation account for the remainders in each category. ⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 14. The Pew Research Center also provided detailed demography for Brazil, Chile, and Guatemala in a 2006 study. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostalism (Washington, DC, 2006). Available online: http://www. pewforum.org/2006/10/05/spirit-and-power/ ⁵¹ Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, ‘Panorama De Las Religiones En México, 2010’ (México, 2011), pp. 3, 59. Available online: http://internet.contenidos.inegi.org.mx/con tenidos/productos/prod_serv/contenidos/espanol/bvinegi/productos/censos/poblacion/2010/ panora_religion/religiones_2010.pdf ⁵² Alan Riding, ‘In Brazil, Evangelicals Are on the Rise’, New York Times (25 Oct. 1987), p. 16.

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philosopher Enrique Dussel was among the first to synthesize these changes on a regional level, but widespread awareness came in 1990 when sociologist David Martin and anthropologist David Stoll published separate regional analyses of Protestant growth in Latin America. Each drew attention not only to the growth itself but also to internal complexities of the movement, including the uneven geographic distribution that was concentrated in Brazil and Central America.⁵³ Stoll also differentiated between four types of Protestantism in the region—1) immigrant, 2) historical, 3) fundamentalist, and 4) Pentecostal—that he argued arrived as distinct ‘waves’ but over time merged and synthesized to produce fluid and overlapping identities.⁵⁴ With regard to dissenting religions, it is important to note that the second and third waves were the origins of Protestant missionary evangelization in the region and were dominated by dissenting groups—especially Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians. The fourth phase, which has come to dominate Protestantism in the region, was both an outgrowth of and a response to those earlier two waves. In the past quarter century, numerous scholars have used the frameworks provided by Stoll and Martin to explain the appeal and effects of Protestantism in late-twentieth-century Latin America. In most cases, these studies have found that the explosive growth of Protestantism has been an extension of the same trends that fostered success earlier in the century, especially the combination of socially marginalized populations and the weak response of the Catholic Church to these populations because of the legacy of church–state conflicts. For example, in Colombia, Elizabeth Brusco has shown that many women used Protestant conversion as a tool for challenging gender norms and for reasserting the value of domesticity in a society where internal migration due to violence and the commodification of labour had fractured households. Brusco also notes that such conversion was a revolutionary option in Bolivia, not only because it confronted the dominant culture of machismo but also because it required the renunciation of Catholicism, which has remained particularly powerful in Colombia relative to the rest of Latin America.⁵⁵ Another marginalized group with relatively high conversion rates to Protestantism are the descendants of Latin America’s pre-Columbian indigenous ⁵³ Enrique D. Dussel, A History of the Church in Latin America: Colonialism to Liberation (1492–1979), trans. Alan Neely (Grand Rapids, MI, 1981), pp. 359–60; Enrique D. Dussel, ed. The Church in Latin America, 1492–1992 (Maryknoll, NY, 1992), pp. 315–50; Martin, Tongues of Fire, pp. 50–2; Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? pp. 3–10. ⁵⁴ Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? p. 5. This idea was expanded upon by José Míguez Bonino in José Míguez Bonino, Rostros Del Protestantismo Latinoamericano (Grand Rapids, MI, 1995). ⁵⁵ Catholicism remained a state-sponsored religion in Colombia until the ratification of the country’s 1991 constitution, which also introduced an express guarantee of freedom of religion. Elizabeth E. Brusco, The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia (Austin, TX, 1995), pp. 3, 16, 31–4, 77–91, and 135–6.

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population, which has experienced both physical and cultural violence under several successive political and economic systems since the arrival of Europeans. The case of the Maya of the Guatemalan highlands offers a particularly harsh example of this history that includes conquest, forced labour, and a twentieth-century genocide. One of the leading questions of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries in this area has been how the Maya are claiming and recovering cultural identity in response to this history of oppression. On the surface, Protestantism seems closely allied with the oppressors rather than the oppressed since its arrival from the United States corresponded temporally, and in part ideologically, with oppressive interests including extractive industries like banana production and aid for right-wing military governments. As such, many opponents in the Catholic Church characterized Protestantism as an ‘invasion’.⁵⁶ Protestantism in Guatemala also shares a more direct link with oppression in the person of Efraín Ríos Montt, the military dictator from 1982 to 1983 who perpetuated genocide against the Maya and who was the first Pentecostal head of state in Latin America.⁵⁷ Despite these connections between Protestantism and violence against indigenous Guatemalans, conversion rates are high among the Maya, and autochthonous Protestantism has played a critical role for many Maya in asserting ethnic identity in the face of repression. Anthropologist Matt Samson has documented how many Maya have not only adopted Protestantism as a reaction to social disruption but also how they have ‘woven (it) into the fabric’ of their communities.⁵⁸ In a comparison of Protestant communities within two Maya ethno-linguistic groups, the Mam and the Kaqchikel, Samson illustrates how various Maya communities use Protestantism in ways ranging from traditionalism to activism in order not only to preserve but also to recover ethnic identity. He argues that these Maya appropriate Protestantism in ways that push back against limits imposed by both Guatemalan and foreign missionary hierarchies.⁵⁹ It must be noted, however, that in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, Protestantism in Latin America was no longer only a religion of the marginalized. Increasingly in this period, Protestantism grew among

⁵⁶ Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? pp. 1–23, 32, 305–31. ⁵⁷ Ibid., pp. 180–217; Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982–1983 (New York, 2010). ⁵⁸ C. Mathews Samson, Re-Enchanting the World: Maya Protestantism in the Guatemalan Highlands (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2007), p. 20. ⁵⁹ Ibid., pp. 76–127. Samson builds on the work of anthropologist David Scotchmer who described Maya Protestant theology in a number of works including David G. Scotchmer, ‘Life of the Heart: A Maya Protestant Spirituality’, in Gary H. Gossen and Miguel León Portilla, eds, South and Meso-American Native Spirituality: From the Cult of the Feathered Serpent to the Theology of Liberation (New York, 1993).

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middle-class and aspiring middle-class populations, too. This has led to several new manifestations of Protestantism, notably in areas of civic engagement, that blurred the lines between church and state interests. For example, beginning in the 1970s, some Pentecostals in Brazil began campaigning for specific political candidates and built patron–client relationships with elected officials.⁶⁰ In Guatemala in the 1980s, Ríos Montt used explicitly religious rhetoric, including Sunday presidential ‘sermons’, to cast his authoritarian vision for civic order in Guatemala. More recently, urban Pentecostals in Guatemala have taken a more centrist political position but have been just as clear about seeing their religious duty as intimately connected to their civic duty.⁶¹ These shifts have highlighted the multifaceted and complex nature of Latin American Protestantism as it expands from foundations created by multiple influences, both internal and external. While none of these cases sought to impose a state-run Protestant church on their respective countries, they do highlight the fact that Protestantism is not always a purely dissenting or non-aligned religious movement in Latin America.

CO NCLUSION The tension between these varied trends in early-twenty-first-century Latin American Protestantism serves as a mirror to reflect the ambiguous historical relationship of these religious movements to dissenting religion. On the one hand, the form and function of Protestantism—or perhaps better, Protestantisms—in Latin America is so diverse that there can be no clear genealogy to one particular theological forebear, including the English dissenters. Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and even Quakers are represented throughout the region, and many of those denominations have long histories in Latin America. However, none are particularly strong traditions as measured by their number of adherents. Although Pentecostalism does have a strong demographic presence in the region and is a descendent of English dissenters via its roots in Wesleyan Holiness movements, it is inaccurate to trace that lineage too directly for most Latin American Pentecostals. Many Latin American Pentecostal churches are home grown, and even those that emerged directly from missionary Methodism, such as Chilean Pentecostals, drew on a variety of other local cultural factors in developing their theology and identity. On the other hand, despite the lack of clear institutional linkages, the core ideas of dissent are critical to understanding almost all of the various types of ⁶⁰ Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil, pp. 145–66. ⁶¹ Kevin Lewis O’Neill, City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (Berkeley, CA, 2010).

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Protestantism in Latin America. For most of Protestant history in the region, Catholicism has not been a state religion; and yet it has been, and remains, socially and statistically dominant. Thus, Protestants are, by definition, nonconformists in Latin America. Beyond that, although they were by no means a deciding factor in the disintegration of church–state bonds in the latenineteenth century, early Protestants were vocal proponents of disestablishment and religious freedom. Local Protestants have also continued to use those arguments in unexpected ways by challenging the hegemony of foreign missionary orthodoxy that, while not a legally established religion, was a functionally established one. Finally, Protestants have used the political and social space created by religious freedom to apply religious voluntarism in locally relevant ways. Particularly notable is how marginalized Latin Americans have used Protestantism to radically disconnect from established social patterns. While scholars must be careful not to be overly determinant in analysing dissenting traditions as the cause of these developments, it is clear that they have been important contributing factors to the development of Latin America’s largest minority religious group.

SEL E C T B I B L I OG R A P H Y Anderson, Justice C. An Evangelical Saga: Baptists and Their Precursors in Latin America (Longwood, FL: Xulon Press, 1995). Baldwin, Deborah. Protestants and the Mexican Revolution: Missionaries, Ministers, and Social Chang. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Bastian, Jean Pierre. Los disidentes: sociedades protestantes y revolución en México, 1872–1911 (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989). Bastian, Jean Pierre. Historia del protestantismo en América Latina México, D.F.: CUPSA, 1990). Brenneman, Robert E. Homies and Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Brusco, Elizabeth E. The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1995). Chesnut, R. Andrew. Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997). Chuchiak, John F. The Inquisition in New Spain, 1536–1820: A Documentary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Cleary, Edward L. and Juan Sepúlveda. ‘Chilean Pentecostalism: Coming of Age’, in Edward L. Cleary and Hannah W. Stewart-Gambino, eds, Power, Politics, and Pentecostals, (Boulder: Westview, 1997): 97–122. Dawsey, Cyrus B. and James M. Dawsey. The Confederados Old South Immigrants in Brazil (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995). Dussel, Enrique D. The Church in Latin America, 1492–1992 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992).

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Dussel, Enrique D. Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982–1983 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). Johnson, Todd M. and Kenneth R. Ross, eds, Atlas of Global Christianity, 1910–2010 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Martin, David. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: B. Blackwell, 1990). Mariz, Cecília Loreto. Coping with Poverty: Pentecostals and Christian Base Communities in Brazil (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). McGrath, John. ‘Polemic and History in French Brazil, 1555–1560’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 27, 2 (1996): 385–97. Míguez Bonino, José. Rostros del Protestantismo Latinoamericano (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995). O’Neill, Kevin Lewis. City of God Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostalism (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2006). Available online: http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/spirit-and-power/ Pew Research Center, ‘Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region’ (Washington: Pew Research Center, 2014). Available online, http://www.pewforum.org/files/2014/11/Religion-in-Latin-America-11-12-PM-fullPDF.pdf Samson, C. Mathews. Re-Enchanting the World: Maya Protestantism in the Guatemalan Highlands (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007). Schwaller, John Frederick. The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America From Conquest to Revolution and Beyond (New York: New York University Press, 2011). Stoll, David. Is Latin America Turning Protestant?: The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Tillman, Benjamin F. Imprints on Native Lands The Miskito-Moravian Settlement Landscape in Honduras (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011). Willems, Emilio. Followers of the New Faith: Cultural Change and the Rise of Protestantism in Brazil and Chile (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967).

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15 Chilean Pentecostalism Methodism Renewed Martin Lindhardt

In histories of early Latin American and global Pentecostalism, the Chilean case is often granted a prominent position. First of all, Chile was the first country in Latin America in which a Pentecostal Church, the Methodist Pentecostal Church, was founded. Second, whereas Pentecostalism was introduced to most other Latin American countries by foreign Pentecostal missionaries who, inspired by the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles in 1906, travelled there with the intention of founding Pentecostal churches, the Methodist Pentecostal Church was founded in 1910 after a schism within the Methodist Episcopal Church in Chile. The birth of Chilean Pentecostalism had no direct relation to the events in Los Angeles in 1906,¹ and it was only decades later that American and European missionaries arrived in Chile and founded new churches. Hence, the Methodist Pentecostal Church was not only the first Pentecostal church in Latin America but also the first autochthonous and financially and theologically independent Pentecostal denomination outside of Europe and North America. In this chapter I shed some light on the origins of Chilean Pentecostalism, focusing particular attention on historical and theological connections with Methodism. I argue that although scholars are certainly right in paying careful attention to intrinsic developments, Chilean agency, and processes of indigenization,² the history of Chilean Pentecostalism is in fact closely related to ¹ As will become clear later in this chapter, the birth of Chilean Pentecostalism was totally unconnected with Pentecostal and pre-Pentecostal revivals elsewhere in the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ² See for instance Luis Urtubia Orellana, El Fuego Y La Nieve: Historia Del Movimiento Pentecostal En Chile, 1909–1932 (Concepción, Chile, 2006); Juan Sepúlveda, ‘Another Way of Being Pentecostal’, in Calvin L. Smith, ed., Pentecostal Power: Expressions, Impact and Faith of Latin American Pentecostalism (Boston, 2011).

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the history of global Pentecostalism because of a shared Methodist heritage. The chapter demonstrates how some of the internal divisions that caused the schism within the Methodist Episcopal Church in Chile, resulting in the foundation of a new Pentecostal ministry, had deep roots within North American Methodism. What Chilean Pentecostalism inherited from certain branches of Methodism was a strong revivalist urge and a contestatory cultural character that often clashed with a ‘high church’ push towards respectability. I suggest that those features, revivalism and certain dissenting, or low church ways of practicing Protestant Christianity and of defining the position of the church and its adherents vis-à-vis the ‘world’ can take us a considerable way in understanding the appeal of Pentecostalism to lower-class Chileans throughout the twentieth century. Furthermore, I argue that the tensions between revivalist, dissenting interpretations of Protestantism and pushes towards respectability have persisted within Chilean Pentecostalism and have resurfaced and become intensified in recent decades due to significant changes in the social composition of the Pentecostal movement.

E A R L Y P R O T E S T A NTI S M I N C HI LE The introduction of Protestant missions in Chile followed its independence from Spain and a partial breakdown of Catholic monopoly in the early nineteenth century. As noted by the Swiss sociologist Christian Lalive d’Epinay³ the latter factor should not be exaggerated as the Catholic Church maintained very strong ties to political authorities after independence. But nineteenth-century history in Chile as elsewhere in Latin America was characterized by a marked liberal-conservative divide of the political landscape and several leading liberal politicians, including Bernardo O’Higgins (Chile’s liberator) welcomed Protestantism as a potential and enlightened ally against Catholic superstition and the excessive power of the clergy. Nevertheless, Protestantism only had a marginal presence in Chile in the decades following independence. Early Anglican missionaries mainly reached out to Indians in the southern cone whereas immigrant churches of English and German origin mostly focused on the national and cultural preservation of foreign populations.⁴ However, in the second part of the nineteenth century a new wave of British and North American mainline Protestant missionaries, Anglicans, Presbyterians and Methodists, arrived in Chile. Unlike many of their predecessors who mainly ³ Christian Lalive d’Epinay, Haven of the Masses: A Study of the Pentecostal Movement in Chile (London, 1969), p. 39. ⁴ Emilio Willems, Followers of the New Faith: Culture Change and the Rise of Protestantism in Brazil and Chile (Nashville, TN: 1967), p. 5.

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focused on indigenous people and European migrant populations, these newer Protestant missionaries considered Catholic Chile to be a missionary territory. These new Protestant missionaries were also more engaged in social work than their predecessors and in addition to founding churches they also founded hospitals and schools.⁵

METHODISM I N CHILE An understanding of the processes that gave birth to Chilean Pentecostalism in the early twentieth century requires a close look at the social, and historical position and internal dynamics of early Chilean Methodism. The Methodist Episcopal Church was established in Chile in 1877 by the independent American Missionary William Taylor (1821–1902) who had chosen the South American west coast as a missionary field. Inspired by the writings of Paul (in the New Testament) Taylor was of the opinion that external funding would undermine the sense of responsibility of new converts and that self-supporting missions were therefore an ideal to strive towards. In Taylor’s own words: Paul laid the entire responsibility of church work and church government upon his native concerts, under the immediate supervision of the Holy Spirit, just as fast as he and his tried and trusted fellow-missionaries could get them well organized, precluding foreign interference. His general administrative bishops were natives of the foreign countries in which he had planted the Gospel: such men as Timothy and Titus.⁶

As Taylor enjoined no official support from the mission board in the United States, the Methodist churches he founded would have to be self-supporting from the beginning.⁷ Taylor attempted to finance the mission by founding schools in different Chilean cities, although in order to attract Catholic pupils he had to accept that there would no religious teachings.⁸ Taylor’s plan to let the schools finance the mission ultimately proved to be impossible and the mission work was officially taken over by the Methodist Church of the United States in 1897.⁹ But the ambition of being self-supporting did shape the history ⁵ Lalive d’Epinay, Haven of the Masses, pp. 5–6; Juan Sepúlveda, De Peregrinos a Ciudadanos: Breve Historia Del Cristianismo EvangéLico En Chile (Santiago, Chile, Fundación Konrad Adenauer, 1999), p. 117. ⁶ Taylor 1882, pp. 66–7, quoted from Sepúlveda, ‘Another Way of Being Pentecostal’, p. 39. ⁷ J. B. A. Kessler, Jr, A Study of the Older Protestant Missions and Churches in Peru and Chile: With Special Reference to the Problems of Division, Nationalism and Native Ministry (Goes, 1967), p. 96. ⁸ Sepúlveda, De Peregrinos a Ciudadanos, pp. 73–4. ⁹ Lalive d’Epinay, Haven of the Masses, p. 5.

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and position of the Methodist Church in Chile and provided it with some advantages in its early years. Whereas the Presbyterian Church, founded in Chile in 1872, mainly appealed to the educated and liberal middle classes Methodism made a greater inroad among members of the lower or popular classes. Up until 1897 missionaries had to support themselves and, even after the mission was taken over by the church in the United States, missionaries received a much lower salary than their Presbyterian colleagues. Besides, most of the original Methodist missionaries in Chile came from the lower social sectors in the USA. These factors served to reduce the social distance between foreign missionaries and lower class Chileans and made it easier for the former to encourage lay leadership in their congregations. Besides, the self-supporting plan, although ultimately a failure, did result in more self-government and more authority to Chilean church members. At the annual conferences of the church in Chile, national pastors were given the same status as missionaries.¹⁰ Without doubt such social factors were important, both for the Methodist Episcopal Church’s relative success in reaching out to the popular sectors (at least when compared to the Presbyterian Church) and as a stimulus for the development of an autonomous Chilean Pentecostal lay ministry. At the same time, the fact that the North American Methodist church did eventually take over the responsibility for the mission work, also resulted in the influx of more economic resources, making the Church in Chile able to support fulltime staff.¹¹ The Pentecostal revival in the early twentieth century was preceded by a significant growth of Methodism. The number of Methodists in Chile doubled between 1893 and 1897, between 1897 and 1903 and once more between 1903 and 1907 where it reached 4000.¹² The growth was particularly notable in the congregation of the city of Valparaíso in central-coastal Chile where the first Pentecostal revival occurred. In 1892 the evangelistic work in Valparaíso had been abandoned, but with the arrival of an enthusiastic Spanish Methodist missionary, José Torregosa in 1895, the church was revitalized and three years later it counted nearly 300 congregants.¹³

THE PENTECOSTAL REVIVAL IN V ALPARAÍSO As previously mentioned, the Protestant presence in Chile in the nineteenth century was closely connected to the country’s political history. In many cases ¹⁰ Kessler, A Study of the Older Protestant Missions and Churches in Peru and Chile, p. 104. ¹¹ Ibid., p. 103. ¹² Hollenweger, Charismatisch-Pfingstliches Christentum, p. 140. ¹³ Kessler, A Study of the Older Protestant Missions and Churches in Peru and Chile, p. 102.

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Protestant missions were invited directly by political leaders, both as a means to further education and as a counterweight to Catholic hegemony. Although evangelization efforts directed at Catholics were greatly intensified in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Protestant presence in Chile was most notable within the field of education. Intellectual liberals may have sympathized with Protestantism and sent their children to Protestant schools, but actual converts were very few. According to a national survey from 1907, Protestants only made up 1 per cent of the population in Chile, compared to 98 per cent Catholics.¹⁴ As we have seen the Methodist Episcopal Church was more successful than other Protestant churches in appealing to the lower social sectors of Chilean society; nevertheless Methodism had a marginal presence in Chile around the turn of the nineteenth century. It was only with the birth and subsequent growth of Pentecostalism in the early twentieth century that Protestantism became the religion of the popular masses. A main character in the history of early Chilean Pentecostalism was the American Willis Collins Hoover (1858–1936) who served as a pastor in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Valparaíso during the first decade of the twentieth century. Hoover was born in Freeport in the state of Illinois in 1858 and grew up in a Methodist family. He studied medicine in Chicago and graduated in 1884 but in 1889, he felt a divine calling and decided to join the Methodist Mission of William Taylor in Chile together with his wife Mary Anne Hilton Hoover.¹⁵ He first served as a teacher and then, from 1893 as a pastor in northern Chile, but in 1902 he was transferred to serve as pastor of the church in Valparaíso. Here, he soon got the impression that the congregants, although well organized, only had only vague ideas of the meaning of sanctification.¹⁶ In that same year he started to conduct a series of studies of the Acts of the Apostles. During a session in which chapter 2 was discussed an exchange of words occurred that is frequently cited in scholarly texts on the history of Chilean Pentecostalism¹⁷ and which many contemporary Chilean Pentecostals know by heart. A congregant asked: ‘qué impide que nosotros seamos una iglesia como esta iglesia primitiva?’ (what prevents us from being a church like that primitive church?) to which Hoover replied: ‘no hay impedimento alguno sino el que esté en nosotros mismos’ (nothing prevents it, except something within ourselves). According to Hoover this conversation triggered

¹⁴ Juan Sepúlveda, ‘Reinterpreting Chilean Pentecostalism’, Social Compass, XLIII, 3 (1996), p. 300. ¹⁵ Willis Collins Hoover, Historia Del Avivamiento Pentecostal En Chile (Santiago, Chile, 1977), p. 115. ¹⁶ Hollenweger, Charismatisch-Pfingstliches Christentum, p. 140. ¹⁷ For instance, Juan Sepúlveda, ‘Indigenous Pentecostalism and the Chilean Experience’, in Allan H. Anderson and Walter Hollenweger, eds, Pentecostals after a Century: Global Perspectives on a Movement in Transition (Sheffield, 1999), p. 114;

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a search for sanctification and a desire to become a church like the Early Church described in the Acts of the Apostles.¹⁸ During the following years revivalism grew in the congregation in Valparaíso. Although Hoover is generally considered to be an instrumental and founding figure in the history of Chilean Pentecostalism, ordinary lay members also played a very prominent role in the spiritual revival in the early twentieth century. Thus the absence of Hoover in 1904, when he took a long sabbatical leave in the US, did not extinguish the spiritual fire of the congregation. In this period, the official Methodist periodical, El Cristiano, published numerous testimonies that spoke of the ongoing search for revival in the congregation in Valparaíso.¹⁹ Another important incident that served as a stimulus for lay participation in ministry as well as in financial affairs was the 1906 earthquake that destroyed the church building in Valparaíso. Afterwards, the congregation had to be divided into small clusters that worshipped in private homes, each under the care of a lay member.²⁰ In 1907 the Methodist mission sent the congregation in Valparaíso a big tent for worshipping in and on 7 March 1909 a new church building was inaugurated. The construction of this building was financed by donations of lay people and without any support from the mission board. To reiterate, the revival in Valparaíso had no direct relation to the Azusa street revival in the United States in 1906 and did not involve any foreign Pentecostal missionaries (Hoover originally came to Chile as a Methodist missionary). This, however, is not to say that the Chilean revival was totally unconnected to similar revivals elsewhere in the world. During a furlough in the United States between November 1894 and September 1895 Hoover visited a ‘pre-Pentecostal’ church in Chicago ‘which was living in a constant state of revival’,²¹ a visit that left a lasting impression on him.²² In 1907 Mary Ann Hoover received a pamphlet from a missionary friend, Minnie Abrams, in the Mukti Mission in India, describing a Christian revival where people had been baptized in the Holy Spirit and spoken in other tongues. After receiving this pamphlet Hoover started corresponding with Pentecostal leaders in different parts of the world, including the Norwegian T. B. Barrett in order to learn more about the Baptism of the Holy Spirit²³ and he eventually became convinced that ‘esa experienceia era la herencia legitíma de toda la iglesia hasta el fin del siglo’ (this experience was the legitimate inheritance of the whole church until the end of the century).²⁴ ¹⁸ Hoover, Historia Del Avivamiento Pentecostal En Chile, p. 4. ¹⁹ Sepúlveda, ‘Another Way of Being Pentecostal’, p. 40. ²⁰ Sepúlveda, De Peregrinos a Ciudadanos, p. 114. ²¹ Hoover, Historia Del Avivamiento Pentecostal En Chile, p. 25. ²² Sepúlveda, De Peregrinos a Ciudadanos, p. 114. ²³ Kessler, A Study of the Older Protestant Missions and Churches in Peru and Chile, p. 112; Sepúlveda, De Peregrinos a Ciudadanos, p. 115. ²⁴ Hoover, Historia Del Avivamiento Pentecostal En Chile, p. 29.

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From 1907 the search for spiritual revival in the congregation in Valparaíso was intensified. New activities, suggested by lay members and supported by Hoover, included all night prayer meetings on Saturdays and daily prayer groups. During these activities the congregation experienced spiritual manifestation, described by Hoover as: Laughing, weeping, shouting, singing, foreign tongues, visions and ecstasies during which the individual fell to the ground and felt himself caught up into another place, to heaven, to paradise, in splendid fields, with various kinds of experience: conversations with God, the angels or the Devil.²⁵

These experiences also inspired congregants to go out on the streets and public squares to give testimonies of their experiences. These public actions and the rather noisy church meetings provoked negative reactions from the political authorities and the press. In the national newspaper El Chileno the revival was described as the ‘work of a hoaxer or a madman’.²⁶ In some cases the police intervened when church members were preaching on the streets²⁷ and eventually Hoover had to agree to conclude all services no later than 10 p.m.²⁸ It was not only the press and the authorities that reacted to the noisy and emotional expressions of Christian faith in Valparaíso. Within Methodist ranks the revival was also a source of considerable controversy. Other pastors accused Hoover of practicing hypnotism and even feared that the events in Valparaíso were the work of the Devil.²⁹ The official church magazine, El Cristiano, criticized the revival in harsh terms and refused to publish articles sent by Hoover.³⁰ The Mission Board in New York even authorized the bishop in Chile to remove Hoover from office if necessary. In many ways, the emerging conflict within the Methodist Church exemplified a classical (Weberian) tension between on the one hand formal, routinized and institutionalized religiosity and, on the other, revivalist charismatic impulses and movements that emphasize lay responsibility.³¹ By refusing to conform to missionary demands on matters of doctrine, liturgy, and discipline, and by disregarding denominational boundaries (as exemplified by the public testimonies in the streets and on public squares) the revivalists in Valparaíso clearly dissented from official visions of how Methodist religiosity should be ²⁵ Ibid., p. 41; English translation taken from Lalive d’Epinay, Haven of the Masses, p. 116. ²⁶ Lalive d’Epinay, Haven of the Masses, p. 8. ²⁷ Hoover, Historia Del Avivamiento Pentecostal En Chile, p. 53. ²⁸ Sepúlveda, De Peregrinos a Ciudadanos, p. 116. ²⁹ Hoover, Historia Del Avivamiento Pentecostal En Chile, p. 41. ³⁰ Lalive d’Epinay, Haven of the Masses, p. 9. ³¹ Of course, the revival was not a charismatic movement in a narrow Weberian sense (see Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York, 1947)) in so far as it was not centred around one particular charismatic leader but rather around the presumed ability of any person to be inspired and moved by the Holy Spirit.

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practiced and consequently they were seen by church authorities as a sectarian threat to the internal order and unity of the church. For the revivalists, on the other hand, the enthusiastic and emotional forms of worship represented genuinely biblical models or practices that served to revitalize the church. The conflict between anti-revivalist and revivalist dissenting Methodists in Chile had been underway for some time but it greatly escalated after two particular incidents that involved Nellie Laidlaw, a convert from Valparaíso, who according to Hoover was blessed with extraordinary spiritual powers including the gift of prophecy.³² On 12 September 1909 Laidlaw visited the Sunday morning worship of the Second Methodist Church in Santiago and asked for permission to speak to the congregation. Although she presented a letter of recommendation from Hoover, and although members of the congregation were eager to hear what she had to say, the Pastor refused her request. Laidlaw instead went out to speak in the courtyard of the church and a number of congregants followed her. The pastor was infuriated and it came to bitter argument. A second and similar incident occurred when Laidlaw visited another Methodist church in Santiago in the evening of that same day, but this time the police eventually intervened and Laidlaw was arrested.³³ According to the Chilean Pentecostal theologian Juan Sepúlveda³⁴ 12 September is generally regarded as the birthday of Chilean Pentecostalism. After the incidents in Santiago, a number of congregants from the two churches in question started to hold their own services in private homes even though Hoover encouraged them not to do so and asked them to wait for the conflict to be addressed at the annual Methodist conference in 1910. But in December 1909 the Methodist authorities decided to cut all official relations with the congregants from Santiago who were now meeting in private homes. The superintendent of the church described the spiritual hysteria as a sign of blasphemy and argued that the church was being governed by a dirty woman (Laidlaw).³⁵ The annual Methodist conference took place in February 1910 in Valparaíso and unsurprisingly the revival was a dominant theme. As early as October 1909 the Mission had tried to get rid of Hoover by offering him a vacation. At the conference a Disciplinary Commission submitted a report that included detailed accusations against Hoover. Two particular questions stood out: whether or not his teachings conformed to Methodist doctrine and whether or not the manifestations that occurred during worship services in the church in Valparaíso were ³² Hoover, Historia Del Avivamiento Pentecostal En Chile, p. 42; Laidlaw had originally come to Chile to work as a maid in the home of the English consul, but according to Hollenweger, Charismatisch-Pfingstliches Christentum, p. 142, it is likely that she later became an alcoholic and supported herself through prostitution before converting. ³³ Hoover, Historia Del Avivamiento Pentecostal En Chile, p. 43. ³⁴ Sepúlveda, ‘Indigenous Pentecostalism and the Chilean Experience’, p. 117. ³⁵ Hoover, Historia Del Avivamiento Pentecostal En Chile, p. 43.

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truly the work of the Holy Spirit. The report unambiguously accused Hoover of teaching false and anti-Methodist doctrines. For instance it was mentioned that he had declared during public worship that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is manifested in visions, convulsions on the ground, glossolalia, and prophecies. The report also described an incident where Hoover had claimed that a person who was clearly suffering from a mental derangement was in fact possessed by a spirit. Furthermore, it was reported that Hoover in the presence of members of the annual conference, declared that some persons in his church had delivered messages from heaven, had spoken in other tongues and had had visions and practiced praying for others with the laying on of hands.³⁶ Disagreements on the status of phenomena g such as visions, prophecies, glossolalia, and prostrations have a long history within Methodism.³⁷ In Chile the official position was that such phenomena were irrational and could in no way be manifestations of the Holy Spirit.³⁸ Hoover, on the other hand, interpreted such phenomena as signs of divine intervention within a congregation.³⁹ Kessler notes that Hoover’s position on spiritual signs had actually changed prior to the annual conference as he wrote to a missionary in Bolivia that signs were not the essence but rather the accompaniments of the work of God, the essence being the transformation of the individual. According to Kessler, Hoover thus moved closer to Wesley’s own position on spiritual signs, though differences between the two remained. Wesley believed that certain physical manifestations, especially manifestations of joy, accompanied the profound changes that God was bringing about in people, but he did not regard such manifestations as necessary proofs of divine blessings and did not encourage them. While Hoover also came to see manifestations as the accompaniments of inner transformations, Kessler⁴⁰ argues that, unlike Wesley, he was unable to envisage the possibility of the Holy Spirit working without such accompaniments. At the conference in February 1910 Hoover was able to defend himself against the accusations of the Commission by quoting Wesley’s writings and arguing that there was nothing anti-Methodist in the revival. However, he did acknowledge that during the initial stage of the revival some excess had been tolerated in order to keep an open mind to new experiences.⁴¹ In an attempt to reach a settlement, the Conference offered to withdraw the charges against Hoover on the condition that he took a furlough in the United States. Hoover initially agreed, hoping that he would receive support from the mission Board in his home country. Although the Commission did withdraw the charges, a resolution against Nellie Laidlaw was passed. In the resolution the claims that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is

³⁶ ³⁷ ³⁸ ³⁹ ⁴¹

Lalive d’Epinay, Haven of the Masses, p. 11. See Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Peabody, MA: 1987). Kessler, A Study of the Older Protestant Missions and Churches in Peru and Chile, p. 124. Ibid., p. 113. ⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 125. Sepúlveda, ‘Indigenous Pentecostalism and the Chilean Experience’, p. 117.

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accompanied by manifestations such as speaking in tongues, visions, and healings, were rejected as anti-Methodist, anti-biblical, and irrational.⁴² Representatives of the two groups in Santiago that had been separated from the Methodist Church in September 1909 were also present at the conference. They were supposed to defend their case, but were not given much of a chance. Besides, the resolution against Nellie Laidlaw was clearly also a resolution against the revival movement as a whole. The revivalists reacted by founding a new church, Iglesia Metodista Nacional (National Methodist Church), and asked Hoover to be their leader. He initially declined as he intended to keep his part of the bargain with the Commission and go to the USA on a furlough. However, as several congregants from Valparaíso urged him not to go, he eventually decided to stay. After another quarterly conference that took place in Valparaíso in April 2010, a number of officers from the Valparaíso church decided to leave the Methodist Episcopal Church and soon after Hoover and his wife also decided to resign from the Mission. They were followed by approximately 400 church members, about two-thirds of the Valparaíso congregation. In his official letter of resignation as well as in letters to the mission board in New York and to church authorities in Santiago,⁴³ Hoover repeatedly emphasized that he was not separating himself from Methodism and that the revival was not contrary to the teachings of Wesley. Soon after Hoover’s resignation the National Methodist Church in Santiago invited him to be their superintendent. Hoover agreed but suggested that the name of the new church be changed to Iglesia Metodísta Pentecostal (Methodist Pentecostal Church). ‘Methodist’ was preserved in the name of the new church as Hoover firmly believed that he was following the doctrines of John Wesley. ‘Pentecostal’ was added to the name to indicate that the church placed some emphasis on the manifestations of the Holy Spirit as they occurred on the day of Pentecost.⁴⁴ Finally the word ‘national’ was omitted from the name of the new church, as Hoover wished to make it clear that the division was not caused by nationalism.⁴⁵

THE ROOTS OF THE CONFLICT: INDIGENIZATION AND T HE METHODIST HERITAGE Although the division that led to the foundation of the first Pentecostal church in Chile was clearly caused by irreconcilable theological differences within the ⁴² Hoover, Historia Del Avivamiento Pentecostal En Chile, p. 114; Sepúlveda, De Peregrinos a Ciudadanos, p. 120. ⁴³ See Hoover, Historia Del Avivamiento Pentecostal En Chile. ⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 82. ⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 66; Sepúlveda, De Peregrinos a Ciudadanos, p. 118.

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Methodist Church, it has been suggested by several scholars that the clash between different Methodist fractions was also to a large extent a cultural one.⁴⁶ Juan Sepúlveda⁴⁷ describes the two aspects of the conflict as follows: 1) doctrinally, it was a conflict between a religiosity centred in the objectivity of dogma (where faith consists of formal, conscious, and rational acceptance of determined beliefs or doctrines) and a religiosity that gives primacy to the subjective experience of God, in which faith is a response to a kind of possession of one’s being by the divine; 2) culturally, it reflected a conflict between a religion mediated by specialists of the cultural classes (an illustrious clergy) and a religion in which the poor, simple people have direct access to God and in which that relationship can be communicated in the language of feelings and indigenous culture.

Sepúlveda⁴⁸ argues that Pentecostalism was (and is) in many ways more in sync with Chilean popular culture and folk religiosity than more rationalist versions of Protestantism. In a similar vein, David Martin has argued that historical Protestantism has generally not been able to go native to the same extent as Pentecostalism.⁴⁹ Sepúlveda points to important similarities between folk or popular Catholicism and Pentecostalism. For instance, in popular Catholicism spiritual others such as saints are believed to be more directly involved in everyday affairs of human beings than in historical Protestantism. Another point of contact between popular religiosity and Pentecostalism is healing. In popular Catholicism people can appeal to saints and ask for healing and such pleas must generally be accompanied by certain ritual acts (lighting candles, pilgrimages, wearing special clothes for a period of time). Pentecostals, on the other hand, frequently pray for the sick with the laying on of hands, believing that the power of the Holy Spirit can cure people of all kinds of diseases. Sepúlveda further argues that the singing in many Pentecostal churches resembles the moan-like style of southern Chilean folklore.⁵⁰ Popular Catholicism or folk Catholicism has strengthened the popular base of Catholicism in Chile and Latin America by making this kind of Christianity relevant to the everyday concerns and enchanted world views of ordinary

⁴⁶ Lalive d’Epinay, Haven of the Masses; Hollenweger, Charismatisch-Pfingstliches Christentum; Sepúlveda, ‘Indigenous Pentecostalism and the Chilean Experience’; Sepúlveda, De Peregrinos a Ciudadanos. ⁴⁷ Sepúlveda, ‘Indigenous Pentecostalism and the Chilean Experience’, p. 120. ⁴⁸ Sepúlveda, ‘Reinterpreting Chilean Pentecostalism’, pp. 306–7. ⁴⁹ David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 282; For a similar point on historical Protestantism and Pentecostalism in Africa, see Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh, 1999); Martin Lindhardt, ‘Continuity, Change or Coevalness? Charismatic Christianity and Tradition in Tanzania’, in Martin Lindhardt, ed., Pentecostalism in Africa: Presence and Impact of Pneumatic Christianity in Postcolonial Societies (Boston, 2014). ⁵⁰ Sepúlveda, ‘Reinterpreting Chilean Pentecostalism’, p. 308.

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people.⁵¹ In a similar way the rise and growth of Pentecostalism has, undoubtedly, increased the popular base and social and cultural relevance of Protestant Christianity. Of course, a major difference is that while folk Catholicism has certainly been frowned upon by church authorities, the Catholic church has by and large been able to accommodate and (rather condescendingly) tolerate heterogeneous (including syncretistic) expressions of Christianity. Mainline Protestant churches have generally been less tolerant of too creative lay initiatives. Within the Methodist Episcopal Church in Chile, the nonconformist lay-expressions of Christianity including the search for direct spiritual intervention in the lives of adherents had a more dissenting character and represented a direct challenge to the church authorities, which is why a division and a subsequent formation of a new congregation, alienated from the parent body, eventually became inevitable. According to Sepúlveda⁵² the rise of Pentecostalism in the twentieth century represents a Chilean re-appropriation of Protestant Christianity. As previously noted, a number of mainline Protestant churches were founded in Chile in the nineteenth century, but many of these were mainly focused on European migrants or indigenous people, and those churches that did try to evangelize among urban Chilean Catholics found little success. Furthermore, the Protestant presence in Chile in the nineteenth century was closely connected to a liberal political agenda. It was only with the birth of Pentecostalism in the early twentieth century that Protestantism became a popular religion in Chile. I tend to agree with Sepúlveda that the birth of the Pentecostal movement in the early twentieth century enabled new degrees of enculturation of Protestantism that would probably have been impossible within the Methodist Church. However, some of the phenomena that he refers to in order to support his argument (healing by prayer, beliefs that spiritual others are directly involved in the life of human beings) are characteristic of Pentecostalism all over the world and can hardly be attributed to a particular Chilean process of indigenization or re-appropriation. But Sepúlveda is certainly right that a proper understanding of the growth and appeal of Pentecostalism in Chile as elsewhere requires a careful focus on points of resonance with existing cultural and religious traditions.⁵³ That being said the conflicts between different kinds of religiosity that he and other scholars point to were also, to ⁵¹ Lindhardt and Thorsen, ‘Christianity in Latin America’, p. 178. ⁵² Sepúlveda, ‘Reinterpreting Chilean Pentecostalism’, p. 308. ⁵³ Some of the most important work on continuities and discontinuities between Pentecostalism and existing cultural and religious traditions has been done by scholars working in Africa (see Meyer, Translating the Devil, Lindhardt, ‘Continuity, Change or Coevalness?’) and the Pacific (see Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley, CA, 2004). For a study of Pentecostalism and popular Argentine cosmologies, see Wilma Wells Davies, The Embattled but Empowered Community: Comparing Understandings of Spiritual Power in Argentine Popular and Pentecostal Cosmologies (Boston, 2010).

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a large extent, imported ones with deep roots within British and especially North American Methodism. In order to fully understand the forces behind the revival and the schism in the Methodist Pentecostal Church in Chile, we need to take a closer look at those roots.

CONSTITUTIONAL THEO LO GICAL INSTABILITIES WITHIN NORTH AMERICAN METHODISM In an intriguing historical study, the American theologian Donald Dayton sheds light on what he refers to as a certain ‘constitutional theological instability,’ within North American Methodism, referring to a mixture of sociological and theological instabilities.⁵⁴ He traces the sociological instability back to a profound ambiguity in John Wesley’s own legacy. On the one hand, Dayton detects a certain ‘preferential option for the poor’ in the model of Wesley, more precisely in field preaching and in the planting of churches among the poor and the lower middle classes.⁵⁵ On the other hand, Dayton points out that profound sociological and psychological forces have also pulled Methodism ‘toward the more “respectable” established church and toward the center of the culture’.⁵⁶ Dayton further points to an ongoing conflict between what he calls ‘high church’ and ‘low church’ interpretations of the Methodist experience.⁵⁷ The low church interpretation, which he also refers to as Primitive Methodism, represented the camp meeting and revivalist side of Methodism whereas the classical high church interpretation represented a push towards professionalism. In the decades following the death of John Wesley (1791) struggles emerged within Methodism on both sides of the Atlantic. According to Dayton, specific divisive issues included: The extent to which democratic structures of government ought to prevail within the life of Methodism, the role of the laity in church governance, the even more radical question of the role of women in ministry, the nature of ministry and ordination in general, the value and necessity of an educated ministry, the nature of Methodist worship, the use of the prayer book and formal liturgy, the status of the sacraments in Methodist worship, congregational singing versus the use of musical instruments and the propriety of professional musicians, the structuring of the church in general, modes of financing church life, whether the ‘pew rental’ system was an appropriate way of financing church life, the appropriateness of

⁵⁴ Christian T. Collins Winn, ed. From the Margins: A Celebration of the Theological Work of Donald W. Dayton (Eugene, OR 2007), p. 85. ⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 84. ⁵⁶ Ibid. ⁵⁷ Ibid.

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‘field preaching’, the accountability of independent evangelists to larger church structures, camp-meetings and their role in the life of the church, revivalism in general as a reading of Wesley and the heart of the Methodist impulse, and so forth.⁵⁸

Dayton points to a correlation between the theological and the sociological instabilities as he argues that theological divisions were closely, although not uniformly, related to a social class conflict. Thus it was mainly the revivalist side of Methodism that preserved the Wesleyan preferential option for the poor and cultivated the use of laity.⁵⁹ The social and theological instabilities were also significant factors in precipitating the rise of the North American Holiness movement within (but also beyond) Methodist circles in the nineteenth century. The Holiness movement represented a search for personal holiness and experiential sanctification and is widely considered to be an important predecessor of North American Pentecostalism. Dayton points to a concern with Pentecostal themes such as Spiritual baptism and the role of the Holy Spirit in sanctification in the writings of early Holiness theologians,⁶⁰ and he notes how Pentecostal imagery and rhetoric became increasingly dominant within the movement after an 1857–8 revival.⁶¹ While the emergence of the Holiness Movement certainly testifies to deep theological divisions Dayton also describes the movement as a ‘reaction to the nineteenth-century embourgeoisement of Methodism in North America’.⁶² Many wings of the American Holiness Movement were critical of high steeple Methodist churches that did not pay sufficient attention to the poor and the neglected.⁶³ In the second half of the nineteenth century Methodist churches began to fragment along class lines. The upward social mobility of some Methodists was an important factor in some splits that occurred as other Methodist sections, including the Holiness movement, attempted to maintain contact with the masses.⁶⁴ Dayton describes how Phineas Breese, a Methodist holiness oriented pastor, who eventually founded his own church, the Church of the Nazarene in the late nineteenth century, explicitly advocated a ministry for the poor and developed a polemic against elaborate and expensive church buildings.⁶⁵ The Church of the Nazarene and other Holiness churches such as the Free Methodist Church (founded in 1860) mainly appealed to the urban poor and the lower middle classes.⁶⁶ Needless to say the history of early Methodism and the Holiness movement is longer and more complex than what I have outlined above.⁶⁷ However, the ⁵⁸ Ibid., pp. 91–2. ⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 85. ⁶⁰ Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, pp. 71–2. ⁶¹ Ibid., pp. 73–4. ⁶² Ibid., p. 102. ⁶³ Ibid. ⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 75. ⁶⁵ Collins Winn, From the Margins, p. 103. ⁶⁶ Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, p. 77. ⁶⁷ For elaborate studies of Methodism and the Holiness movement, see ibid.; Collins Winn, From the Margins. Dayton points out that divisions within American Methodism in the

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main point is that the theological and social divisions that caused the schism in the Episcopal Methodist Church in Chile in the early twentieth century had a long history within North American Methodism. The preferential option for the poor, the cultivation of laity, and of a certain spiritual individualism (based on the belief that each believer can connect with the Holy Spirit) all contributed to the nonconformist and dissenting character of certain strands of Methodism. In North America, the fragmentation of Methodism and the formation of new churches eventually became inevitable, and something similar happened with the Pentecostal revival in Chile. In fact, the doubleedged nature of North American Methodism manifested itself rather sharply in the mission field, especially after the ambition of self-supporting missions was abandoned. The Methodism of William Taylor was closest to the holiness side of the doctrinal spectrum. Besides, the self-supporting programme not only raised the laity to important positions but also turned out to be rather demanding of the missionaries who as mentioned received much smaller salaries than their Presbyterian colleagues. Early Methodist missionaries in Chile were mainly drawn from ‘the less cultured, revivalist fringe of Methodist Church in the United States’⁶⁸ and in the words of Sepúlveda, they felt ‘more comfortable working with simple people than with the cultured middle class’ .⁶⁹ As noted by Dayton such factors gave the Methodism of Chile a natural Holiness fringe,⁷⁰ and they can take us a long way in understanding its appeal to lowerclass Chileans. A later generation of North American Methodist missionaries who arrived at the end of the nineteenth century were better educated and represented an anti-revivalist, rationalist, and modernist side of the Methodist spectrum. This was also a time when reactions against revivalism were manifesting themselves in the Methodist Church in the United States. Although Hoover, who was a passionate defender of revivalism, had gained some recognition as a very successful evangelist, he also found himself in opposition to his American brethren in Chile.⁷¹ In summary, the schism that gave birth to indigenous Chilean Pentecostalism was, in part, caused by social and theological divisions with deep roots within North American Methodism. Both the rationalist high church and the revivalist version of Methodism were imported to Chile, so it is not too surprising that the tension between these versions resurfaced in the mission

nineteenth century were highly complex and were also caused by struggles over slavery and by a modernist/fundamentalist controversy that followed the introduction of new scientific knowledge and theories (Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, p. 75). ⁶⁸ Kessler, A Study of the Older Protestant Missions and Churches in Peru and Chile, p. 105. ⁶⁹ Sepúlveda, ‘Reinterpreting Chilean Pentecostalism’, p. 303. ⁷⁰ Collins Winn, From the Margins, p. 105. ⁷¹ Kessler, A Study of the Older Protestant Missions and Churches in Peru and Chile, p. 120.

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field. The holiness fringe, the cultivation of laity and the humble origins of missionaries meant that Methodism was originally able to make some inroads among lower-class Chileans. But as in the United States, the revivalist impulses and the emphasis on lay empowerment in Chile also took on a nonconformist and dissenting character, especially as they were increasingly countered by a high church, rationalist, and more institutionalized vision of Methodism. Some of the theological disagreements in the Methodist Church in Chile in the early twentieth century also had precedents in American Methodism. As mentioned in the previous section, the question of whether physical manifestations such as glossolalia, visions, and prophecies can be attributed to the workings of the Holy Spirit was a source of considerable tension and division between Hoover and other American missionaries. Disagreements about whether the baptism of the Holy Spirit was confined to the Primitive Church or is the privilege of all believers at all times have a long history within Methodism and the issue was vividly discussed in the writings of North American Holiness theologians as early as the 1840s.⁷² Today, a Methodist influence can still be identified in the way many Chilean Pentecostals from indigenous churches understand glossolalia, namely as a spiritual gift which should be placed at the same level as other spiritual gifts but should not be seen as an indispensable sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The Methodist roots of Chilean Pentecostalism are also manifest in the name of the first church (The Methodist Pentecostal Church) which, despite numerous schisms, is still one of the largest Pentecostal denominations in the country. Many of Chile’s indigenous Pentecostal churches, most of which are offshoots or offshoots of offshoots (or offshoots of offshoots of offshoots, etc.) of the Methodist Pentecostal Church still practice infant baptism, and maintain aspects of a Methodist system of government and organization.⁷³ Finally Dayton⁷⁴ points to an implicit continuation of the Wesleyan concern with the poor in Chilean Pentecostalism. Existing research, including my own has shown that Pentecostalism has mainly grown among the poorer sectors of Chilean society throughout the twentieth and the early twenty-first century, in large part because the principles of lay responsibility and lay participation have provided people from these sectors with a new sense of dignity.⁷⁵ Without question, the most influential study of parallels between early Methodism and Latin American Pentecostalism in terms of appeal to the popular sectors of society is David Martin’s groundbreaking book, Tongues

⁷² Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, p. 72. ⁷³ Kessler, A Study of the Older Protestant Missions and Churches in Peru and Chile, p. 288; Collins Winn, From the Margins, p. 105. ⁷⁴ Collins Winn, From the Margins, p. 105. ⁷⁵ Willems, Followers of the New Faith; Lalive d’Epinay, Haven of the Masses; Sepúlveda, ‘Indigenous Pentecostalism and the Chilean Experience’; Lindhardt, Power in Powerlessness.

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of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America.⁷⁶ In this book Martin compares the impact of Pentecostalism in Latin America with that of early British Methodism in Britain arguing that both kinds of Protestantism introduced new forms of egalitarianism, individualism, voluntarism, and lay participation to existing religious landscapes. He argues that British Methodism, much like American Pentecostalism, originally emerged as a religious counter-culture of dissent, providing people in the social peripheries with free spaces in which personal autonomy, initiative, a new work discipline, and feelings of self-esteem and power were fostered.⁷⁷ Martin further argues that Pentecostal religious communities, although insular and apolitical in their initial stages (much like early Methodist churches in Britain) may cultivate certain democratic values and skills among adherents, which may in time spill over to the political sphere. In Pentecostal churches, adherents learn to express themselves in public, to organize church events and to create and sustain voluntary associations. Furthermore, Pentecostalism promotes a value of individual autonomy that is compatible with the modernist notions of personhood that inform democratic ideologies.⁷⁸ In Martin’s view Pentecostalism has introduced earlier Methodist values and practices into a Latin American context and given marginal people a possibility to symbolically challenge secular hierarchies by devising their own social world. Other researchers who do not pay particular attention to possible similarities between Latin American Pentecostalism and early Methodism, have reached similar conclusions regarding the ability of Pentecostalism to provide free spaces that enable marginal people to gain a certain measure of control over their lives.⁷⁹ Furthermore, Martin’s predictions that what started out as an insular and dissenting religious movement may in time prepare the ground for popular participation in democratic processes have been echoed by other scholars.⁸⁰

⁷⁶ Martin, Tongues of Fire. ⁷⁷ Ibid., pp. 32–9. ⁷⁸ David Martin, Pentecostals: The World their Parish (Cambridge, 2002). ⁷⁹ Willems, Followers of the New Faith; Cecília Loreto Mariz, Coping with Poverty: Pentecostals and Christian Base Communities in Brazil (Philadelphia, PA 1994); Elizabeth E. Brusco, The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia (Austin, TX, 1995). ⁸⁰ Christian Smith, ‘The Spirit and Democracy: Base Communities, Protestantism, and Democratization in Latin America’, Sociology of Religion, LV, 2 (1994); Michael Dodson, ‘Pentecostals, Politics, and Public Space in Latin America’, in Edward L. Cleary and Hannah W. Stewart-Gambino, eds, Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America (Boulder, CO, 1997); Elsewhere, Martin Lindhardt, ‘Pentecostalism and Politics in Neoliberal Chile’, Iberoamericana, XLII, 1/2 (2012), I have provided an elaborated critique of such views. Here it will suffice to point out that 1) there is currently little empirical evidence to support the view that Pentecostalism should have made any significant contributions to the strengthening of a sound democratic culture in Latin America and 2) Pentecostalism also contains certain anti-democratic elements including an understanding of human dependence on divine intervention that contrasts with modernist versions of personhood.

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CONTEMPORARY CHILEAN PENTECOSTALISM AND THE PULL TOWARDS THE RESPECTABLE Martin makes a general argument about Latin American Pentecostalism and not just about the Chilean version that emerged directly from a schism in a Methodist church, and although he pays some attention to the Methodist origins of Pentecostalism,⁸¹ he is generally more concerned with cultural, theological, and organizational similarities than with actual historical connections. A quarter of a decade after his book was published, I think that an analysis of such similarities can be carried even further. As previously mentioned, Dayton highlights early divisions within Methodism, both between high church and low church revivalist interpretations of the doctrine and between a preferential option for the poor and those forces that pulled the church towards the respectable and the centre of national cultures. Theological divisions within contemporary Latin American Pentecostalism may not be as marked as they were within nineteenth-century Methodism. For sure, Chilean and Latin American Pentecostals disagree theologically on many issues—the emphasis on material prosperity, the importance of an ascetic lifestyle, and the mixture of religion and politics to name just a few—and such disagreements have, without doubt, been a cause of continuous schisms and a proliferation of denominations. But it is nevertheless relatively safe to say that Pentecostals generally agree more on practicing a revivalist, experience oriented form of Protestantism, characterized by little formal liturgy and relatively high levels of lay responsibility than early Methodists did. But like nineteenth-century Methodism, Chilean (and Latin American) Pentecostalism has within recent years experienced a significant pull away from a dissenting and countercultural position of symbolic resistance against society and towards the respectable. Throughout most of the twentieth century, Chilean Pentecostalism was characterized by a self-declared and sometimes demonstrative isolation from the surrounding society, an outspoken ambition of keeping the ‘world’ at arm’s length, a marked unwillingness to participate in politics, and not least by the definition of alternative parameters of social status.⁸² But as occurred with many American Methodists in the nineteenth century, Pentecostals in Chile have for some time been revising their own position vis-à-vis the national society in which they live. This process, which is thoroughly described in publications by the Russian historian Evguenia Fediakova,⁸³ is related to a general reduction of poverty and the growth of the middle class in Chile since ⁸¹ Martin, Tongues of Fire, pp. 28–30. ⁸² See Lindhardt, Power in Powerlessness. ⁸³ Evguenia Fediakova, ‘Somos Parte De Esta Sociedad. Evangélicos Y Política En El Chile Post Autoritario’, Politica, XLIII, (2004); Evguenia Fediakova, ‘Tradición Religiosa Y Juventad Evangélica Chilena: 1990–2008: ¿“Choque De Generaciones”?’ Estudios Ibero-Americanos, XXXVI, 1 (2010).

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the return to democracy in 1990 which means that Pentecostals, although still relatively poorer than other Chileans do not form a uniformly marginalized group as they did throughout a substantial part of the twentieth century. Also, a new generation of Pentecostals, most of who are children of Pentecostal parents are now studying at universities and hold degrees, a rarity among previous generations. Many younger, Chilean Pentecostals are highly critical of the moral state of their society and maintain firm moral stances (for instance on sexuality and alcohol) that clash with those of secular Chilean youth culture. But while they do, to some extent, maintain an oppositional religious identity, they have also begun to replace a classical being-in-but-not-of-the-world position with ideals of active Pentecostal citizenship as they feel that Pentecostals should try to influence the society they live in, for instance through political or different kinds of civic participation, rather than keeping to themselves and waiting for the return of Christ.⁸⁴ It may be a little premature to refer to Pentecostalism as a mainstream religion in Chilean society, but the numerical growth of Pentecostals,⁸⁵ their ongoing search for political recognition,⁸⁶ their gradual abandonment of strict behavioural standards (for instance regarding dress codes and women’s use of makeup), their use of electric instruments in worship, and their entrance into the middle classes, the universities, and to political life all suggest that processes of mainstreaming are in operation.

CONCLUSIO N As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the Chilean case is often granted a special position within the history of Latin American and global Pentecostalism, first and foremost because Chilean Pentecostalism emerged as an indigenous, autochthonous and financially independent religious movement with no direct relation to the Azusa Street revival in the United States and no direct involvement of foreign Pentecostal missionaries. However, as this chapter has shown, Chilean Pentecostals do share a profound and complex Methodist heritage with their North American brothers and sisters in Christ, and it ⁸⁴ See Sepúlveda, De Peregrinos a Ciudadanos: Fediakova, ‘Somos Parte De Esta Sociedad’; Fediakova, ‘Tradición Religiosa Y Juventad Evangélica Chilena: 1990–2008: ¿“Choque De Generaciones”?’; Lindhardt, ‘Pentecostalism and Politics in Neoliberal Chile’; Martin Lindhardt, ‘ “We, the Youth, Need to Be Effusive”: Pentecostal Youth Culture in Contemporary Chile’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, XXXI, 4 (2012). ⁸⁵ Protestants now make up approximately 25 per cent of the Chilean population and an estimated 80 to 90 per cent of Chilean Protestants are Pentecostals. ⁸⁶ The Pentecostal search for official political recognition started in the 1970s during the dictatorship of Augosto Pinochet. As the Catholic Church became a harsh critic of the regime Pinochet had to look for religious legitimation elsewhere and found support among leaders of the Methodist Pentecostal Church (see Lindhardt, ‘Pentecostalism and Politics in Neoliberal Chile’).

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does, I think, make good sense to see the birth of Chilean Pentecostalism as being closely connected to the history of early global Pentecostalism in the beginning of the twentieth century. In many ways, the dissenting tradition embodied by certain strands of American Methodism was imported into the mission field, and the dissenting and revivalist impulses eventually resulted in the formation of an independent Pentecostal movement. This chapter has also argued that the tension between dissenting, counter-cultural religious identities and a pull towards the respectable that characterized North American Methodism in the nineteenth century has been reproduced within Chilean Pentecostalism, especially in the more recent phases of the movement’s history. This is not to say that Chilean Pentecostalism has not followed its own social and cultural paths. To be sure, processes of indigenization and enculturation are an important part of Pentecostal history in Chile and elsewhere in the world. As we have seen, the development of a Pentecostal movement that dissented from the Methodist parent body in Chile drew on indigenous elements. Furthermore, a thorough analysis of the history of the Pentecostal movement clearly needs to address the ways in which Pentecostals have had to define their own positions and religious identities in a context of Catholic hegemony and changing political systems.⁸⁷ Although I have, admittedly paid relatively little attention to processes of enculturation and to wider historical and political processes and contexts in this chapter, my agenda has by no means been to deny Chilean converts their agency and ability to appropriate Pentecostalism on their own terms. What I have tried to demonstrate is that a historical analysis of early Chilean Pentecostalism and its dissenting character needs to consider both (intrinsic) and external factors, including the deep historical connections to North American Methodism.

S E L E C T B I BL IO G R A P H Y Anderson, Allan. An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Collins Winn, and Christian T., eds. From the Margins: A Celebration of the Theological Work of Donald W. Dayton (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2007). Dayton, Donald W. Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1987). Dodson, Michael, ‘Pentecostals, Politics, and Public Space in Latin America’, in Edward L. Cleary and Hannah W. Stewart-Gambino, eds, Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America (Boulder, CO: 1997).

⁸⁷ Sepúlveda, De Peregrinos a Ciudadanos; Lindhardt, Power in Powerlessness.

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Fediakova, Evguenia. ‘Somos Parte De Esta Sociedad. Evangélicos Y Política En El Chile Post Autoritario.’ Politica XLIII (2004): 253–84. Fediakova, Evguenia. ‘Tradición Religiosa Y Juventad Evangélica Chilena— 1990–2008: ¿“Choque De Generaciones”?’ Estudios Ibero-Americanos XXXVI, 1 (2010): 87–117. Hollenweger, Walter J. Charismatisch-Pfingstliches Christentum: Herkunft, Situation, ÖKumenische Chancen (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997). Hoover, Willis Collins. Historia Del Avivamiento Pentecostal En Chile (Santiago, Chile: Eben-Ezer, 1977). Kessler, J. B. A., Jr A Study of the Older Protestant Missions and Churches in Peru and Chile: With Special Reference to the Problems of Division, Nationalism and Native Ministry (Goes: Oosterbaan & Le Cointre N.V., 1967). Lalive d’Epinay, Christian. Haven of the Masses: A Study of the Pentecostal Movement in Chile (London: Lutterworth Press, 1969). Lindhardt, Martin. ‘Pentecostalism and Politics in Neoliberal Chile.’ Ibero-americana XLII, 1/2 (2012): 59–83, 8–9. Lindhardt, Martin. Power in Powerlessness: A Study of Pentecostal Life Worlds in Urban Chile (Boston: Brill, 2012). Lindhardt, Martin ‘ “We, the Youth, Need to Be Effusive”: Pentecostal Youth Culture in Contemporary Chile.’ Bulletin of Latin American Research XXXI, 4 (2012): 485–98. Lindhardt, Martin, and Jacob E. Thorsen, ‘Christianity in Latin America: Struggle and Accomodation’, in Stephen Hunt, ed., Handbook of Global Contemporary Christianity: Themes and Developments in Culture, Politics, and Society (Boston, 2015). Martin, David. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990). Martin, David. Pentecostals: The World Their Parish (Cambridge, MA:, Basil Blackwell, 2002). Orellana, Luis Urtubia. El Fuego Y La Nieve: Historia Del Movimiento Pentecostal En Chile, 1909–1932 (Concepción, Chile: Ceep Ediciones, 2006). Sepúlveda, Juan. ‘Reinterpreting Chilean Pentecostalism.’ Social Compass XLIII, 3 (1996): 299–318. Sepúlveda, Juan. De Peregrinos a Ciudadanos: Breve Historia Del Cristianismo EvangéLico En Chile (Santiago, Chile: Fundación Konrad Adenauer, 1999). Sepúlveda, Juan. ‘Indigenous Pentecostalism and the Chilean Experience’, in Allan H. Anderson and Walter Hollenweger, eds, Pentecostals after a Century: Global Perspectives on a Movement in Transition (Sheffield, 1999). Sepúlveda, Juan. ‘Another Way of Being Pentecostal’, in Calvin L. Smith, ed., Pentecostal Power: Expressions, Impact and Faith of Latin American Pentecostalism (Boston, 2011). Smith, Christian. ‘The Spirit and Democracy: Base Communities, Protestantism, and Democratization in Latin America.’ Sociology of Religion LV, 2 (1994): 119–43. Weber, Max. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans.A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Free Press, 1947). Willems, Emilio. Followers of the New Faith: Culture Change and the Rise of Protestantism in Brazil and Chile (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967).

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16 Dissenting Religion Protestantism in Latin America Virginia Garrard

I N T R O D U C TI O N Protestantism is not a religion indigenous to Latin America. But although the number of Protestants in Latin America was very small until the 1960s—in no place did Protestants number more than 5 per cent of the total population— the faith nonetheless has a long history in the region. Historically, the advance of Protestantism in Latin America has been tied negatively to the expansion of the political and economic hegemony of Protestant nations, specifically Great Britain and the United States. Protestantism came to Latin America alongside forces that have been traditionally hostile to the totality of the Hispanic experience. It is no accident that the cases of captured British pirates from the ‘Spanish Main’ were adjudicated by the colonial Spanish Inquisition in the seventeenth century and tried as heretics, rather than as the violent criminals they actually were.¹ Protestantism in Latin America has been uniquely tied to dissent from what was traditionally a hegemonic Catholic religious and social world, a condition that continues even to the present day. Largely because of the political rivalry that underscored religious difference, Protestantism remained outlawed (either by practice or actual decree) in Spanish America through the eighteenth century. In many places, however, this status changed with independence. As the Roman Catholic Church suffered under Enlightenment-influenced Liberal rule, Protestantism benefited from Liberals’ dreams of ‘modernity’—an ideology that placed order, progress, scientific advancement, secularism, and capitalism as central priorities; as such, it provided a dissenting political ideology to break with the ¹ Gonzalo Baez-Camargo, Protestantes Enjuiciados por la Inquisición en IberoaméRica (Mexico, 1960).

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colonial status quo as much as an alternative, even contrary, religious option. With independence from Spain, many new national constitutions included a freedom of religion clause in its new constitution, which legalized Protestant practices in Latin America for the first time in order to facilitate the immigration of ‘desirable’ foreigners from Europe who might be willing to invest their lives and capital in the emerging republics. Throughout the middle part of the nineteenth century, roughly from 1840 to 1860 pro-Catholic Conservative government returned to rule the day, and Protestantism again moved underground. It was during this mid-century interregnum, nevertheless, that Protestant colporteurs—peddlers of religious books and tracts—began to work illicitly within the newly-formed nations Spanish America, selling or giving away Scripture and covertly trying to evangelize. In the middle years of the nineteenth century, Anglican organizations such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (established 1701) and the British and Foreign Bible Society (established 1804)—organizations founded to spread the Gospel in the many vernacular languages of the vast British Empire—began to actively support colporteurs in the America. They based themselves in British outposts in British Honduras and Jamaica, where the Anglican Church already had a relatively substantial presence, as bases for operations. In the years following the US Civil War, as British influence declined in the face of rising US hegemony in the region, the American Tract Society was one of several US-based evangelical organizations that also began to distribute religious materials in Latin America.² Technically speaking, these Anglophone Bible societies were non-sectarian in the sense that they professed not to be evangelizing Catholics per se, but simply making Holy Scripture available to them. While they distributed holy books ‘without note or comment’,³ the very nature of their work—the distribution of Bibles—reflected the fundamental Protestant tenet of sola scriptura, that God’s truth is revealed solely in Holy Writ, in contrast to Catholicism’s emphasis on God’s revelation through Scripture and tradition and mediated through the Church. Within Latin America, this sharp theological divide underscored the fact that the Bible societies’ colporteurs were widely understood to be not only Protestant evangelists, but also advance agents of imperialism. And well they might, since both proselytes and proselytizers alike generally understood Protestant religion and ‘Anglo Saxon’ culture to go hand and hand. For example, the first agents of the American Bible Society entered Mexico in 1847, with the troops during the US invasion of that ² See Hubert W. Brown, Latin America: The Pagans, the Papists, the Patriots, the Protestants, and the Present Problem (New York, 1901) ³ Available [online] at Bible Society’s Library: Introduction, Cambridge University Library, http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/biblesociety/.

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country. After American forces captured Mexico City and then annexed more than half of Mexico’s national territory to the United States in 1848, one colporteur observed that, ‘Many Mexicans were eager to see the book to which the success of the American arms was attributed.’⁴ Despite the work of the colporteurs, it was not until the return of Liberal, Positivist (modernization-oriented) governments to most of Latin America in the last decades of the nineteenth century that Protestant missionary work began in earnest in the region. The second half of the nineteenth century was during an era of enormous expansion in US political and economic influence in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the work of Protestant missionaries went hand in glove with the spread of US power in the last quarter of that century. During this period, North American ‘mainline’ (Reformational) denominations came to the region bearing a message of salvation that was deeply imbedded in the cultural norms and behaviours of Victorian society and, to some extent, wrapped in the flag of political imperialism. The Anglican and Lutheran churches expanded their presence in Latin America over the course of the nineteenth century, less as missionary denominations than as expatriate churches for British and European businessmen, diplomats, and, especially in the case of the Lutherans, German immigrants to the region. Despite their ‘foreign’ cache, both denominations established a meaningful presence in countries such as Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, where the British presence was influential. In Mexico, for example, prominent Anglican schools such as the regrettably named but highly respected Episcopal-run Hooker School for Girls, established in 1889 and named for its founder, Josephine Hooker, served as one of the few places in Mexico City that provided secondary education for young ladies, preparing them for ‘domestic life or for one of the few professions open to women in Mexico’.⁵

Black Anglicans and their Discontents in the Caribbean Even more importantly, in the circum-Caribbean—that is to say the region that includes the British Caribbean (Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, and St. Vincent), British Honduras (now Belize), as well as parts of the Atlantic Coast of Central America, especially among the population along Nicaragua’s isolated eastern ‘Mosquito Coast’—the Anglican Church, despite its relatively non-proselytizing approach, nevertheless took root among local people. In 1863, the Revd James Theodore Holly, an American black (son of freed slaves), established the L’Eglise Orthodoxe Apostolique Haitienne, the first Anglican ⁴ See Brown, Latin America, p. 194. ⁵ Margaret Jefferys Hobart, Then and Now: Social Results of the Church’s Work (New York, 1914), p. 78.

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parish in Haiti.⁶ Holly was consecrated missionary bishop to Haiti under the auspices of the US Protestant Episcopal Church in 1874, thus making him the first bishop of colour in the Episcopal Church.⁷ The American-born Holly was a true dissenter in almost every sense of the word. He co-founded the Protestant Episcopal Society for Promoting the Extension of the Church Among Colored People in 1856, which had (unsuccessfully) challenged the Church to take a position at General Convention against slavery before the US Civil War. His move to Haiti was inspired by Haiti’s slave revolt (1804)—the only such successful rebellion in the Americas— and by Holly’s vision of Haiti as a suitable place for emigration for freed American blacks. Holly believed that Anglicanism would be a positive and stabilizing force in Haiti and that it had the potential to play a decisive contributing role in this black nation’s development.⁸ Although the Anglican Church ultimately set only shallow (though permanent) roots in Haiti, it was a well-established and influential presence in the British Caribbean. The large-scale migration of black families from the Caribbean at the turn of the century to work on Central American banana plantations and, slightly later, on the Panama Canal (beginning in 1904) further reinforced an Anglican presence in places such as Panama, Costa Rica, and Honduras; here, race, language, and religion readily differentiated banana and canal workers of Afro-Caribbean origin from the native population. Thus did the Anglican Church in northern Latin America and the Caribbean become popularly associated not only with ‘Englishness’, but also, somewhat ironically—since Caribbean peoples’ initial exposure to Anglicanism had come about through slavery—with blackness.⁹ Kevin Ward has written, ‘The Anglican communion seems peculiarly unfortunate with being saddled with a particular place. Anglicanism, after all, is just another word for “English”. How can a church be worldwide with such a parochial name? How can it be truly “local” in Ghana or Uganda, Barbados or Brazil?’¹⁰ But this, to greater or lesser extent, is precisely what happened in the Caribbean. Despite W. E. B. Dubois’ indictment that ‘The Episcopal Church has probably done less for black people than any other ⁶ Histoire, http://www.egliseepiscopaledhaiti.org/ ⁷ Leadership Gallery: The Right Reverend James Theodore Holly, 1829–1911, The Archives of the Episcopal Church DFMS/PECUSA, The Church Awakens: African-Americans and the Struggle for Justice, https://www.episcopalarchives.org/Afro-Anglican_history/exhibit/leader ship/holly.php ⁸ See: James Theodore Holly, Facts About the Church’s Mission in Haiti: A Concise Statement by Bishop Holly (New York, 1897). ⁹ For more on this diaspora, see Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013). ¹⁰ Kevin Ward, ‘The Empire Fights Back: the Invention of African Anglicanism’, in Afe Adogame and others, eds, Christianity in Africa and the African Diaspora: The Appropriation of a Scattered Heritage (London, 2008), p. 86.

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aggregation of Christians’, many black Anglicans in the Caribbean, as in the northern United States, became involved with ‘social uplift’ or ‘racial improvement’ movements in the early twentieth century.¹¹ Such connections become clear in relation to one of the most radical and important black rights movements to come about in the early twentieth century, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). UNIA, founded by Jamaican Marcus Garvey in 1914, was the black nationalist organization based in Jamaica and later the United States that championed ‘race-first’ economic and political rights for Afro-descendent people, black pride, respectability, self-sufficiency, and pan-Africanism.’¹² Garveyism, as UNIA’s guiding philosophy became popularly known, was, in the words of historian Frank Guridy, ‘an eclectic blend of Victorian notions of morality with the traditions of African American prophetic Christianity’.¹³ It would in time inspire several religious and pseudo-religious movements built around the notions of African redemption and racial self-sufficiency, including both the Nation of Islam and Rastafarianism, the latter of which proclaims Garvey as a prophet. In the beginning, however, UNIA had some associations with the Jamaican Anglican church, in part because Garvey himself had attended Anglican schools, though he was raised a Methodist.¹⁴ In part because of its concerns with racial self-improvement and probity, Garveyism attracted to its ranks some of the Caribbean’s brightest and best, including leaders of the Anglican Church. This was very much by design, as Garvey strongly advocated that the movement needed as its leaders men of colour who had already mastered the tools of Western modernity.¹⁵ In 1920, even Haiti’s Bishop Holly’s son, Alonzo Potter Holly—an MD educated in Barbados and Cambridge—was surveilled by the US FBI during the 1920s because of ‘fiery speech[es]’ he made in Florida on behalf of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).’¹⁶

Garveyism’s Religious Legacies Garveyism also inspired other Anglican leaders. In its early years, UNIA employed an Antiguan-born Anglican chaplain by the name of George ¹¹ Quoted by Lydia T. Wright, ‘The Black Experience in the Episcopal Church’ (undated tract), p. 1. ¹² Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010), pp. 63–4. ¹³ Ibid., p. 72. ¹⁴ Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rouge, LA, 1991), p. 35. ¹⁵ Guridy, Forging Diaspora, p. 72. ¹⁶ ‘Report by Bureau Agent William C. Sausele, Jacksonville, FL 11/2[2]/20’, in Marcus Garvey and Robert A. Hill, eds, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. III (Berkeley, CA, 1984), p. 91.

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Alexander McGuire. McGuire, believing that black Episcopalians should have a separate church of their own, in time left the chaplaincy to create his own denomination. He established the Independent Episcopal Church in 1924, but the first meeting of its House of Bishops renamed it the African Orthodox Church (AOC). The new denomination had a strong black nationalist component: McGuire purportedly exhorted his congregations, ‘You must forget the white gods. Erase the white gods from your hearts. We must go back to the native church, to our own true God.’¹⁷ Aspiring to affiliate with the Eastern Orthodox Church ‘as a racial or national unit’ (a failed aspiration, since the Eastern Orthodox church viewed the AOC as a schismatic body and never accepted it), the African Orthodox Church eventually split with the Anglican Communion. In its heyday, the AOC, which mainly attracted Anglican West Indian immigrants in the United States, ordained clergy in British Uganda, British Kenya, South Africa, Canada, Cuba, and Venezuela. Although the denomination was never large—at its height, it numbered around 30,000 members and fifty clergy worldwide— and generally played out after McGuire’s death in 1934, it has not disappeared altogether.¹⁸ The St John William Coltrane church in San Francisco, California, which preaches ‘sound baptism’, and that the jazz musician Coltrane, was ‘one who was chosen to bring souls back to God’, has been affiliated with the African Orthodox Church since 1982.¹⁹ Likewise, the Spiritual Revival Church, an African-referenced faith found in Jamaica and on the Caribbean coast of Panama among Afro-descendent people, traces its roots—perhaps apocryphally—to both Jamaican African diasporan religious traditions and also to Anglicanism. The Spiritual Revivalists’ liturgical practices include such elements as trance, spirit possession, communication with the dead, the use of ‘seals’ and ‘tables’ for intercessions, healing, and prophecy, and Anglophone black identity is elemental within the denomination. By the same token, some Spiritual Revival churches, such as St Joseph’s Spiritual Episcopal Church in Colón, Panama, retain Anglican nomenclature; they also employ the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer in their regular Sunday worship.²⁰ However, the Spiritual Revivalists do not now, if they ever did, lay claim to any formal association with the Iglesia Episcopal ¹⁷ See more at: Rachel Gallaher, Mcguire, George Alexander (1866–1934), Blackpast.org, African American History, http://www.blackpast.org/aah/mcguire-george-alexander-18661934#sthash.MdP0Oxnd.dpuf ¹⁸ Ibid. ¹⁹ See A. C. Terry-Thompson, The History of the African Orthodox Church (New York, 1956). For the St John William Coltrane church, see the church’s website, Saint John Coltrane Church, http://www.coltranechurch.org/. Further investigation into this man proved him to be not just a ‘jazz musician’ but who was chosen to guide souls back to God. ²⁰ See David Daniel Hutchinson II, Rooted and Grounded: Spiritual-Revival Churches in Contemporary Panama, MA Thesis, University of Texas, Austin, TX (2015); R. S. BryceLaporte, ‘Crisis, Contraculture, and Religion among West Indians in the Panama Canal Zone’,

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de Panamá, Panama’s standard branch of the Anglican Communion (and also a majority Afro-descendent church), which traces its roots back to the construction of the Panama Railway during the 1850s.²¹ Panama’s Spiritual Revival churches are thus in some ways liturgically Anglican, but their theological beliefs diverge significantly toward self-consciously African references.

THE PENTECOSTALS The emphasis on spiritualist practices—speaking in tongues, prophecy, and ecstatic expression—that one finds in the Spiritual Revivalist churches points us towards a very different movement in Latin American religion. This is Pentecostalism, a ‘new’ variation of Christianity that has spread rapidly across Latin America over the past forty years. Pentecostalism is by far the most vigorous form of non-Catholic Christianity in Latin America today, and it does not derive directly from the Anglican or even any Reformational tradition, although it is very much a dissenting current within Protestantism. As Latin America has become increasingly pluralist over the past half century, Pentecostalism is largely responsible for the dramatic changes that have transformed Latin America’s contemporary religious landscape. That said, it is important to note while nearly all Latin American countries remain predominantly Catholic (save a few unique cases such as Cuba), the Catholic ‘marketshare’ of the population has dropped significantly in many— even most countries—in recent decades. While there is also an upswing in secularization in countries Uruguay and even Brazil, the main reason for Catholicism’s numerical decline is a dramatic increase in conversions to Protestantism, and to Pentecostalism in particular.²² In 1990, anthropologist David Stoll published an influential book provocatively entitled, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The answer to that question a quarter of a century later remains ‘no’ or at least ‘not yet’.²³ But Pentecostalism has in Norman E. Whitten, Jr and John F. Szwed, eds, Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives (New York, 1970), pp. 103–18. ²¹ See Iglesia Episcopal De Panamá, http://www.episcopaldepanama.org/. The Panamanian church expanded dramatically with the entry of Caribbean workers during the construction of the Panama Canal, 1904–14. It retains a predominantly Afro-descendent membership and some parishes continue to hold some services in English. It remained a missionary province of the US Episcopal Church (Province 9) until 1998, when it joined the other Central American churches (excluding Honduras) to form the autonomous Iglesia Anglicana de la Región Central de América (IARCA). ²² Philip Jenkins, ‘Notes from the Global Church: A Secular Latin America?’, The Christian Century (12 March 2013). https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2013-02/secular-latin-america. ²³ David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant?: The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley, CA, 1990).

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nonetheless had a dramatic impact on Latin American religion across the board, to the extent that some scholars have suggested that Christianity in the region—Catholic, mainline Protestant, and evangelical—have all become functionally ‘Pentecostalized’, meaning that these churches have adopted aspects of Pentecostal liturgical practices and that many non-Pentecostal Christians attest to ecstatic experiences. In 2006, a study conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life noted that 73 per cent of Protestants in Latin America were Pentecostals. Even more significantly, the Pew study demonstrated upsurge in what it termed ‘renewalist’ religion within their ten-country study, meaning that people who belonged to religious groups that were not historically Pentecostal—mainline Protestants and, especially, Catholics—had adopted a ‘Pentecostalized’ set of beliefs and practice—belief in faith healing and speaking in tongues, for example—to enrich their own traditions. In Guatemala, for example, Pew found that while eight-in-ten Protestants were Pentecostal, six-in-ten Catholics also practiced charismatic religion, making for an overall Christian population that was, in total, more than 60 per cent ‘renewalist’.²⁴ Guatemala offers something of a special case, in that it experienced a significant surge in Protestant conversion relatively early—in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—and therefore serves as a bellwether for the religious changes that would blow across much of the rest of the region in the final years of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. However, it is worth noting that today, Guatemala is hardly unique in its charismatic focus; today, Pentecostals make up around a third or more of the population in three of the other five Central American countries (El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua). Nor is this preference unique to Central America. Further south, about a third of all Chileans report themselves to be renewalists (though in this case, Catholic charismatics far outnumber Pentecostals). Brazil, Latin American’s most ‘Catholic’ nation in terms of sheer numbers, is also among the most Protestant—nearly half of all Brazilians are either Catholic or Pentecostal renewalists.²⁵ Although many scholars and students of popular culture characterize Pentecostalism as a relatively ‘new’ movement in Latin America, its presence in the region goes back a century, even though its influence and popularity did not fully register until much later. In his work on Brazil, sociologist Paul Freston has described three waves of Pentecostal activity, a chronology that

²⁴ Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and Pew Research Center, Historical Overview of Pentecostalism in Guatemala Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals (5 Oct. 2006), http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/historical-overview-of-pentecostalism-in-guatemala/ ²⁵ Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and Pew Research Center, Estimated Size of Renewalist Populations Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals (5 Oct. 2006), http:// www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/spirit-and-power/

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closely correlates to the rest of Latin America as a whole.²⁶ ‘First wave’ Pentecostalism, according to Freston, came to Latin America in the early decades of the twentieth century, in the vanguard of the Azusa Street Revival, brought by foreign missionaries who were themselves new converts to Pentecostalism. The second wave of Pentecostals appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the arrival of media-based evangelism and national ‘crusades’. In some locations, this second wave, though motivated primarily by the need to proselytize, was also weighted by political impulses, specifically a desire on the part of US-based evangelicals to offer ecstatic Christianity as a ‘spiritual alternative to communism’. Freston’s ‘third wave’ of Pentecostalism is what church leaders in Spanishspeaking Latin American often refer to as ‘el boom’, when local Pentecostal churches began to proliferate from around the mid-1970s onward. Although today the conversion boom has slowed in terms of absolute percentages, we might also posit a fourth wave of Latin American Pentecostalism, wherein Latin American denominations—fully integrated into global charismatic networks—now conduct missionary work around the world, including in North America and Europe. This South-to-North evangelism effectively closes the circle of mission outreach and reception.²⁷

First Wave Protestantism in Latin America A permanent Protestant presence came to Latin America by way of missionaries from mainline denominations from the United States who began working in Latin America for the most part in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In that earlier day, the mainline denominations had been initially reluctant to expend scarce missionary resources on Latin America, which was, after all, already Roman Catholic. Even though many Protestants at the time (or, for that matter, now) did not recognize Catholics as ‘Christian’, they nonetheless generally preferred to send out ‘laborers into the harvest’ to indisputably ‘heathen’ parts of the world such as Siam, China, or the ‘Dark Continent’ (Africa)—a moniker that had as much to do with spiritual darkness as the pigmentation of its people. Yet geography and competition with British missionaries in other parts of the world eventually impelled North American missionaries to the United States’ ‘backyard’: Latin America, in the decades following the US Civil War (1861–5). These were missionaries imbued with ideas of ‘uplift’ and conversion, and, by the turn of the century, they were also inspired by the precepts of ²⁶ Paul Freston, ‘Pentecostalism in Brazil: A Brief History’, Religion, XXV, 2 (1995), pp. 119–33. ²⁷ Karla Poewe, ed. Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture (Columbia, SC, 1994).

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the Social Gospel movement. In the 1880s and 1890s, missionaries from such denominations as the Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Quakers, and non-denominational evangelical missionary agencies such as the Dallas-based Central American mission, began to actively establish missions across Latin America. All these missions offered a message of direct dissent against Catholicism; far from being simple reformational ‘protest-ants’, their express purpose was to drive out ‘false’ and ‘popish’ religion and introduce ‘true Christianity’ to the region. Although their early efforts were largely unsuccessful, so pervasive was this discourse that even today many Latin Americans—Catholics included—use the word ‘cristiano’ (Christian) to describe Protestants. Typically, such efforts enjoyed the support of progress-oriented Liberal governments at the turn of the last century, since they—anticipating Max Weber’s famous thesis on the subject—associated Protestantism with a modern work ethic and valued their religious efforts as a check on the Catholic Church’s spiritual and cultural hegemony, which the governments were attempting to curtail through a variety of anti-clerical programmes. As the states reduced the Catholic Church’s presence in education and medicine, Protestant missionaries replaced these services with modern schools, clinics, literacy projects, and language translation efforts; schools and literacy of course, were a high priority for missionaries, so that new or potential converts might learn to read in order to avail themselves of the Word of God. Without doubt, mainline Protestant missionaries to Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left a lasting footprint. They educated a generation of statesmen and intellectuals (Mexico’s great educational reformer, Moisés Saenz, for example, or Peru’s famous political theorist, Raúl Haya de la Torre were the products of missionary schools and converts to Protestantism), and rare is the Latin American capital today that does not boast a modern ‘Hospital Evangélico’ or prominent schools or universities founded by missionaries. Yet by the same token, these same missionaries were strikingly unsuccessful in actually making converts: the sacred canopy of Catholicism still covered almost all of Latin America, and very few people (often alcoholics, serial adulterers, or other social misfits) had joined the churches even by the mid-twentieth century. Pentecostals also sent missionaries to Latin America during this early period. However, they were not part of the larger Protestant missionary movement and were not included in it. Much of this early history is lost, because it tended to be very localized, under-the-radar, and because Pentecostals at the time—who often believed they were moving according to the Spirit in the vanguard of an unfolding kairos (divine moment)—tended to leave few written records. In addition, the early twentieth century was the dawn of modern Pentecostalism, which places its mythogenesis in the Pentecost event described in

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the Book of Acts, but in fact it by and large tracks back to an event known as the Azusa Street Revival that took place in Los Angeles, CA, between 1906–15. (Some non-Western Pentecostals today contest this American origin story, pointing to conterminous outbursts of the Spirit in Wales, India, and elsewhere. They assert that modern Pentecostalism was a polysemic ‘fountainhead’ movement that emerged simultaneously in several parts of the world at the start of the last century.).²⁸ The timing of Pentecostalism’s modern genesis, if not so much the place, is important. Contemporary Pentecostalism, of course, grew out the ferment of the modernist-fundamentalist debates that tore apart Western Protestantism following Darwin’s revelations on the descent of man in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, pitting the ‘modernists’, who proposed an allegorical reading the Bible and a reconciliation of science with religion (among other things), against the ‘fundamentalists’, who read the Bible as the literal Word of God and the fundamental source of all truth. (The fundamentalist perspective is clearly expressed in the words of the wellknown children’s song, ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so’ (emphasis mine). As these two groups fought over sacred text, Pentecostalism carved out a new and explicitly dissenting pathway to God, based on soma, the bodily sensation of God that they refer to as the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. While Pentecostals would continue to place value on the Bible, they would be much less concerned than with the reading of Scripture than with their lived experience of God, thus recovering soma from logos and orality from textproofed sources of existential truth in mainline Protestant religion. Thus, Pentecostal children would learn that Jesus loves them not because the Bible says it, but because their experience tells them so. Whatever its multinational roots, Latin American Pentecostalism specifically does trace its roots back to the Azusa Street Revival, which began in April 1906 in Los Angeles, California. Azusa’s founder, William J. Seymour, was an African American preacher originally from Houston, Texas, who introduced ecstatic experience (especially speaking in tongues, vibrant music and preaching, and [holy] spirit possession into worship). Seymour did not originate these practices, but borrowed freely from older Holiness and African American religious ideas and gestures. Seymour was also deeply influenced by the teachings of a contemporary Kansas-based (white) preacher named Charles F. Parham, whose ministry encouraged both speaking in tongues and interracial worship.²⁹ ²⁸ Allan Anderson, ‘The Present Worldwide Revival . . . Brought up in India: Pandita Ramabai and the Origins of Pentecostalism’, Paper given at the SPS Annual Meeting, Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA (10–12 March 2005); Eifion Evans, The Welsh Revival of 1904 (Brigend, 1969), pp. 190–6. ²⁹ Eddie L. Hyatt, ‘Across the Lines: Charles Parham’s Contribution to the Inter-Racial Character of Early Pentecostalism’, Pneuma Review, VII, 4 (20 Dec. 2004).

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This amalgamation of practices gave birth to what we think of now as contemporary Pentecostalism. The Azusa Revival’s location in Los Angeles— even then a city with a large Latino population—assured that Spanish speakers were early participants in the Pentecostal movement. Mexican Americans such as Sinaloa-born Francisco Olazábal were among the movement’s first evangelists, preaching the message of Baptism of Fire not only in the ineffable language of the Spirit, but also in fluent Spanish.³⁰ From the beginning, the Pentecostal movement brought people together across race, gender, language, and class in a way that sharply challenged conventional Protestant denominational probity at the dawn of the twentieth century. The multi-ethnic, unashamedly humble backgrounds of its members and its raucous, sensational worship services lent Pentecostalism a frankly dangerous, transgressive air that cast it in sharp relief against the formal liturgical, single-race rigidity of the traditional Protestant churches. Underscoring the transgressive quality of Pentecostalism was the flamboyant and highly emotional style of worship—the shouting, arm-waving, and music borrowed freely from black churches—punctuated by tongues speaking, rolling on the floor, ‘holy laughter’, ‘treeing the devil’, convulsive jerking, and the other spectacles that could make services go on for hours.³¹ Non-Pentecostal Protestants were aghast at such goings on, which seemed to them to be both heretical and in appalling bad taste.³² Reviled by both Catholics and other Protestants, the first wave Pentecostals in Latin America established something of a permanent presence in some locations (especially in Brazil, where Swedish evangelists founded the Assembleias de Deus [Assemblies of God], now the largest non-Catholic denomination in the country), but at the time, for the most part, it did not penetrate the religious cultural membrane of the receiving nations. Missionaries of the mainline denominations abjured the Pentecostals on both theological and strategic grounds. In many countries, they established ‘comity agreements’, which were effectively non-competition agreements designed to stave off Pentecostal incursions into mainline mission territory. The mainline missions’ fears that the ‘tongues people and convolutionists’ would ‘dip from the net’ were hardly unfounded, since recent Protestant converts, not Catholics, were the most enthusiastic adopters of early ³⁰ See Gastón Espinosa, ‘El Azteca: Francisco Olazábal and Latino Pentecostal Charisma, Power, and Faith Healing in the Borderlands’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LXVII, 3 (1999), pp. 597–616. ³¹ Elmer T. Clark, The Small Sects in America (New York, 1949), p. 92. ³² This tradition goes back to the nineteenth century, when American society ladies would amuse themselves with visits to holiness camp meetings and occasionally get caught up in the action themselves, with, as one observer recalled, ‘fine bonnets, caps, and combs flying’. Ibid., p. 93.

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Pentecostalism in Latin America, and the introduction of charismatic practices proved divisive to congregations that were already fragile.³³ For example, in Chile, missionary Willis Hoover introduced a booklet entitled ‘The Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire’, into congregations in Santiago and Valparaíso in 1909, and some members almost immediately adopted pneumatic practices.³⁴ Eventually, this group broke away from the missionaryfounded Methodist Episcopal Church to establish the Chilean Methodist Pentecostal Church, a denomination that severed fellowship from what would eventually become the Iglesia Metodista de Chile, (IMC).³⁵ Significantly, the IMC’s historical record recalls that, ‘The conflict [between the Methodists and Pentecostals] was not only theological. The emergence of Chilean Pentecostalism was also an affirmation of an authentic, Chilean expression of non-Catholic Christianity, over against a foreign missionary model.’³⁶ The fact that the Chilean Methodist Pentecostal Church was actually founded by an American Methodist missionary notwithstanding, it is true that the Chilean Methodist Pentecostal Church (CMPC) would go on to serve as the incubator for much of locally-originated Chilean Pentecostalism even today. Much of this legacy lies in schism and dissent, which often nonetheless fed and encouraged Pentecostalism’s growth and expansion. In the 1930s, Hoover’s followers left the CMPC over a dispute regarding leadership to establish what they called the Evangelical Pentecostal Church. In the early post-World War II period, both of these major denominations both again experienced schism, as the Pentecostal Church of Chile broke away from the CMPC in 1947 and the Pentecostal Mission Church severed relations with the Evangelical Pentecostal Church in 1952. In both cases, the main cause of division was over issues of ‘worldliness’, foreshadowing questions of the role of social activism and ecumenism with other Protestants in the post-war period that would challenge Pentecostalism in years to come.³⁷

³³ Virginia Garrard-Burnett, ‘ “Tongues People and Convolutionists”: Early Pentecostalism in Guatemala, 1915–1940’, unpublished paper presented at Latin American Studies Association (9 Sept. 2001). ³⁴ Allan Anderson, ‘To All Points of the Compass: The Azusa Street Revival and Global Pentecostalism: Worldwide Revivals in the Early 20th Century’, Enrichment Journal (Spring, 2006), http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/200602/200602_164_allpoints.cfm ³⁵ Edward L. Cleary and Juan Sepúlveda, ‘Chilean Pentecostalism: Coming of Age’, in Edward L. Cleary and Hannah W. Stewart-Gambino, eds, Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America (Boulder, CO, 1998), p. 99. ³⁶ Iglesia Metodista De Chile, World Council of Churches, https://www.oikoumene.org/en/ member-churches/methodist-church-of-chile ³⁷ Paul Freston, Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 214–16.

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Second Wave Pentecostalism Across much of Latin America, Pentecostalism in the 1960s began to germinate in well-tilled mission fields that had been initially ploughed by missionaries from the mainline denominations. This was a time when Cold War ideology dominated the region and the world. In the wake of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, politically conservative evangelicals from the United States (as distinguished from evangélicos, a word which in Spanish and usually in Portuguese means simply any Protestant) initiated large-scale revivals and campaigns across Latin America and Central America in particular. Their express intention was to promote Protestant religion (though not Pentecostalism per se, as indeed most of the evangelistic groups were not) as a ‘spiritual alternative to communism’.³⁸ Often with the support of fiercely anti-communist governments in the host countries, these campaigns, headed by groups such as the American-financed but Costa Rican-based Latin American Mission (LAM), introduced new church-growth technologies such as televised revivals modelled on Billy Graham’s crusades, held in venues such as national stadiums; door-to-door evangelism; and they attempted to ‘saturate with Scripture’ populations where there had been little prior Protestant contact. (It is worth noting that this saturation marketing came at a time when the Catholic Church—itself undergoing dramatic structural changes as a result of the Second Vatican Council—was also suffering from a severe shortage of clergy, meaning that even a handful of lay evangelists could generate a bigger pastoral presence than a single Catholic priest. For example, as late as 1964, Guatemala had only 470 priests to serve a nation of over 4 million Catholics).³⁹ Similar concerns also led to a proliferation of ‘nationalist’ churches that grew out of, but separated themselves from their missionary origins and moved to local leadership and, eventually, usually to Pentecostal-inflected theology. By the 1960s and 1970s, this was a pattern that would be repeated again and again across Latin America, as exuberant Pentecostalism struck a chord with Latin Americans as more autochthonous than staid, liturgical mainline Protestantism, with its longstanding associations with ‘foreignness’ and Anglophone culture. The expansion of Protestantism in places such as Guatemala and Brazil was sufficient to capture the attention of church growth specialists (called cleverly in Spanish, ‘iglecrecimiento’, a bit of clever wordplay that elides the words for ‘church’ and ‘growth’), who noted a dramatic increase

³⁸ Deborah Huntington, ‘Visions of the Kingdom: The Latin American Church in Conflict’, NACLA Report on the Americas (Sept.–Oct. 1985), pp. 22–3. ³⁹ Richard N. Adams, Crucifixion by Power: Essays on Guatemalan National Social Structure, 1944–1966 (Austin, TX, 1970), pp. 137, 284.

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in ‘evangélicos’ in each country. But even more noteworthy was the persuasion of these new converts, who were overwhelmingly becoming Pentecostals. By the mid-1960s, Protestant conversion had begun to inch up to a noticeable degree. Due to a favourable convergence of sociological, political, and—indeed— even spiritual factors, the efforts of such interdenominational agencies quickly bore fruit, and by the middle of the decade, for the first time, locally-run Protestant churches began to sprout in urban slums and rural villages of Latin America. The context of mid-century Latin America, which Sheldon Annis has called ‘a complex bombardment of 20th-century forces’, contributed directly to this.⁴⁰ Among many factors, these involved rapid urbanization, internal migration, and transitions from agricultural to industrial economies. Above all, these forces included the exigencies of the Cold War in Latin America, where military governments confronted leftist insurgencies and many populations struggled to persevere in a setting of violence and police states. (This was no small factor: in 1979 no fewer than two-thirds of Latin Americans lived under military or authoritarian rule.)⁴¹ Early observers of Protestant expansion in Latin America, most notably Christian Lalive d’Epinay and Emilio Willems attributed conversion to the churches’ appeal to new urban migrants, who found new social networks in the churches and a means to organize complex urban life (d’Epinay famously argued that evangélico churches in urban slums in Chile ‘replaced the authoritarianism of the hacienda’).⁴² Later scholars credited church growth to pragmatic a ‘trench faith’ that provided a means to self-preservation in the context of violence, especially in places such as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, where Catholics’ participation in popular movements by way of their mobilization via Liberation Theology also placed them in harm’s way.⁴³ Guatemala, one of the most Protestant countries in Latin America in terms of overall percentages, provides a good example of this characterization. There, General Ríos Montt, himself a recent convert to Pentecostalism, presided over a war of elimination of the Marxists guerrillas and a campaign against the Maya indigenous people (considered by the Guatemalan military to be guerrilla supporters and many of whom were Catholic) in the early 1980s. Although the facts of the case eventually proved to disprove this trope (given the large number of Maya Pentecostals who also died in the army’s ⁴⁰ Sheldon Annis, God and Production in a Guatemalan Town (Austin, TX, 1987), p. 140. ⁴¹ See Brian Loveman, ‘ “Protected Democracies” and Military Guardianship: Political Transitions in Latin America, 1978–1993’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, XXXVI, 2 (1994), pp. 105–89. ⁴² Christian Lalive d’Epinay, Haven of the Masses: A Study of the Pentecostal Movement in Chile (London, 1969), p. 129; Emilio Willems, Followers of the New Faith: Culture Change and the Rise of Protestantism in Brazil and Chile (Nashville, TN, 1967). ⁴³ See, for example, Sara Diamond, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right (Montreal, 1990).

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scorched earth campaigns), many at the time, including the general’s own brother, the Catholic bishop Mario Ríos Montt, condemned the violence as a ‘holy war’ between Catholics and Protestants.⁴⁴

Pentecostalism as Dissent As a ‘dissenting tradition’, Pentecostalism’s properties lie in contradistinction not only to mainline Protestantism, as we have seen above, but also to Catholicism, which remains Latin America’s most dominant and its most historic religion. It is worth reiterating that despite more than a century of Protestant missionary activity in Latin America, as recently as 1960 no country in the region measured less than 90 per cent Catholic, and even today, Latin America remains the ‘most Catholic’ area of the world in terms of absolute numbers. The region’s contemporary Pentecostals are mostly converts from Catholicism—that is to say, they are former Catholics—or the children of converts; thus, it is entirely appropriate to juxtapose these two religions one against the other, as believers themselves tend to do. Some scholars have framed this in terms of ‘rationale choice’ or a ‘religious supermarket’—using the ideas of religious monopolies, competition, and rational choice as both metaphor and hard theory on religious change and decision-making.⁴⁵ However, it also important to note that many of Pentecostalism’s most salient qualities (bearing in mind that Pentecostalism is not a single, unitary movement or even a specific denomination) place it in direct opposition to Catholicism, and that converts are expressing their dissent in a very direct manner by abandoning the Church of their birth and heritage for another. This dichotomy is one that converts understand very clearly and express as a central element of their discourse as Pentecostals: church services in Latin American Pentecostal churches typically include a wide use of testimonies, where converts describe their lives in stark, Manichean terms: ‘my (lost) life before, as a Catholic, and my (redeemed) life as a “Christian”’. Other properties that make Pentecostalism dissentive vis-à-vis Catholicism would include the profoundly non-hierarchical, even schismatic nature of Pentecostal congregations (which are as likely to result from congregational disputes and splintering as from intentional ‘church’ planting); their lack of reliance on outside authority (indeed, during the armed conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala, scores—perhaps hundreds—of small Pentecostal ⁴⁴ See: Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982–1983 (New York, 2010). ⁴⁵ R. Andrew Chesnut, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (New York, 2007); Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ, 2005).

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congregations sprang up in the zones of conflict, unbeknownst even to church leaders back in the national capitals); and their rejection of formal, set liturgy and ritual in worship (although it is true that many Pentecostal congregations that pride themselves on their liturgical spontaneity nonetheless follow fairly standard formats from one service to the next). Unlike Catholicism, where clergy are often highly educated and trained in church dogma—not to mention living lives very separated from their congregations by their vows and their role as conduits to God—Pentecostal ministry is in some ways wildly democratic, in that it is open to any believer with a ‘calling’ and a willing congregation. Perhaps most important is Pentecostalism’s radical emphasis on evangelism and the ‘priesthood of all believers’, which seeks to solve life’s problems not by bringing the ‘Church to the world’ but rather the ‘world to the church’. This last factor is particularly germane in Central America, where Pentecostals are notoriously dubious not just of politics, but also of any sort of engagement with quotidian social justice issues; this wariness stems not merely from the theological imperative to keep themselves ‘separate from the world’, but is also a direct repudiation of Catholic Liberation Theology involvement in revolutionary politics during the civil wars of the 1980s.

Spinning off the Spirit The centrifugal nature of the Pentecostal experience described above—where a constellation of factors of dissent—theological disputes, conflicts over leadership, and even simple logistics—spins one church off of another, creating a plethora or denominations great and small typifies the expansion of Latin American Pentecostal churches. The ongoing dynamic of dissentive churchplanting is both the Pentecostals’ strength and their bane, since the only canonical requirements for starting a new congregation was a divine calling and a location in which to meet. This remains true even now, even if pastors today typically eventually receive some sort of formal theological training— often in weekend seminars or long-distance correspondence courses—if sometimes after the fact. A case which vividly illustrates the centrifugal nature of Latin American Pentecostalism is that of the Misión Cristiana Elim Internacional, a Central American Pentecostal denomination that had its origins during the political upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s and which today is the largest Central American Protestant denomination in the world, with large congregations in US cities such as Houston, Los Angeles, and Washington—all cities with close connections to the Salvadoran diaspora. Elim’s origins rest almost entirely in dissent. The denomination’s roots lie with the Central American Mission (CAM), a non-denominational missionary ‘faith mission’ that began work in Guatemala in the 1890s. Perhaps because it was not a formal ‘denomination’

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per se, the CAM gravitated toward schism, and during the early twentieth century the small missionary faith mission spun off at least five new denominations in Guatemala alone. None, however, would compare in success or influence with Elim. Elim, which began in the early 1960s when a small group, led by a Dr Otoniel Ríos Paredes, left the CAM flagship, the Cinco Calles Church in Guatemala City, over disputes with the pastor over nationalistic and doctrinal differences. They founded a new church, Misión Cristiana Elim, with an entirely Guatemalan pastorate and staff. Elim initially followed the fundamentalist doctrines of the CAM, but in 1965, the entire congregation adopted Pentecostal practices. The change was propitious. By 1970, membership in Elim had expanded to nearly 1000 members, and the church was able to establish several auxiliary congregations around the capital city and in neighbouring provinces.⁴⁶ In 1977, Elim sent a Guatemalan preacher named Sergio Daniel Solórzano Aldana to San Salvador, where he established a small congregation on behalf of Elim de Guatemala. The Elim de Guatemalan envisioned the Salvadoran church as a mission, but this maternal relationship was rocky almost from the start. Misión Cristiana Elim El Salvador quickly outstripped its progenitor, particularly after the Salvadoran armed conflict conflagrated into outright civil war in 1981. As refugees from the countryside began to stream into the San Salvador church, Elim established a series of small mission outposts in the zones of conflict, which also readily attracted a lively membership; the congregation in violence-ravaged Ilopango, for example, grew so rapidly that it required the building of an annex to hold 3000 additional people in 1983, just two years after its opening. Yet despite (or perhaps in part because of) these successes, tensions began to grow between the Elim El Salvadoran and Elim Guatemala. After Solórzano accused Ríos Paredes of introducing ‘strange teachings’ (enseñanzas extrañas), Ríos Paredes dispatched one of the church’s ‘prophets’, Jorge Serrano Elias, to El Salvador to offer an ultimatum to Solórzano to submit to Río Paredes’ doctrinal authority.⁴⁷ When Solórzano refused, Serrano expelled the Elim El Salvador from the Guatemalan church’s patronage, and removed the mantel of Ríos Paredes’ ‘apostolic coverage’ from Solórzano. Solórzano returned this volley with a document for Ríos entitled, ‘Final Declaration on the Doctrine of the Security of the Christian from Total Oppression by Satan’. Ríos Paredes,

⁴⁶ Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (Austin, TX, 1998), pp. 116–17. ⁴⁷ Serrano was elected President of Guatemala and served from 14 January 1991 to 31 May 1993. He did not finish out his term after being forced from office after he arbitrarily suspended the constitution, dissolved the Legislative Assembly and the Supreme Court, imposed widespread censorship, and restricted civil liberties.

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not surprisingly, rejected this hostile manifesto, and the two Elims severed communion. The website of El Salvador’s Elim notes with some satisfaction that, ‘with the death of Dr. Ríos Paredes in 1998, the Misión Guatemala Elim suffered a loss of leadership that resulted in a rapid succession of divisions [of Elim] in both Guatemala and abroad. These divisions have converted what was once the Misión Elim Guatemala into a disaggregation of small groups.’⁴⁸ Misión Cristiana Elim El Salvador, by contrast, has expanded dramatically, with terrestrial and virtual ministries far from where Salvadoran people live, including (at the invitation of the Korean super evangelist Paul Yonggi Cho) South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Italy, and Spain. The main Iglesia Central in San Salvador—which originally met in a converted corrugated warehouse—now boasts a congregation of 200,000, making it arguably the largest single congregation in Latin America. A few other home-grown denominations, however, including Guatemala City’s Fraternidad Cristiana (which holds some 12,500 people and is known as the MegaFrater) and São Paulo’s new Templo de Salomão (capacity 10,000)—the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, Brazil’s most successful megachurch’s answer to Rome’s St Peter’s Basilica—aspire to lay claim to that very title.⁴⁹

Third Wave Pentecostalism Freston’s ‘third wave’ Pentecostalism emerges in the 1980s. Unlike the earlier two waves, which were typically—if not always—driven by foreign clergy, mandates, and epistemologies—third wave Pentecostalism has developed from local leadership and ‘consumer tastes’, yet which are part and parcel of a global Pentecostal culture that both transcend national boundaries and are, at the same time, radically ‘local’ at the grassroots. In particular, third wave Pentecostals differ from their predecessors by their emphasis on the here-andnow, as opposed to the eschatological concerns and focus of first and second wave Pentecostals, who were (and remain) so focused on Christ’s imminent Second Coming that they have little concern for quotidian and ‘worldly’ matters. Third wave Pentecostals, often called neopentecostal, adhere to a fiercely temporal orientation. Like other Pentecostals, neopentecostals reify the Baptism by the Holy Spirit. But their orientation is firmly grounded in the temporal world, as neopentecostals underscore self-improvement and material advancement as signs of God’s grace and favor. Devotion to self-realizing religious practice such as prosperity theology and spiritual warfare, both of ⁴⁸ Historia, Misión Cristiana Elim, http://www.elim.org.sv/historia/. ⁴⁹ Ibid.; Fraternidad Cristiana De Guatemala, http://frater.org; Igreja Universal Do Reino De Deus http://sites.universal.org/templodesalomao/o-templo/

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which propose to bring about improvement in the temporal world through celestial intervention, are central to most neopentecostals’ arsenal of belief. Prosperity theology in particular has spread wildly in Latin America and other parts of the world since the last decades of the twentieth century, although its origins come from North America’s ‘Word-Faith’ televangelists of last century.⁵⁰ By the second decade of the twenty-first, it has become the main focus of many of the fastest growing evangelical ‘non-denominational’ churches in the global South, the message of prosperity in many new churches far surpassing that of holiness, aesthetic behaviour, sin and salvation, that were the traditional foci of Protestant, even Pentecostal, theology.⁵¹ Certainly, it is hard to imagine a theological counterpoint more contrary to Latin America’s other great religious movement of the mid-twentieth century, Liberation Theology, where important sectors of the Catholic Church claimed a ‘preferential option for the poor’ and valorized the poor as the children of God. Pentecostal prosperity theology, by contrast, posits a theology of wealth that offers material rewards in return for faith; indeed, one of prosperity theology’s chief proponents. The Brazilian megachurch founder Edir Macedo presses this very point in his 1992 book, The Liberation of Theology, the title of which provocatively taunts the reader to invert Liberation Theology’s promises to see God’s favour in the rich, not the poor.⁵² On the other hand, the theology’s popularity surged arguably as much in response to current conditions as to dissentionist sentiments. In the 1990s, as neo-liberal economic reforms in Latin America reshaped both economic policies and ordinary people’s access to the system, one can argue that prosperity gospel emerged in force at least partially as a reaction to changes in market forces. As elsewhere in in the world, economic transitions have forced people in Latin America into new methods of coping with new global realities. Again, Latin America offers us a vibrant example to illustrate this third type: Macedo’s church, the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD). Having an active presence in many parts of the world, the church is known in Spanish as the Iglesia Universal del Reino De Dios and in English as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. The IURD, as with virtually all the cases discussed here, has its roots in the same centrifugal forces—dissent again finding its expression in personal relationships and jealousies more than in doctrinal differences—that has produced so many other Pentecostal denominations. The IURD was founded in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1970s by Macedo, a former civil servant and lottery employee.⁵³ Macedo was born a Catholic, but

⁵⁰ See Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York, 2013). ⁵¹ Gary E. Gilley, ‘The Word-Faith Movement’, Think on These Things, V, 4 (April 1999). ⁵² Edir Macedo, A Libertac¸ão da Teologia (Rio de Janeiro, 1992). ⁵³ Macedo has recently published his autobiography, entitled Nothing to Lose, in a three-part trilogy. See Edir Macedo, Nada a Perder, 3 vols (São Paulo, 2012–14).

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converted to Pentecostalism in the late 1960s, when he joined the Igreja Cristã de Nova Vida (New Life Christian Church), a missionary denomination established by a Canadian ‘Bishop’ named Walter Robert McAlister. Macedo wished to become a minister in the church, but finding himself frozen out by McAlister, left Nova Vida along with his brother-in-law, R. R. Soares to start their own congregation. (Here, as in so many cases, a foreign missionary’s reluctance to cede authority to local leadership again sowed the seeds of congregational dissent.) Macedo and Soares established the Igreja Universal in 1977, meeting at first in an old funeral home. (Soares and Macedo soon parted ways, and Soares went on to found one of Brazil’s other large Pentecostal megachurches, the Igreja Internacional da Graça de Deus, also in Rio, in 1980). In large part because of Macedo’s emphasis on prosperity theology, the church immediately stood out on the crowded Brazilian religious landscape. By the 1980s, the IURD was one of Brazil’s largest Protestant churches, rivalled only by the Assembleas de Deus, a missionary-origin denomination, for presence and influence in the country. Today, the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD) is, with its multinational reach, arguably, the region’s most avid and aggressive proponent of prosperity theology. The IURD is one of the fastest growing denominations in the world, with an active presence in 180 different countries, including not just Latin America, but Europe, the United States, Africa, and even in places that are normally off-limits to evangelical proselytization, including Cuba.⁵⁴ In 2013, the IURD opened its Templo de Solomão in São Paulo, said to be an ‘exact replica’ of Solomon’s temple, with a capacity of 15,000 in the main sanctuary and thirty-six additional rooms for prayer, classes, healing, and the like. The temple’s grand opening, an Old Testament spectacle worthy of production by Cecil B. DeMille, included the ceremonial presentation of a golden ‘Ark of Alliance’, modelled after the Ark of the Covenant, and was broadcast for hours on live TV.⁵⁵ But sheer size and numbers alone do not tell the whole story. Latin America, of course, is home to a larger number of observant Christians of all stripes than any other region of the world, and, increasingly, many of these subscribe to at least some of the teachings of prosperity theology. So pervasive is its influence that historian Andrew Chesnut has suggested that ‘virtually no church, not even the Catholic Church, has been untouched by its teachings’.⁵⁶ Indeed, in the Pew Forum’s 2006 survey of Pentecostalism in ten countries, 44 per cent of Brazilians and a whopping 56 per cent of Guatemalans responded that they ⁵⁴ http://universal.org/who-where-how/our-locations.html ⁵⁵ Leiliane Roberta Lopes, ‘Inauguração Do Templo De Salomão Tem Entrada Da “Arca Da Aliança” ’, Notícias Gospelprime (1 Aug. 2014), http://noticias.gospelprime.com.br/inauguracaotemplo-de-salomao. ⁵⁶ Andrew Chesnut, quoted by Arlene Sanchez Walsh in Madison Trammel, ‘First Church of Prosperidad’, Christianity Today (6 July 2007).

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‘completely agree’ with the statement: ‘God will grant material prosperity to all believers who have enough faith.’⁵⁷ Both critics and fans of prosperity theology agree to its most obvious appeal: it promises success and valorizes material gain. In this context, a faith is immediately rewarded with guilt-free gain: as the pastors say, ‘God will meet you at the point of your need.’⁵⁸ While in the (recent) past within Latin American Pentecostalism, this ‘point of need’ was usually health (sanación), it is now financial prosperity (prosperidad). Certainly this is true for Macedo, whose personal wealth Forbes magazine places at more than US$1 billion in 2015.⁵⁹ Much of this comes from the IURD’s investment empire, which includes, among other things Rede Record, a major Brazilian media conglomerate, and Macedo himself is a significant shareholding (49 per cent) in a private financial institution, Banco Renner.⁶⁰ The church’s vast and visible wealth—the ostentatious Templo de Solomão is estimated to have cost US$300,000,000⁶¹—has caused many to heap criticism on Macedo and the IURD itself, charging them with charlatanism, money laundering, misappropriation of charitable funds, scandal, and even witchcraft.⁶² Yet Macedo shrugs off such accusations. ‘If I preach prosperity and my clothes are ragged’, he has said, ‘Who will follow me?’⁶³ The methods that the church uses to advance the doctrine of prosperity, however, are by no means unique to the denomination. As with many prosperity theology churches, within the IURD, much (financially) is expected of each believer, but much can be expected in return; for example, a pastor might urge the faithful to put their entire paycheck into the offering plate in order to reap the blessing of a better-paying job or unexpected wealth in return. Unlike some denominations, within the IURD, the giving of money to the church is a central tenet of belief; it is, in fact, central to salvation.

⁵⁷ Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and Pew Research Center, Spirit and Power: A 10Country Survey of Pentecostals (question 17, p. 144. The third Latin American case study was Chile. Chileans have apparently not embraced prosperity theology to the same extent—only 15 per cent of Chileans ‘completely agree’ with the statement in Q17. ⁵⁸ Paul Gifford, ‘Expecting Miracles’, Christian Century, CXXIV, 14 (10 July 2007). ⁵⁹ The World’s Billionaires: 2015 Ranking—#1638 Edir Macedo and Family’, Forbes (2015), https://www.forbes.com/profile/edir-macedo/#6e0774c72fcf ⁶⁰ Anderson Antunes, ‘Brazilian Billionaire Bishop Edir Macedo Is Now a Banker, Too’, Forbes (22 July 2013), https://www.forbes.com/sites/andersonantunes/2013/07/22/brazilianbillionaire-bishop-edir-macedo-is-now-a-banker-too/#5298702978be ⁶¹ Igreja Universal Do Reino De Deus Inaugura Empreendimento Faraônico De R$685 Milhões’, Em Rondonia (1 Aug. 2014), accessed http://ariquemesonline.com.br ⁶² Alex Cuadros, ‘Edir Macedo, Brazil’s Billionaire Bishop’, Bloomburg Business (25 April 2013), accessed http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-04-25/edir-macedo-brazilsbillionaire-bishop ⁶³ Julia Preston, ‘Brazil’s Pastor of Prosperity Accused of Misusing Funds’, The Washington Post (3 Aug. 1991).

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This formula for earthly salvation, which ‘Bispo’ (Bishop) Macedo has referred to as ‘the miracle of the tithe’, or ‘putting God to the test’, is as much sympathetic magic—essence for essence, money for money—as it is an article of faith.⁶⁴ In Macedo’s words, ‘The tithe and offerings are as sacred (sagrado) and as holy (santos) as the Word of God.’⁶⁵ According to the church, the giving of money in larger and larger amounts is both a test of faith and an act of obedience. As Macedo phrases it, ‘God orders us to test Him so that blessing can descend upon us’⁶⁶ (emphasis mine). Members are urged to give a donation at every service they attend, and many of the faithful attend services multiple times per week, sometimes more than once a day, since each day symbolizes a different aspect of intercession: for health, family, money, jobs, etc. It is perhaps too glib an observation to make that such contributions do indeed, produce prosperity—at least for the pastor and church administration, if not necessarily for the giver. The success of neopentecostal churches such as the IURD is evinced in their continued expansion, not only in Latin America, but also even in places such as England and the United States, in a reverse of the missionary paradigm. The appeal of such churches may seem overly pragmatic and deterministic, even cynical. But the appeal is also obvious to poor and middle-class people in Latin America and elsewhere who aspire for a better life and believe they can do so through the Lord’s anointing. While it is obviously tempting for outsiders to criticize such thinking, we may or may not heed the words of J. Lee Grady, who, writing of the prosperity theology in the African church, challenges: ‘It seems hypocritical for Western[ers] who live in their nice suburbs to criticize [those] who want to “prosper” . . . and are just beginning to experience for the first time the joys of owning a car, holding a decent job, or enrolling in college. Do we really believe it is wrong for them to want those things?’⁶⁷ This seems a fair enough question.

CO NCLUSION To return to the question posed in the beginning of this essay, ‘is Latin America turning Protestant’, the answer, as we have seen: not yet. Perhaps. But the region has undoubtedly certainly become more pluralist than in any ⁶⁴ See IURD, Vida En Abundancia, capitulo VI. This is a devotional manual published by the church. No city or date of publication. ⁶⁵ Os Dizimos E as Ofertas São Tão Sagrados E São Santos Quanto a Palavra De Deus, http:// www.igrejauniversal.org.br/doutrinas.jsp ⁶⁶ IURD, Vida En Abundancia, p. 62. ⁶⁷ Grady is quoted in Isaac Phiri and Joe Maxwell, ‘Gospel Riches: Africa’s Rapid Embrace of Prosperity Pentecostalism Provokes Concern—and Hope’, Christianity Today, LI, 7 (6 July 2007).

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other point in its history, and religious change has been largely precipitated by dissent. As Pentecostalism has burned across the religious landscape, we see religious change generated by charismatic faith’s centrifugal qualities and by its plasticity, which allows it to adapt readily to local tastes and religious preferences. The experiential and non-doctrinal qualities that help define Pentecostalism make it almost endlessly adaptable to local religious preferences, tastes, and habitus, making it an ideal vehicle for dissent in many guises. The same may also be said, to some extent, to the Anglicanism that took root in the Caribbean and Central America: though liturgical and highly doctrinal, local adapters were able to appropriate and deploy the faith in ways that helped them frame new discourses of ethnic identity and value. This might lead us to the conclusion that Latin America is not becoming Protestant so much as Protestantism is becoming Latin American.

SEL E C T B I B L I OG R A P H Y Anderson, Allan.‘To All Points of the Compass: The Azusa Street Revival and Global Pentecostalism: Worldwide Revivals in the Early 20th Century.’ Enrichment Journal (Spring 2006). Bowler, Kate. Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Bryce-Laporte, R.S., ‘Crisis, Contraculture, and Religion among West Indians in the Panama Canal Zone’, in Norman E. Whitten, Jr and John F. Szwed, eds, AfroAmerican Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Free Press 1970). Chesnut, R. Andrew. Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Cleary, Edward L., and Juan Sepúlveda, ‘Chilean Pentecostalism: Coming of Age’, in Edward L. Cleary and Hannah W. Stewart-Gambino, eds, Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America (Boulder, CO, 1998). Freston, Paul. Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998). Garrard-Burnett. Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982–1983 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Guridy, Frank Andre. Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Holly, James Theodore. Facts About the Church’s Mission in Haiti: A Concise Statement by Bishop Holly (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1897). Hutchinson II, David Daniel. ‘Rooted and Grounded: Spiritual-Revival Churches in Contemporary Panama.’ MA Thesis, University of Texas, 2015.

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Hyatt, Eddie L. ‘Across the Lines: Charles Parham’s Contribution to the Inter-Racial Character of Early Pentecostalism.’ Pneuma Review VII, 4 (20 Dec. 2004): 16–25. Jenkins, Philip. ‘A Secular Latin America? Notes from the Global Church, ’ The Christian Century (12 March 2013). https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2013-02/secularlatin-america Lalive d’Epinay, Christian. Haven of the Masses: A Study of the Pentecostal Movement in Chile (London: Lutterworth Press, 1969). Pew Research Center. Pew Forum on Religion & Public, Life, Estimated Size of Renewalist Populations, Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals (2006). http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/spirit-and-power/ Macedo, Edir. A Libertac¸ao da Teologia (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Gráfica Universal, 1992). Macedo, Edir. Nada a Perder 3 vols (São Paulo: Planeta do Brasil, 2012–14). Putnam, Lara. Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill, NC:, University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Stol, David. Is Latin American Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). Ward, Kevin, ‘The Empire Fights Back: the Invention of African Anglicanism’, in Afe Adogame, Roswith Gerloff, and Klaus Hock, eds, Christianity in Africa and the African Diaspora: The Appropriation of a Scattered Heritage (London: Bloomsbury, 2008).

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Part V The Pacific

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17 Localization and Indigenization of Christianity in the Pacific Brian M. Howell and Michael A. Rynkeiwich

An examination of the dissenting traditions of Christianity in the Pacific region provide a strong context for discussions of ‘indigenous’ or local Christianity. So-called indigenous forms of Christianity could be said to include everything from heterodox practices such as the ‘cargo cults’ of the South Pacific, to theologically orthodox and locally supported Anglican churches in Papua New Guinea, to generations of Fijian Methodists, and independentlyfounded Pentecostal revivalist churches throughout the region. At the same time, all of these expressions of Christianity reflect colonial experiences, Western missionary activity, and the expansion of global Christian movements, though the differences between the many groups and cultural contexts are vast and every bit as meaningful as the similarities tying them together. For this chapter, we attempt to recognize both the variation and the commonality by briefly presenting several examples of Christianity and mission in the Pacific as a way to explore questions of localization and indigenization generally. In this culturally, geographically, and religiously diverse region, what can we learn about the nature of localization and indigenization in the specific historic contexts of various Pacific Christian communities? How do the examples of mission work among Protestant/dissenting Christian groups suggest dynamics of Christian localization? How does this contribute to an overall understanding attempted by the historical, theological, and missiological entries of this encyclopaedia? In this chapter, the region brought together as ‘the Pacific’ (described below) becomes an occasion to explore the notions of indigenization and localization/contextualization as they relate to the development of the sort of Christianity that can, at least loosely, be understood in terms of the categories and legacies of the ‘dissenting traditions’. After the various terms are briefly

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defined in the first section, the article shifts to the questions of how the romantic and modernist sensibilities of dissenting Christianity have emerged in these particular cultural and historical contexts. Then, drawing on a few more elaborated examples from Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, and the Philippines, the chapter concludes by suggesting that the legacy of the dissenting traditions today is manifest in the religious practices and ethos of Christianity as flexible and individual, but not in the kind of intellectualist or modernist terms that emerged (and to some extent remain prominent) in European and North American contexts.

THE P ACIFIC The Pacific is the reverse of a continent; vast stretches of water punctuated with scattered bits of land. For the first three centuries of European colonization and Christian mission, the ocean was a barrier, an arduous stretch of the journey between East and West. Before Captain Cook (1770s), few had bothered to map any of the thousands of islands, and before the London Missionary Society (1795), few had bothered themselves about the souls of the inhabitants of those islands. Throughout the next 150 years, various LMS missionaries employed a variety of mission strategies; some by design and some rooted in the personalities and circumstances of particular missionaries. They and their successors contributed to what is now the widespread, complex, and indigenized expressions of South Pacific Christianity. There are a variety of terms that define the region at play here. Melanesia is often used to specify the island of New Guinea (including the nation of Papua New Guinea on the Eastern half, and the Indonesian provinces of West Papua and Papua—previously Irian Jaya—on the West) and the nearby archipelagos of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Fiji is sometimes included in the definition of Melanesia, or may be classified as Polynesia (which extends to Tonga, Samoa, Tuvalu, and others). Micronesia typically refers to the small islands north of Melanesia. The island nations of Southeast Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines, are often looped into conversations about The Pacific, as both share significant cultural and historical connections with the nations central to the South Pacific of lore. Today, particularly in conversations about the globalization and localization of Christianity, the boundaries of the Pacific are less important than the ways in which circulations of people, practices, and ideas are lived out in populations identifying with specific places and communities in the region. The Pacific, excluding Indonesia beyond West Papua, was called by

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missiologist Charles Forman ‘in all probability, the most solidly Christian part of the world’.¹ This can certainly be understood in terms of religious identity, in which every nation of non-Indonesia Pacific is 80 per cent or more Christian (and most are over 90 per cent), but also in terms of the ways Christianity defines public life, the political landscape, legal codes, and social mores.² No presentation of the history or contemporary anthropology of this vast region could be attempted here. At the same time, we do not limit examples to those that may be more traditionally considered ‘the Pacific’, but draw on the Philippine example where it illuminates particular aspects of the ways dissenting Christianity (or its progeny) is expressed in these diverse cultural contexts. In representing even a sliver of the scholarship produced through the long encounter of Pacific peoples with Christianity throughout this vast region, we consider how the impulses to break Christianity free from hegemonic theological traditions, institutional hierarchies, and confluences of the church with state power have been worked out in cultural-historic contexts in distinct ways.

DEFINING INDIGENO US CHRISTIANITY For many decades, the disciplines of anthropology and history (among others) framed Christianity outside the West as part of the extension of colonial power and a project of cultural, social, and political domination.³ Christianity was always ‘foreign’ and the question scholars tended to ask was how local people either resisted or acquiesced to the hegemony of this universalizing ideology/ religion.⁴ Missiologically, the question of indigenization tended to be framed in institutional terms. That is, indigenous churches exhibited the ‘three-self ’ characteristics of self-sustaining (financially), self-propagating, and selfgoverning. It was often assumed by early advocates of this mission model ¹ Charles W. Forman, The Island Churches of the South Pacific: Emergence in the Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, NY 1982), p. 227 ² See Matt Tomlinson and Debra L. McDougall, Christian Politics in Oceania (New York, 2013). ³ See, for example, Joel Robbins, ‘On the Paradoxes of Global Pentecostalism and the Perils of Continuity Thinking’, Religion, XXXIII, 3 (2003), p. 221; Joel Robbins, ‘Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity’, Current Anthropology, XLVIII, 1 (Feb. 2007), p. 5; Jon Bialecki and others, ‘The Anthropology of Christianity’, Religion Compass, II, 6 (2008), pp. 1139–58; 1139; Timothy Jenkins, ‘The Anthropology of Christianity: Situation and Critique’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, LXXVII, 4 (Dec. 2012), pp. 459–76. ⁴ See Fenella Cannell, ‘Introduction: The Anthropology of Christianity’, in Fenella Cannell, ed., The Anthropology of Christianity (Durham, NC, 2006), pp. 11ff.

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that the theology, if not the religious practices, of a healthy church would look very much like whatever the missionaries first brought, but without the leadership, financial support, and evangelizing activity of foreign missionaries.⁵ From a variety of directions, particularly from the perspective of indigenous scholars, this framework has been challenged. People began to focus on the ways local people appropriated Christianity for their own purposes, including the resistance of these very sorts of domination as well as the reinvention of Christianity. Missiologists introduced the ideas of indigenization and contextualization to argue that congregations adopting Christianity in previously non-Christian countries should develop distinct practices and theologies reflecting the local cultural context.⁶ Anthropologists who have looked at local forms of Christianity have observed these developments, although they have shifted from understanding these as only colonial impositions, to interpreting the complex cultural and political negotiations of meanings in context. One early example of this shift with secular anthropological studies of Christianity comes from a conference organized in Cebu, Philippines by Jean-Paul Dumont. Picking up scholarship questioning the hegemony of institutionalized Christianity, the conference focused on ‘practical religion’ (or what is now commonly called ‘lived religion’) as the place where the universal teaching of Christianity becomes ‘embodied in the life of a person who live[s] in radically different place and time’.⁷ Anthropologist Charles Keyes stated that this articulation of the universality of Christianity in a local context—what Philippine historian Reynaldo Ileto called ‘domestication’ and Scottish historian Andrew Walls termed ‘translation’ – ‘always creates tension between the meanings of a practical religion and the meanings asserted by an authority’.⁸ This focus on the lived and local manifestation of Christianity is now a familiar understanding of all large-scale religions and has helped scholars of non-Western Christianity move from a limited understanding of missionary religions as only the thin edge of capitalism and colonial rule.⁹ Similarly, mission scholars came to recognize the necessary, and, from a normative ⁵ Cf: Alan R. Tippett, ed. The Ways of the People: A Reader in Missionary Anthropology (Pasadena, CA, 2013), Introduction, Ch. 65. ⁶ Ibid.; Charles H. Kraft, Christianity in Culture: A Study in Dynamic Biblical Theologizing in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Maryknoll, NY, 1979); Orlando E. Costas, Christ Outside the Gate: Mission Beyond Christendom (Maryknoll, NY, 1982). ⁷ Charles F. Keyes, ‘Christianity as an Indigenous Religion in Southeast Asia’, Social Compass, XXXVIII, 2 (1 June 1991), p. 178. ⁸ Ibid.; Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY; Edinburgh, 1996), pp. 26ff.; Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910 (Quezon City: Metro Manila, 1979), p. 15. ⁹ Cf: Robbins, ‘Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture’.

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point of view, healthy process by which specific communities expressed their Christian faith in ways culturally resonant to their pre-Christian lives. At the same time, as the ‘localization’ perspective gained favour, it tended to place Christianity in opposition to political changes that emerged in colonial or post-colonial regimes. As is evident in the framework above, by emphasizing the local, it created a kind of oppositional structure in which the localization of Christianity could only be seen where the appearance of conventional, orthodox, or institutionalized Christianity could be stripped away to find something authentically local underneath, or where the outward expression looked notably ‘local’, usually in some unique aesthetic or performative way.¹⁰ This created a new set of limitations where any Christianity appearing too conventional or linked to institutional structures became interpreted as either a veneer, a superficial manifestation of real, enduring cultural practices at work inside the adopted Christian forms, or an inappropriate, noncontextualized expression of a ‘colonial mentality’.¹¹ In both analyses there is undoubtedly truth for particular cases. In some cases, local Christians have felt inordinately constrained to maintain the practices of foreign missionaries, even when such practices reflected little of the cultural logic of everyday life, or bore any affective links to meaningful religious and spiritual understandings. Similarly, some subjective meanings of Christian symbols used in communities around the world hold such little, or even mutually exclusive, significance to those expressed in historic Christian teaching, that it seems only reasonable to look for the ‘true’ cultural logic and meaning ‘underneath’ the Christian practice.¹² But in grappling with localization, these two possibilities do not exhaust the ethnographic and historic realities found throughout the world. Taking just the Pacific cases, it’s clear that such dichotomies as ‘local’ versus ‘global’, along with a host of other categories such as foreign, authentic, imported, autochthonous, or imposed, do not, in hard oppositions, capture the ways local Christians have, over time, grappled with the same questions of autonomy, individuality, and political theology that are part of the roots ¹⁰ Cf: John W. Burton, ‘The Problem of Making Christianity Indigenous’, in Alan R. Tippett, eds, The Ways of the People: A Reader in Missionary Anthropology (Pasadena, CA, 2013), pp. 423–7; also, Michael A. Rynkeiwich, ‘The World in My Parish: Rethinking the Standard Missiological Model’, Missiology, XXX, 3 (2002), pp. 301–21. ¹¹ Cf: Jaime Bulatao and Vitaliano R. Gorospe, Split-Level Christianity. Christian Renewal of Filipino Values (Quezon City, 1966). ¹² The anthropological tradition of so-called folk versions of Christianity goes back to the well-known work of Robert Redfield’s model of the Great Tradition/little tradition of religious life, and has been explored in a number of ethnographic studies. See, for example, Lorraine V. Aragon, Fields of the Lord: Animism, Christian Minorities, and State Development in Indonesia (Honolulu, Hawai’i, 2000); cf. John M. Watanabe, ‘Unimagining the Maya: Anthropologists, Others, and the Inescapable Hubris of Authorship’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, XIV, 1 (1 Jan. 1995), pp. 34–5.

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of the dissenting traditions of Europe and North America.¹³ Just as many European dissenters ‘cherished contrary convictions’, so too have the many re-formations and creations within Pacific Christianity expressed these contrary impulses to find a new way forward for a specific community of Christian believers. Localization in the Pacific should not be seen as something unique to the so-called mission field, but as illustrations of a common process in the reforming traditions of Christianity and cultural processes generally.

LOCAL CHRISTIA NITY AND D ISSENTING TRADITIONS

Eastern Polynesia Polynesia (‘many islands’) is a triangular culture area that stretches from Easter Island to New Zealand to Hawai’i. It was settled by Austronesian speakers so recently (the last 4000 years) that the languages and cultures of the people are still closely related. Captain Cook’s accounts of his voyages captivated England and roused the missionary spirit of several groups of dissenters and nonconformists. William Carey inspired Baptist preacher John Ryland who flamed the missionary fervour of other evangelicals, H. O. Willis, David Bogue, James Stevens, John Hey, John Eyre, and Thomas Haweis. They formed ‘The Missionary Society’ in 1795. Soon the Congregationalists came to dominate the society and in 1818 it was renamed ‘The London Missionary Society’. Haweis was in conversation with Selina, the Countess of Huntingdon who introduced him to Captain Bligh, from whom he learned about Tahiti.¹⁴ The society obtained the ship Duff and the services of a volunteer captain to take the first group of seventeen missionaries to Tahiti. Although the society worked with the best information it had, certain assumptions about mission work and Tahitian society hampered the progress of conversion and church planting. First, being nonconformists, they did not value social status or education, and thus purposely chose craftsmen (brick layers, carpenters, printers) without a university or seminary education and certainly without missionary training.¹⁵ Of the original twenty-nine, four were ministers and the rest were labourers. Two were dropped in the Marquesas, one left the next day on the same ship, the other a year later. Seventeen were dropped in Tahiti, and within ¹³ See John H. Y. Briggs, ‘The Changing Shape of Nonconformity, 1662–2000’, in Robert Pope, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (London, 2013), 1–29. ¹⁴ John Garrett, To Live Among the Stars: Christian Origins in Oceania (Geneva, 1982), p. 4. ¹⁵ Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (Baltimore, MD, 1964), p. 251.

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a year, half had either defected or departed. Ten were dropped in Tonga; three were killed, one defected, and the remainder soon boarded a ship bound for Sydney.¹⁶ Second, in an age before concerns for ‘missionary care’ arose, the society expected self-sufficiency. The second voyage of the Duff carried thirty missionaries, but the ship was captured by the French and ransomed at great cost to the society. A few eventually were able to join those remaining on Tahiti, but the Napoleonic wars prevented contact for another six years.¹⁷ Third, the cultural and political information that Captain Bligh provided them was spotty. Chief Pomare on Tahiti turned out not to be the ‘king’ of all of Tahiti but only one of a number of chiefs engaged in warfare trying to dominate each other. Thus, placing themselves under his protection cut the missionaries off from working in areas allied with Pomare’s enemies, and tied their welcome in the islands to his fortunes in war. Finally, the missionaries tried to use the model that had worked in Europe which involved settling a group of missionaries in one place so that they could then attempt to convert the chief in the hope that that his conversion would radiate out to the people. The problem is that, when chiefs fail, when dynasties fall, when new chiefs arise, then people shift their allegiances, and that may include their allegiance to the chief ’s religion, in this case, Christianity. In addition, not every society is organized hierarchically around chiefs, nor does every society settle down in one place for long periods of time. The inappropriateness of the European mission model soon became apparent to missionary John Williams. He set his eyes ever on spreading west, to the Cook Islands, to Samoa, and to Tonga, but sitting in a small missionary community on Raiatea was not going to accomplish this goal. Adapting the Polynesian love of long-distance sailing, Williams purchased a small sailing ship and named it the Endeavor. He crewed the ship with newly-converted and trained Polynesian missionaries. Ownership of the vessel was vested in the chiefs of the Leeward Islands (like Raiatea, west of Tahiti and part of the Society Islands). Thus, Williams resisted and reshaped three assumptions: let the European missionaries settle down in a Christian community, restrict the work to European missionaries, and concentrate on polity, not geography. As Neill says: He was the first to see clearly that the evangelization of the Pacific could be carried out only by Christians of the native races; hence his policy of planting native teachers, often with the slenderest of qualifications, on remote island were [sic] they could hardly ever be visited by any missionary.¹⁸

¹⁶ Garrett, To Live Among the Stars , pp. 15–16. ¹⁸ Neill, A History of Christian Missions, p. 253.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 17.

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In the present, Polynesian Christianity has proliferated in multiple directions from these early efforts. Pentecostalism, a vibrant and rapidly growing form of Christianity in Polynesia as elsewhere in the world, ‘addresses itself to a Polynesian Protestant memory that intertwines the legacy of British revivalism with indigenous representations of “power”’.¹⁹ In this way, Pentecostalism is a ‘subversion of the traditional order stemming from Polynesian historical Christianity and a break with the moral conservatism of classical Pentecostalism’, opening the way to an indigenous Christianity that does not imagine itself as rooted in a ‘pagan’ cultural past, but also distinct from European Christendom.²⁰ Similarly, in settings like Fiji, where the Methodist church has a strong, if not majoritarian presence, local Christian communities have embraced local traditions of power in explicitly Christian settings. These sorts of practices, long labelled ‘syncretism’ by disapproving Western-based church authorities, have become foundational to the experience and practice of Christianity, yet differentiated from what local leaders consider the Christian basis for their social and cultural lives. Matt Tomlinson writes that for the deeply Christian nation of Fiji religion has become a ‘metaculture’, a form of life used to interpret and develop cultural life more generally around locally based understandings of spiritual life, power, hierarchy, and religion.²¹ Throughout the region, Christianity is set in complex and historically and politically specific relations to ‘culture’ and the state as it has been increasingly taken in as a traditional religion itself.

Samoa On his first trip to Samoa, on his newly constructed ship the Messenger of Peace, Williams brought Tahitian missionaries Moia, Boti, Taataori, Umia, Arue, and Taihere, and Cook Islanders Rake and Tuava, and on a later trip, Teava. By this time Williams was convinced that ‘great are the advantages on the side of a native Teacher at the commencement of a Mission over a European’.²² As Christianity spread through Samoa, Williams learned another lesson in indigenization of the mission. Unlike Tahitian, Cook Islands, and Tongan social structure, the most important structure in Samoa was the village with its leadership groups of chiefs and talking chiefs, and their counterparts among women, young women, and young men. It proved impossible to plant ¹⁹ Yannick Fer, ‘Politics of Tradition: Charismatic Globalization, Morality, and Culture in Polynesian Protestantism’, in Simon Coleman, ed., The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism (New York, 2015), p. 231. ²⁰ Ibid., p. 229. ²¹ Matt Tomlinson, In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity (Berkeley, CA, 2009). ²² Garrett, To Live Among the Stars , p. 84.

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the church outside or in between villages. ‘The LMS introduced a key figure into the picture—the faife’au, pastor, surrounded by his council of influential lay deacons.’²³ In this way, the independent nature of the dissenting missionaries fit well with Samoa’s localized structure and its resistance to a centralized chiefly hierarchy. The LMS established a theological school at Malua and an educational institution at Leulumoega that were functioning by the 1840s. There were setbacks, at least from the perspective of the missionaries. For example, in the east where one chief was struggling to dominate, the LMS introduced teachers from Tahiti and the Cook Islands. His rivals tended to identify with Tongan Wesleyans in the west, and thus local politics split the missionary effort. From another angle, chiefs and people alike desired to access the spiritual prowess of the Europeans that gave them an edge in navigation, trade, and warfare. A Samoan who worked on a whaling ship, Sio Vili, returned with a prophetic vision designed to access this spiritual source of power, and thus, in the eyes of the missionaries, led astray the newly converted.²⁴ Such movements reveal the Samoan desire to reconcile the differences between Europeans and Samoans by ‘seeking new religious explanations’.²⁵ As elsewhere, European, Polynesian, and local converts worked to produce a Bible in the local language so that before 1900 every major language group in Polynesia had Scripture in their own tongue. And, as elsewhere, a theological school was founded at Alofi on Niue which, along with Takamoa and Malua continued to send out missionaries to Micronesia and Melanesia. This too is the story of indigenization which empowered the first generation of converts to think of themselves as missionaries and thus answer the call. After World War I, New Zealand replaced Germany as colonial administrator in Western Samoa, and they proved more imperialistic and less understanding than the Germans. The Samoan LMS church was on the verge of establishing an indigenous free church, but resistance to the New Zealand colonizers that took shape in the form of a movement called the Mau put the church in a dangerous position. This movement, the Mau or ‘firm opinion’ with the motto Samoa mo Samoa ‘Samoa for Samoans’, was a non-violent resistance movement to German and then New Zealand hegemony. The centre of leadership was the same as the newly established church, the villages with their titled leaders (matai). The overlap in leadership and organization may be the origin of the non-violence strategy. Newer missionaries did not understand Samoan customs, especially village organization and chiefs, and so, in spite of their dissenter tradition, they did not support the Mau.

²³ Ibid., p. 124. ²⁴ Ibid., p. 121. ²⁵ Malama Meleisea, The Making of Modern Samoa: Traditional Authority and Colonial Administration in the History of Western Samoa (Suva, Fiji, 1987), pp. 52–3.

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The LMS authorities in London assigned a veteran missionary, Reginald Bartlett, to be the principal of Malua and chief negotiator between the Mau and the colonial administration. Bartlett had served in Papua and so understood mission in the Pacific Islands. At the same time, he had served in the British Army during the war and so knew how to handle officious governors and commanders. On arrival in late 1929, Bartlett met with all parties, including the Mau. In particular, he met with the chief who was the head of the Mau. One week later, Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III was shot dead by New Zealand troops while trying to stop his people from throwing rocks at the police. Ten others died as well. The Samoans asked Bartlett to speak at his funeral as Tamasese was a deacon in the LMS church. Bartlett continued to be in contact with dissident Mau in the mountains, and was able to set up a meeting with the administration. When another leader of the Mau was arrested prematurely, Bartlett pulled rank (he had been a Major during World War I) on the detachment and had him released.²⁶ Bartlett worked hard on reconciliation, which came later in 1930, with the promise that, in his own words, the Mau would not disappear but would transition into an indigenous parliament. The Samoan Christianity of the early- to mid-twentieth century was often portrayed as that which ‘overlaid a much older attitude’.²⁷ Anthropologist Margaret Mead, in one of her first works on Samoan society, wrote that: Despite the long church influence, there are certain features that have made for preserving parts of the old religion intact. A great number of native pastors, simple men who have gone only a short distance from their cultural background, is one of the most important of these.²⁸

Contemporaneous to these views, however, were those who interpreted Samoan Christianity in terms of hybridity and emerging cultural and religious forms that were not dichotomous mash-ups of discrete, but competing systems. Derek Freeman, writing well before the infamous controversy with Margaret Mead, noted the salience of Samoan Christianity to the cultural context he encountered.²⁹ Where Mead and others saw cultural overlay, he suggested a more dynamic process at work. In an unpublished paper presented at the London School of Economics entitled ‘Missionaries and Culture Change’, Freeman argued that Samoan Christianity was ‘something unique

²⁶ John Garrett, Footsteps in the Sea: Christianity in Oceania to World War II (Geneva:1992), pp. 403–5. ²⁷ Margaret Mead, Social Organization of Manua (Honolulu, Hawaii, 1930), p. 147, http://hdl. handle.net/2027/mdp.39015055238938. ²⁸ Ibid. ²⁹ On the controversy, see Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Cambridge, MA, 1983); also, Paul Shankman, The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy (Madison, WI, 2009).

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to the Samoan islands . . . the product of the contact and interaction, of the past 116 years of two strongly contrasting cultures and their religions’.³⁰ The missionary perspective on such religious innovation and production has often come under the heading of ‘syncretism’, or the ‘the type of popular religious practice that [religious leaders] condemn’.³¹ As historian Andrew Walls has argued, however, such re-combinations of religious elements, is an inevitable, and even necessary aspect of Christianization and conversation.³² In the Samoans’ case, from the variously hybrid/syncretic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Christian church has emerged to play a powerfully influential role in daily Samoan life. Anthropologist Lowell Holmes wrote in the latter half of the twentieth century that the church, primarily congregational, plays the most vital role in Samoan society of any institution with the exception of the family. Both in Samoa and in Samoan communities in Hawaii and California, the church still enjoys a central position in the social, economic and political aspects of Samoan life. Pastors continue to be major decision-makers and are respected even more than high chiefs. That Samoans are 100 percent literate can only be credited to the existence of village church schools. Likewise, there would be little charity or philanthropy in Samoan villages if it were not for the influence of the pastor and certain village organizations such as the Women’s Committee which have strong church affiliation.³³

Though concerns of ‘syncretism’ (i.e., improper theology, impurity, idolatry) remain part of the religious anxieties of missionaries and Samoan pastors, for anthropologists and missiologists, these worries are understood as those common to Christians everywhere.³⁴ Though framed in terms of Samoan ‘traditional religion’, the desires for ‘pure faith’ and biblical Christianity prove to be those that are familiar to Christians everywhere.

Hawai’i In the afterglow of the Second Great Awakening, the American version of the LMS was founded in 1806. Primarily Congregational, it included ³⁰ Peter Hempenstall, ‘Manuscript Xv: “On Missionaries and Cultural Change in Samoa”: Derek Freeman Preparing for a “Heretical” Life’, The Journal of Pacific History, XXXIX, 2 (1 Sept. 2004), p. 250. ³¹ André Droogers, ‘Syncretism and Fundamentalism: A Comparison’, Social Compass, LII, 4 (1 Dec. 2005), p. 464, doi:10.1177/0037768605058152. ³² Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History. ³³ Lowell Don Holmes, ‘Cults, Cargo and Christianity: Samoan Responses to Western Religion’, Missiology, VIII, 4 (1 Oct. 1980), p. 486. ³⁴ See Edwin Zehner, ‘Orthodox Hybridities: Anti-Syncretism and Localization in the Evangelical Christianity of Thailand’, Anthropological Quarterly, LXXVIII, 3 (Summer 2005), pp. 585–617.

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Presbyterians and the Dutch Reformed Church. The first missionaries were sent to South and East Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The first group of ABCFM missionaries arrived in Hawai’i in 1820, seven people led by the Revd Hiram Bingham. They were followed by another dozen groups over the next thirty-five years until the total number of missionaries sent out from Boston was 120. Most were white, married US Americans, but a few were single men or women, including one African American woman. The timing of the mission is one of the strange stories of the Pacific. King Kamehameha I had died in 1919 and was succeeded by his son Liholiho, who became King Kamehameha II. After years of dealing with whalers and traders, primarily British and beginning with Captain Cook, the powers behind the throne, particularly the Queen Mother Kaahahumanu and the ‘Prime Minister’ Kalanimoku, were ready to overthrow the cumbersome system of gods and kapu (taboos) that constituted the traditional religious system. Although rivalry among the priests of the four primary gods (Ku, Kanaloa, Kane, and Lono) played a part in the movement, the result was the destruction of images of the gods (akua) and the worship spaces (marae) just months before the missionaries arrived. Thus, the missionaries stepped into a religious vacuum, found a society in the midst of an upheaval, and were presented a unique opportunity for the preaching of the Gospel. The mission had been shaped by several forces, starting with the revival that inspired the East Coast college students to wed evangelical passion and the entrepreneurial spirit. In another version of the ‘indigenization’ of the church as well as the mission, Hawaiian students on Yale’s campus and a nearby Foreign Mission School played a pivotal role in preparing the young missionaries for their labour. Foremost among them was Henry Opukahaia who, sadly, died of typhus before the first group left.³⁵ Three Hawaiians accompanied the first group: Kaumualii, William Tenui, and Thomas Hopu. Polynesians trained at the Cornwall mission school arrived with several of the mission groups including more Hawaiians, William Kamooula, Richard Kalaioulu, Kupelii, George Tyler Kielaa, Samuel J. Mills Paloo, and John E. Phelps Kalaaauluna, along with Tahitians sent to school by the LMS, including Stephen Popohe and Henry Tahiti. When schools were up and running in the islands, William Ellis of the LMS recommended training in the islands, and so fewer Polynesians came from America. Ellis and his wife arrived with nine Tahitian teachers led by deacons Auna and Matatore.³⁶ Two advantages derived from this tactic. First, the settling of Hawai’i from the Society Islands was recent enough (about AD 500) that the Tahitians, and William Ellis, could communicate with the Hawaiians without an interpreter. Second, providentially, Auna’s wife found among the chief ’s entourage her

³⁵ Garrett, To Live Among the Stars , p. 35.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 39.

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long-lost brother who had been a sailor on the Bounty but had been diverted to Hawaii when the mutiny occurred. Thus did the Tahitian missionaries gain an unusual entré into the upper levels of Hawaii’s society.³⁷ Under the sovereign protection of Kamehameha I’s wife, Kaahumanu, Christianity spread through preaching, literacy, and education. As in Samoa, dissenting missionaries had to discover where the authority lay within society, and had to work through, rather than against, indigenous authority to secure the growth of the church. The missionaries opened a mission school near Lahaina, and from there trained pastors and missionaries emerged, albeit at a slower pace than the LMS practised in the South Pacific. At the insistence of ABCFM secretary Rufus Anderson, the strict exclusiveness of the earliest missionaries under Bingham was loosened, revival broke out in 1837, and more Hawaiians came into the church.³⁸ The Hawaiian church became independent in 1852 as The Hawaiian Evangelical Association, and Hawaiians themselves were going out under the Hawaiian Missionary Society to the Marquesas and Micronesia. However, the American missionaries never let go and, as the nineteenth century came to an end, were prime movers in business and politics, supporting the dethronement of Liliuokalani in 1893 and the annexation of Hawai’i by the United States in 1897. Thus, the original supporters of the mission, the ali’i or ‘chiefs’ lost the support of the missionaries and an independent, selfgoverning church by and for Hawaiians was delayed. In spite of these struggles for control, however, Christianity continued to emerge as a Hawaiian response to material and transcendent concerns. As was the case with Samoa, this union of political power and Christianity, culture and religion, did not simply translate directly into a dichotomy of power and foreignness on one side, with authentic and autonomous culture on the other. Even as the church spread through ‘indigenous’ missionaries (e.g., Tahitians and other South Pacific islanders), Hawaiian Christians found themselves negotiating the meanings of church life and Christianity in light of colonial histories and practices. Certainly, unlike the more popular movement of Samoa, Hawaiian Christianity developed with strong ties to political power. In particular, the conversion of Queen Kapi’olani in the early 1800s, was followed in the faith by her grandniece Queen Lili’uokalani, who was deposed by American colonial interests in 1893. Despite these political conflicts, however, both of these Hawaiian rulers espoused Christian faith until their deaths and encouraged the development of Hawaiian Christianity.³⁹ This caused the Christians of Hawaii to grapple with the political and religious meanings of their faith side by side, and interpret each in light of the other. Christianity provided both the context of colonialism and resources for ³⁷ Ibid., pp. 40–2. ³⁸ Ibid., pp. 47–8. ³⁹ See Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen (Honolulu, Hawaii, 1991).

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resistance. Historian Dorothy Barrére and anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wrote of the emerging Hawaiian Christianity: We can now see the complex of Hawaiian values accruing to Christianity and to Tahitian teachers such as Toketa in particular. As the religious basis of foreign power, Christianity had to be encompassed and controlled. At the same time, it could serve as a new ground of legitimacy for the chiefs who had risen to authority as the economic and cultural brokers of this European power, but who could not claim the traditional sanctions of rule. Hence the Tahitian converts fit the historic situation like the idea whose time had come. In their capacity of Christians from kahiki, they might at once domesticate the foreign usurping power, and usurp the domestic Hawaiian power.⁴⁰

As a dissenting tradition, Christianity in Hawai’i was woven into the discourses of resistance and practices of localization to serve, in some cases, as an indigenous force through which to engage powers of imperialism, local states, and cultural hegemony.

Papua New Guinea British nonconformist missionaries Samuel McFarlane, William Lawes, and James Chalmers, working in Polynesia, all kept sailing west until they got to Papua. McFarlane arrived first and commenced to apply his missionary method: establish a base for the Western missionaries, then send out Cook Islanders and Loyalty Islanders to live in the villages. This was more than simply a pragmatic strategy, but was part of the theology of Christian conversion McFarlane espoused. McFarlane believed ‘that British Nonconformist customs and comforts were also Christian and should prevail’.⁴¹ In other words, along with conversion should come a more ‘civilized’ society, reflecting the values of British nonconformists. Lawes and Chalmers had a different method: explore and then settle among the people yourself as partners with Polynesian missionaries. Lawes complained that too quickly forcing European ways, such as requiring clothing, produced only a superficial change that would not serve them well over time. Consequently, in his efforts to connect with the everyday lives of potential converts, Lawes was the first white man to settle on the mainland.⁴² Chalmers soon followed, and began to work with the missionaries from neighbouring islands. Ruatoka was the leader of the Cook Islanders who had settled earlier with men like Rau, Piri, Adamu, Anederea, ⁴⁰ Dorothy Barrére and Marshall Sahlins, ‘Tahitians in the Early History of Hawaiian Christianity: The Journal of Toketa’, Hawaiian Journal of History, XIII, (1979), p. 24. ⁴¹ Garrett, To Live Among the Stars, p. 212. ⁴² David Wetherell, ‘First Contact Mission Narratives from Eastern Papua New Guinea’, The Journal of Pacific History, XXXIII, 1 (1 June 1998), pp. 111–16.

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Heneri and their wives. Ruatoka and Chalmers were equal partners for many years in mission until Chalmers, Oliver Tompkins, and nine Kiwai students from the coast were killed at Goaribari in 1901. In 1910, Ben Butcher set up a station at Aird Hill to minister with the people who had killed Chalmers and his party. The Cook Islanders introduced island versions of singing and dancing for the Lord. Polynesians trained in mission schools in the Loyalty Islands, Samoa, the Cook Islands, and Tahiti came as missionaries. They lived in the villages and introduced island songs and dances into the worship services of the emerging church. They also paid a high price: four Roratongan families were murdered in 1881. Following the Pacific mission tradition, Lawes founded a school in Port Moresby and began training Motu converts for mission further inland. Because of the difficulties of travel, and because of their ecclesiology, the church was decentralized with local congregations and districts moving ahead on their own. Thus, in east Papua, Charles Abel developed the Kwato region along the lines of an industrial community. The idea was to have a boarding school where vocational education and sports would lead children away from the old life and into the new. Eventually, the Kwato Extension Association separated from the LMS and went their own way. In Hanuabada, the first medical services were provided in 1876 with the arrival of Dr Turner. The LMS’ educational ministry was improved by the appointment of the first qualified educational missionary, Percy Chatterton, at Hanuabada in 1924. The first hospital was built in 1923, and in 1928, the first female was appointed as District Missionary in Papua. Suzanna Ellis (later Rankin) also taught at Lawes College.⁴³ The LMS saw as part of their mission the establishment of a vernacular school in every village where there was a church, but also the establishment of ‘colleges’, such as Lawes College, where candidates would be trained to become evangelists and pastors. The Kwato region emphasized a boarding school where through vocational education and sports children would leave the old life and become members of a Christian industrial community. After World War II, the LMS and the Kwato Extension Association moved into new fields in the Highlands. The Kwato joined the LMS churches in 1962 to create The Papua Ekklesia, the first indigenous denomination in Papua New Guinea. In 1968, The Papua Ekklesia became the Papuan Mainland Region, joining with the Australian Methodist churches in the newly formed United Church. Thus, in the LMS mission, while the early missionaries tended to link the gospel with British culture, the widespread use of Polynesian teachers and the rapid development of Papuan pastors contributed to the indigenization of ⁴³ See Laurel Gray and Joint Board of Christian Education, Sinabada, Woman among Warriors: A Biography of the Rev. Sue Rankin (Melbourne, 1988).

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the church even before the establishment of The Papua Ekklesia. On the other hand, many elements of church doctrine, order, and administration retained a European flavour and the church has continued to struggle to make the topheavy administration work. The tension between a philosophical commitment to indigenous Christianity (defined partly through the leadership of indigenous pastors, but also through the creation of locally particular forms of worship and Christian ritual), and the control of institutions within the hands of expatriate missionaries continued to feature in much of the nonconformist Christianity of PNG throughout the twentieth century. David Wetherell, writing about the first one hundred years of the Kwato mission of Eastern PNG, notes that the nonconformist commitments to a lack of hierarchy often worked against their ideals of indigenous leadership. Without satisfactory expressions of Papuan faith to match the expectations of the European missionaries, the founders of Kwato found themselves reluctant to give over real control of the ministry work to Papuan Christians. He argues that although the founder’s explicit aim was the creation of a self-supporting Papuan church, support for the ordained ministry of Papuans was dispensed with altogether.⁴⁴ As Wetherell writes: In part, this revealed the strength of Abel’s disapproval of the patriarchal Polynesian pastors from Samoa who occupied the district outstations from 1892 to 1917, and whose relations with Abel were never free from tension. A Nonconformist who suspected the pretensions of a clerical caste was easily persuaded to do away with a specific order of ministers altogether. Instead, his preachers were lay evangelists who did ‘personal work’ among Papuans.⁴⁵

Yet, despite such conflicts between the desire for indigenous control, and standards of ‘spiritual maturity’ that often prevented the development of local leadership, Christian movements spread across Papua New Guinea. In the latter part of the twentieth century particularly, Christianity emerged, often in Pentecostal form, as a strong influence throughout the island nation. In many areas, revivals, along with the introduction of new missions of Seventh Day Adventists and Latter Day Saints, spurred local initiative in the formation of Christian communities, producing a wide variety of Christian expressions and institutions.⁴⁶ Courtney Handman, an anthropologist working ⁴⁴ David Wetherell, ‘An Elite for a Nation? Reflections on a Missionary Group in Papua New Guinea, 1890–1986’, Pacific Studies, IX, 2 (March 1986), p. 22. ⁴⁵ Ibid. ⁴⁶ See, for example, Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley, CA, 2004); Mark Mosko, ‘Partible Penitents: Dividual Personhood and Christian Practice in Melanesia and the West’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, XVI, 2 (2010), pp. 215–40; Holger Jebens, Pathways to Heaven: Contesting Mainline and Fundamentalist Christianity in Papua New Guinea (New York, 2005); John Barker, Maisin Christianity: an Ethnography of the Contemporary Religion of a Seaboard Melanesian People (Ottawa, 1986).

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among the Guhu-Samane Christians of the Waria River region of PNG, has published an account of these multiple expressions within a single linguistic-ethnic community.⁴⁷ She argues that a kind of ‘critical Christianity’ has developed in this region, by which local communities come to imagine various Christian expressions and practices. The resulting schisms, so often decried by Christians as a failure of unity, and interpreted by scholars as the result of underlying political tensions, are, she argues, the transformative work of culturally productive Christians. She writes that ‘critique is used in a somewhat paradoxical way to foster unity’, not unlike, perhaps, the ways dissenting Christians came together around their own Congregationalist rebellions against the larger structures of state and Church.⁴⁸

The Philippines In the 1500s, the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan encountered the Philippines while sailing under the flag of Spain in search of a western route to the East Indies, the source of the spice trade. He and his men landed on the island of Cebu in the central Philippines. At this time period, almost nothing was known of the Philippines, and so sources of information about preHispanic societies in the country date from the early period of Spanish contact. Most Philippine communities, with the exception of the Muslim sultanates in the Sulu archipelago and Mindanao, were fairly small without a great deal of centralized authority. The absence of centralized power meant that a small number of Spaniards were able to convert a large number of Filipinos living in politically autonomous units more easily than they could have converted people living in large, organized, complex kingdoms such as those Hinduized or (later) Theravada Buddhist-influenced kingdoms in mainland Southeast Asia and on the island of Java in Indonesia. The Spanish were unsuccessful in converting Muslim Sultanates to Catholicism, and in fact warred with Muslim Filipinos throughout their 300-year colonial rule from 1521–1898. Nor did they successfully conquer certain highland areas, such as the Luzon highlands, where a diverse array of ethno-linguistic groups used their remote, difficult mountainous terrain to successfully avoid colonization. It was not until the twentieth century that Protestant Christianity was introduced in a significant way in the Philippines. After the Philippine revolution of 1896, in which the United States assisted the Philippine rebels by defeating the Spanish Armada in the Battle of Manila Bay, US President ⁴⁷ Courtney Handman, Critical Christianity: Translation and Denominational Conflict in Papua New Guinea (Oakland, CA, 2015). ⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 271.

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William McKinley famously prayed for guidance, and reported hearing from God that the United States should annex the Philippines in order to ‘educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men, for whom Christ also died’.⁴⁹ With that mission in mind, the United States made a concerted effort to encourage the growth of Protestant Christianity alongside the work of civil society, infrastructure, and secular education.⁵⁰ For the first forty years of direct US American colonialism, the Protestant missions from such denominational mission organizations as the Methodist, Lutheran, and American Baptists created ‘comity agreements’ and worked alongside US colonial interests to establish religious institutional presences across the archipelago.⁵¹ After World War II, however, when the United States officially ceded control of the islands to their own government, the landscape of Protestant missions changed immensely. The Southern Baptist experience is illustrative of the change. In 1948, as the Communist revolution of Mao Tse Dong transformed Chinese life, the many Southern Baptist missionaries there fled, some taking refuge in the Philippines, a place many had been interned less than ten years earlier, as they found themselves in Japanese camps during the War. Thinking they would stay in the Philippines just until the Nationalist government of China reasserted control, many of these missionaries turned to the Chinese population of the Philippines as a ready mission field. Only when it became clear that they would not soon be returning to China, did these missionaries begin to learn Philippines languages, work with indigenous Filipino populations, and plant churches and theological institutions serving those communities. Not having been party to the comity agreements of the US colonial period, the Southern Baptists worked opportunistically throughout the country.⁵² From the beginning of their work with the Filipino population, the Southern Baptists embraced an ‘indigenizing’ philosophy of mission popular at that time. That is, like the nineteenth century missionaries of the South Pacific, these missionaries sought to train local ministers and raise up local support to create ‘three-self ’ churches (although they did not use the Three-Self language of the earlier era). Like the LMS missionaries of Papua New Guinea or the Presbyterians in Vanuatu, the Southern Baptists were strongly committed to ⁴⁹ Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, eds, The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (Boston, MA, 1987), p. 22. ⁵⁰ Kenton J. Clymer, Protestant Missionaries in the Philippines, 1898–1916: An Inquiry into the American Colonial Mentality (Urbana, IL, 1986). ⁵¹ Ibid. ⁵² Brian M. Howell, Christianity in the Local Context: Southern Baptists in the Philippines (New York, 2008), pp. 51ff; also, Robert Allen Orr, Social Change among Religious Change Agents (Columbia University, 1988).

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developing local leadership and missionaries, effectively ‘working themselves out of a job’.⁵³ What this meant was the need for missionaries in all these places to assess the leadership, organization, and even theology of these many places to determine when, and where, the local Christians were prepared to take on leadership of the churches. As with the Kwato mission of Papua New Guinea, even while many of these missionaries espoused a commitment to local leadership, they often found themselves holding to their own standards of leadership, polity, and theological articulation as the standards by which local leadership capabilities would be measured. In the Philippines, among the Southern Baptists, this meant that leadership would obtain theological degrees equivalent to the Master of Divinity in the United States. The primarily theological institution for the Southern Baptist convention in the Northern Philippines (Philippine Baptist Theological Seminary) only installed its first non-foreign president in 1999. It was not until the early 2000s that the bulk of the property on which the seminary sat was officially controlled by the seminary itself, and not the International Mission Board of the US Southern Baptist Convention. In the eyes of many North American missionaries, the qualifications for leadership among Filipino Baptists were a long time coming. At the same time, the Southern Baptist missionaries, like many US based mission organizations, had, in principle, embraced a view of ‘contextualization’ that affirmed the importance of ‘communicat[ing] the Gospel in word and deed and to establish the church in ways that make sense to people within their local cultural context, presenting Christianity in such a way that it meets people’s deepest needs and penetrates their worldview, thus allowing them to follow Christ and remain within their own culture’.⁵⁴ This approach, while serving as a vital corrective to an ethnocentric or blatantly colonial mission practice, also served to erect boundaries between the ‘culture’ of a people and the ‘Christianity’ they encountered.⁵⁵ It often elided the more complex interplay of history, culture change, power, and internal diversity clearly evident in the many Pacific examples above.⁵⁶ In the Philippines and elsewhere, this focus on ‘culture’ as social forms, preChristian beliefs, and locally distinctive aesthetics allowed converts and missionaries to divide their world into those elements that could be ‘kept’ and were compatible with Christian ontology and ethics, and those parts of culture ⁵³ William Henry Scott, ‘Rethinking the American Missionary Presence in the Philippines’, International Review of Mission, LXIV, 254 (1975), p. 177. ⁵⁴ Darrell L. Whiteman, ‘Contextualization: The Theory, the Gap, the Challenge’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, XXI, 1 (1 Jan. 1997), p. 2. ⁵⁵ See Rynkeiwich, ‘The World in My Parish’. ⁵⁶ See Brian M. Howell, ‘Globalization, Ethnicity, and Cultural Authenticity: Implications for Theological Education’, Christian Scholar’s Review, XXXV, 3 (2006), pp. 303–21; 303.

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that would be ‘discarded’ in order to avoid syncretism.⁵⁷ In the Philippine case, this resulted, naturally, in some conflict over what could be profitably used in Christianity. Were the drums and gongs of upland minority groups ‘cultural’ or ‘religious’? Could a congregation choose to conduct a ‘Christian Cañao’ (ritual sacrificial feast)? Or did it simply ‘make sense’ to continue using English or Tagalog as the medium for Christian worship given the prevalence of resources, and the widespread comfort many Filipinos had in those languages, particularly in urban areas? These were questions still being debated at the end of the twentieth century among the congregationalist, Protestant churches of the country.⁵⁸ Yet while these conversations, and even arguments, caused no small amount of worry among the members of the congregations and denominations in which they took place, they are intrinsically part of a localized and indigenous church.⁵⁹ Just as the politics of Hawaii and Samoa, or the institutional arrangements of Papua New Guinea conditioned the dynamics of missionaries and converts, expatriate and local leadership, and interpretations of what local leadership should look like, the views of what it meant to interact appropriately with culture emerged from local concerns of identity and in locally defined terms. For the Philippine Protestant churches, as for the Catholic and independent, the lines between what is local versus global, or indigenous versus foreign, break down as local actors interact with and take up the concerns of missionaries and their messages. Philippine Christians stand in the line of the dissenters as they continue to create the forms of Christian life that stand them against and outside their own sense of what tradition, culture, and nation demand.

CONCLUSIO N Anthropologist Fenella Cannell argued that to presuppose what is meant by ‘Christianity’ in any particular context is to miss the sorts of local interpretations and embodied practices that may defy simple categorization or easy apprehension.⁶⁰ Similarly, Andrew Walls encouraged those considering missions, Christianity and culture change, to look beyond the externalities of culture and society, to attend to the deepest levels of a community’s life as the

⁵⁷ Cornelia Ann Kammerer, ‘Discarding the Basket: The Reinterpretation of Tradition by Akha Christians of Northern Thailand’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, XXVII, 2 (1996), pp. 320–33. ⁵⁸ See Howell, Christianity in the Local Context. ⁵⁹ Cf: Nicole Constable, Christian Souls and Chinese Spirits: A Hakka Community in Hong Kong (Berkeley, CA, 1994). ⁶⁰ Cannell, ‘Introduction’, p. 15.

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places where Christianity exhibits both an indigenizing and a transformational quality at the same time.⁶¹ From the dissenting traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to their progeny of the non-Catholic world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, what the example of Christianity in the Pacific demonstrates is the extent to which the entanglements of colonialism, culture change, hierarchy, and globalization make any sort of classification of ‘indigenous’ or ‘contextual’ Christianity relatively unhelpful as classifications of a type of Christianity. Various churches or ecclesial institutions may be more or less financially autonomous, and leadership positions may or may not be occupied by national Christians as opposed to expatriate missionaries, but such metrics cannot consider the kinds of social meanings that various aspects of Christian practice may take in a given context. Attending to the dynamic, historically constructed meanings of such practices as music, liturgy, language use, and architecture as well as the more mundane, but equally freighted practices of social organization, institutional life, and global connections, has much more to say about how a particular manifestation of Christianity can be considered ‘indigenous’, than can externally derived criteria of indigenous culture. To speak of localization or indigenization of Christianity draws attention to the institutions and events of Christian history, alongside the complex story of cultural continuity and discontinuity among the diverse communities who embrace a Christian identity. In no case is the story one of ‘Christianity’ generically construed interacting with cultural particularity, but always Christianity in its many European and Pacific particularities encountering the many forces, personalities, institutions, and values of one of the most diverse regions on earth.

S E L E C T B I BL IO G R A P H Y Barker, John. Maisin Christianity: an Ethnography of the Contemporary Religion of a Seaboard Melanesian People (Ottawa: National Library of Canada, 1986). Barrére, Dorothy, and Marshall Sahlins. ‘Tahitians in the Early History of Hawaiian Christianity: The Journal of Toketa.’ Hawaiian Journal of History XIII (1979): 19–35. Bulatao, Jaime, and Vitaliano R. Gorospe. Split-Level Christianity. Christian Renewal of Filipino Values (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University, 1966). Burton, John W., ‘The Problem of Making Christianity Indigenous’, in Alan R. Tippett, ed., The Ways of the People: A Reader in Missionary Anthropology (Pasadena, CA:,2013). ⁶¹ Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History, Ch. 4.

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Cannell, Fenella, ‘Introduction: The Anthropology of Christianity’, in Fenella Cannell, ed., The Anthropology of Christianity (Durham, NC: 2006). Clymer, Kenton J. Protestant Missionaries in the Philippines, 1898–1916: An Inquiry into the American Colonial Mentality (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986). Forman, Charles W. The Island Churches of the South Pacific: Emergence in the Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1982). Garrett, John, To Live Among the Stars: Christian Origins in Oceania (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1982). Garrett, John, Footsteps in the Sea: Christianity in Oceania to World War II (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1992). Gray, Laurel, and Joint Board of Christian Education. Sinabada, Woman among Warriors: A Biography of the Rev. Sue Rankin (Melbourne: Joint Board of Christian Education, 1988). Handman, Courtney. Critical Christianity: Translation and Denominational Conflict in Papua New Guinea (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015). Holmes, Lowell Don. ‘Cults, Cargo and Christianity: Samoan Responses to Western Religion.’ Missiology VIII, 4 (1 Oct. 1980): 471–87. Howell, Brian M. ‘Globalization, Ethnicity, and Cultural Authenticity: Implications for Theological Education.’ Christian Scholar’s Review XXXV, 3 (2006): 303–21. Howell, Brian M. Christianity in the Local Context: Southern Baptists in the Philippines (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Jebens, Holger. Pathways to Heaven: Contesting Mainline and Fundamentalist Christianity in Papua New Guinea (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). Liliuokalani. Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen (Honolulu, Hawaii: Mutual Publishing, 1991). Meleisea, Malama. The Making of Modern Samoa: Traditional Authority and Colonial Administration in the History of Western Samoa (Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific, 1987). Mosko, Mark. ‘Partible Penitents: Dividual Personhood and Christian Practice in Melanesia and the West.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute XVI, 2 (2010): 215–40. Robbins, Joel. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). Rynkeiwich, Michael A. ‘The World in My Parish: Rethinking the Standard Missiological Model.’ Missiology XXX, 3 (2002): 301–21. Scott, William Henry. ‘Rethinking the American Missionary Presence in the Philippines.’ International Review of Mission LXIV, 254 (1975): 177–84. Tomlinson, Matt. In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009). Tomlinson, Matt, and Debra L. McDougall. Christian Politics in Oceania (New York: Berghahn Books, Wetherell, David. ‘An Elite for a Nation? Reflections on a Missionary Group in Papua New Guinea, 1890–1986.’ Pacific Studies IX, 2 (March 1986): 1–40. Zehner, Edwin. ‘Orthodox Hybridities: Anti-Syncretism and Localization in the Evangelical Christianity of Thailand.’ Anthropological Quarterly LXXVIII, 3 (Summer 2005): 585–617.

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Christianity is indigenous to the south Pacific. The region’s diverse Christian landscape today therefore features narratives concerning the continuity or disruption of tradition, creating some intriguing and ironic Pacific Methodisms. Some of the newer denominations emphasize discontinuity: the need to turn away from past Christian understandings in order truly to be born again.¹ However, in the case of Methodism, continuity has been a prominent theme since the nineteenth century, especially in Tonga and Fiji. Stemming from the engagement of early missions with important elements of indigenous social organization and cultural practices, Tongan and Fijian Methodism became the state faith: an ironic position indeed for a denomination born in dissent from the established Church of England. Nevertheless, Tongans and Fijians shaped Methodism according to their own priorities, seeing it less as a radical break with the past, and more as a fulfilment of what went before.² This has produced its own dissenting movements, especially in the twentieth century, as some Methodists produced their own life-movements aimed at recovering the original Wesleyan fervour. So deep was this mutual encounter and transformation in Fiji that today the ‘Three Pillars’ of vanua (land and ancestry), lotu (Christianity), and matanitu (governance) constitute ‘the overarching ideology of Fijian society’ which, as Jacquelyn Ryle points out, ‘is a predominantly Fiji Methodist religio-cultural idea structure that came into being during the colonial period (1874–1970)’.³ In fact it was constructed much earlier, as we shall see. I favour the view of

¹ Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, ‘Woven Histories and Inter-Denominational Anthropology [Series Editors’ Preface]’, in Jacqueline Ryle, My God, My Land: Interwoven Paths of Christianity and Tradition in Fiji (Farnham, 2010), p. x. ² Martha Kaplan, ‘Christianity, People of the Land, and Chiefs in Fiji’, in John Barker, ed., Christianity in Oceania: Ethnographic Perspectives (Lanham, MD, 1990), pp. 189–207. ³ Jacqueline Ryle, My God, My Land: Interwoven Paths of Christianity and Tradition in Fiji (Farnham, 2010), p. xxxi.

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Christina Toren that ‘“The coming of the light” did not violate indigenous cultural practice but revealed the inherent Christianity of the Fijian people. The process of constructing the past neither denies nor distorts it. Rather it reveals a dimension to the past that historians and anthropologists have overlooked.’⁴ The same can be said of the arrival of Methodism in Tonga. Here the Polynesian word lotu is significant. A noun meaning Christianity, or church, it can also signify a Christian religious service, or it can act as a verb meaning conversion, i.e., ‘I will lotu.’ First used in the London Missionary Society (LMS) mission field in Tahiti and the surrounding islands at the end of the eighteenth century, it took on denominational nuances as Christianity spread. For example, LMS missions to other parts of Polynesia retained the label ‘lotu Tahiti’ while Methodist islanders, regardless of location, became known as followers of the ‘lotu Tonga’ because the first permanent Methodist mission station was founded in the Tongan islands.⁵ This terminology points both to a process of indigenization concerning Christianity itself, but also to the pioneering role played by indigenous teachers and ministers. Six out of the fifteen countries in the world with the highest Christian affiliation are Pacific island nations.⁶ For them, Christianity is primordial. This essay will take up several important themes involving dissent (or its ironic absence), rather than attempting a comprehensive chronological overview of both island groups. Ultimately successful in both Tonga and Fiji, the close relationship between Methodist missions and indigenous political centralization produced an intimate relationship between church and state which, in both cases, came to include some measure of British colonial rule. We will also consider the protracted and controversial process by which white missionaries reluctantly conceded equal rights and status for indigenous clergy and teachers. The independent Methodist churches of Tonga and Fiji today draw on powerful indigenous traditions, but they were also born in dissent against racism and paternalism.⁷

⁴ Christina Toren, ‘Making the Present, Revealing the Past: The Mutability and Continuity of Tradition as Process’, Man, XXIII, 4 (1988), p. 697. ⁵ John Garrett, To Live among the Stars: Christian Origins in Oceania (Suva, 1982), p. 314. ⁶ Matt Tomlinson and Debra McDougall, ‘Introduction’, in Matt Tomlinson and Debra McDougall, eds, Christian Politics in Oceania (New York, 2013), pp. 1–2. ⁷ A brief word on terminology: I use Tongan and Fijian names for various forms of Methodist ministry (with translations), rather than imposing English vocabulary. I use the commonly accepted term ‘Indo-Fijians’ for both indentured labourers who migrated from India to Fiji, and for their descendants in Fiji. Ethnic Fijians refer to themselves as iTaukei. As for the incoming missionaries and the leaders of their sending societies, I refer to ‘whites’ rather than ‘Europeans’ because of Australia’s eventual domination of the Tongan and Fijian mission fields.

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THE E ARLY MISSION YEARS Modern British missions sprang from a very particular strand of Protestantism: the Pietist or evangelical movements of eighteenth-century Europe. There was already a Church of England overseas mission by this time: the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was founded in 1701. However, John Wesley’s own experience of the SPG demonstrates why it failed to inspire effective missions outside expatriate British communities. Returning in apparent failure from his brief ministry in Georgia, Wesley’s journal reflected his bitterness: ‘I went to America to convert the Indians’, he wrote, ‘but oh, who shall convert me?’⁸ He had been impressed by the Moravian missionaries he had encountered in Georgia and in the year of his return to England, 1838, he famously felt his heart ‘strangely warmed’ at a Moravian service. The institutional narrative of Methodism, however, does not tell us much about the source of its missionary movement because ‘Methodism in its origins was itself a mission, with a style and structure that were essentially missionary.’⁹ This explains why Methodists began going overseas before there was a Methodist missionary society to send them.¹⁰ The first of the new evangelical British sending societies were the ecumenical (but mainly Congregationalist) LMS, founded in 1794, and the evangelical Church Missionary Society (CMS), part of the Church of England, in 1799. The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS) began in 1813 in response to these earlier initiatives, but unlike the LMS, its first field of endeavour was not the south Pacific. The WMMS mission to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1813 took advantage of British Parliamentary pressure on the East India Company to allow missionaries to operate on its territory for the first time. This would suggest a close connection between Methodist missions and imperial power, but conditions in the south Pacific were very different.¹¹ The first initiative here, in New Zealand in 1821, involved territory still firmly under indigenous control. Later missions in other Polynesian islands faced the same situation: dependence on chiefly patronage which could be abruptly withdrawn depending on indigenous political and social priorities. This situation does not reflect simplistic claims that ⁸ Frank Whaling, ed. John and Charles Wesley: Selected Prayers, Hymns, Journal Notes, Sermons, Letters and Treatises (Mahwah, NJ, 1981), p. 100. ⁹ Andrew F. Walls, ‘Methodists, Missions and Pacific Christianity: A New Chapter in Christian History’, in Peter Lineham, ed., Weaving the Unfinished Mats: Wesley’s Legacy— Conflict, Confusion and Challenge in the South Pacific (Orewa, New Zealand, 2007), p. 21. ¹⁰ Ibid., p. 16. ¹¹ For a thorough discussion of the relationship between missions and colonialism see Andrew Porter, Religion Versus Empire?: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004).

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‘their work provided an ethical and benevolent face to the imperial and colonial projects with which they came to cross paths’.¹² The London Missionary Society made a foray into Tonga using teachers from the Tahitian mission, but it failed almost as soon as it began in 1796. Revd William Lawry made a brief attempt for the WMMS in 1822, but not until 1826 did John Thomas (1796–1881) and John Hutchinson (1793–1866) establish the first permanent Methodist mission on the southern island of Tongatapu. They accepted the patronage of Aleamotu’a, the high chief at Tongatapu, settling in the northern part of the island. Eventually Thomas established another mission in the central island group of Ha’apai. Here the high chief was Taufa’ahau (c.1797–1893), whose promotion of Methodism would prove so crucial to the future of the mission and to the centralization of Tongan political life under his eventual rule as the first King of Tonga. After an unsuccessful attempt by the London Missionary Society to establish a Congregationalist mission on Fiji in 1825, the WMMS used its rising success in Tonga to send Tongan teachers along with two European ministers, David Cargill and William Cross, to the Lau islands of eastern Fiji in 1835. By 1850 there were about 2000 communicating members of Methodist chapels in various parts of Fiji, along with 3500 hearers.¹³ As in Tonga, white missionaries were vastly outnumbered by indigenous teachers, though only four of the latter were being considered for ordination by 1850.¹⁴ Meanwhile, the conversion in 1854 of the high Fijian chief Cakobau of Bau (c.1815–85) was directly related to the Christianization and centralization of indigenous politics in Tonga. Taufa’ahau (now King George Tupou) supported Cakobau’s aspirations to overall rulership of Fiji, and Cakobau’s decision prompted mass conversions during which, apart from a small number of Roman Catholics, the whole population of Fiji became Methodist. This process was not unproblematic. Minor chiefs hostile to Cakobau’s aspirations sometimes expressed their opposition by refusing to convert, and even by attacking missionaries, as when Revd Thomas Baker was killed in the remote interior of Viti Levu in 1867. Others accepted Roman Catholic missionaries as a sign of their dissent from Cakobau’s Methodism, which in this era was virulently anti-Catholic and hostile to Catholicism’s main patron, France. Nevertheless, for all intents and purposes, Methodism had become the religion of the land in both Tonga and Fiji. Distinctive to Methodist missions in both island groups was a doublelayered concern about conversion. It was not enough simply to become a

¹² Charles Yrigoyen, Jr, ed. T&T Clark Companion to Methodism (London, 2014), p. 156. ¹³ Andrew Thornley, ‘ “Through a Glass Darkly”: Ownership of Fijian Methodism, 1850–80’, in Phyllis Herda et al.,eds, Vision and Reality in Pacific Religion: Essays in Honour of Niel Gunson (Christchurch, New Zealand; Canberra, ACT, 2005), p. 132. ¹⁴ Ibid.

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Christian; the Methodist theology of ‘entire sanctification’ required a deeper, ongoing process of repentance and reformation of life. ‘Perhaps the old China missionary was right who said “Converts do not weep over their sins—Christians do that”.’¹⁵ True conversion would generate holiness of life, a ‘second blessing’, and these revival movements were led by indigenous teachers as well as British missionaries. An extensive Tongan revival took place in 1834 in the northern and central islands, led by the Tongan preacher ‘Aisea Vovole. In Fiji, where Revd John Hunt was preaching vigorously about entire sanctification, his mission at Viwa experienced a revival in 1845.¹⁶ The idea of conversion as a lifelong process gave Methodists a particular concern for appropriate education, and in both Tonga and Fiji their mission stations founded the first schools, and continued to sponsor new schools well into the twentieth century.

CHURCH, STATE, AND CULTURE Early Methodist success in both Tonga and Fiji paralleled the process by which Europeans had been converted to Christianity: political leaders took their people wholesale into the new faith, producing Christian states.¹⁷ Indigenous politics therefore played a critical role in shaping Methodist missions in the islands, meaning that Methodism was linked with centralizing political power: an ironic development for a British religious movement originally founded in dissent. Because Tongan and Fijian leaders interacted with each other during this period, it is useful to consider them together, and to begin with the empire-building Tongan chief Taufa’ahau.¹⁸ Twentieth-century developments cannot be understood without a summary of this background. High chief of the Ha’api island group, Taufa’ahau’s political ambitions were clear: to create the first comprehensive rulership of all the Tongan islands. From the foreign missionary perspective, however, the main predicament was how to interpret the WMMS standing instructions with regard to a ‘cheerful obedience to lawful authority’¹⁹ when there was no centralized political authority to obey. The mission’s support for Taufa’ahau led to a pamphlet war debating the mission’s role in the subsequent civil war of the 1830s and 1840s,

¹⁵ Cited in Walls, ‘Methodists, Missions and Pacific Christianity’, p. 26. ¹⁶ Hunt’s writings on the subject were published posthumously as John Hunt, Letters on Entire Sanctification (London, 1853). ¹⁷ Walls, ‘Methodists, Missions and Pacific Christianity’, p. 28. ¹⁸ Ryle, My God, My Land, p. 39. ¹⁹ Martin Daly, ‘The Bible and the Sword: John Thomas and the Tongan Civil War of 1837’, Wesley and Methodist Studies, IV, (2012).

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and debate continues concerning the relationship between the Bible and the sword in Tongan history.²⁰ As King George Tupou I, Taufa’ahau succeeded in uniting the islands of Tonga under his rule in 1845. Longstanding Tongan migration to Fiji’s eastern Lau islands had already brought Methodist Tongans into contact with Revds William Cross and David Cargill, stationed at Lakeba from 1835 as the first permanent white Methodist missionaries to Fiji. Taufa’ahau had visited them there in 1842 and in 1853, and as King George Tupou, he also visited Cakobau of Bau, the nominal high chief of Fiji. Providing military assistance as well as spiritual encouragement, King George’s role was crucial in consolidating Cakobau’s authority: ‘The advance of Tongan Wesleyan Christianity and warlike manoeuvres proceeded simultaneously in Fiji.’²¹ Powerful traditional connections between chiefs, kinship groups, and the vanua (the land and its ancestors), were shaped in relationship with Christianity, creating close ties between chiefly power and Methodism.²² Chapel architecture in Fiji reflected this respect for indigenous authority. Fijian Methodist churches still usually feature a separate entrance for chiefs, and in the loqi tabu (sanctuary), village leaders sit in a high-status location near the pulpit.²³ There is no similar structuring of other denominational churches in Fiji. This mutually supportive relationship between Methodism and political power was enhanced by the arrival of British colonial rule in Fiji in 1874: official Methodist membership increased to 24,000 by 1880, with over 100,000 hearers, more numerous than in Australia.²⁴ Reinforcement of the chiefly elite in Fiji by the ‘indirect rule’ method of colonialism deepened the relationship between the Methodist Church and secular authority. As we will see, this would eventually produce a ‘failure [of Methodism] to accommodate movements of protests and thus act as spokesman for the disaffected’ in Fiji,²⁵ setting the stage for both political and religious dissent. Meanwhile, confident Tongan and Fijian Methodists, proud of their own cultures, went out into the mission field themselves during the nineteenth century. When Revd George Brown, leader of a new mission to the island of New Britain, visited the Fijian Methodist seminary in 1875 to call for volunteers, the entire student body stepped forward. He chose nine Fijians and four Samoans, with their families, to join him. Unlike most white missionaries, Brown stayed to work alongside them during the dangerous early years. When four of his Fijian teachers were killed by the islanders in 1878, Brown persuaded the Royal Navy to launch a punitive raid to ensure the future safety of

²⁰ For a recent example compare Daly, ‘The Bible and the Sword’ with Janet Luckcock, Thomas of Tonga, 1797–1881: The Unlikely Pioneer (Peterborough, 1990). ²¹ Garrett, To Live among the Stars, p. 80. ²² Ryle, My God, My Land, p. 39. ²³ Ibid., p. 17. ²⁴ Thornley, ‘Through a Glass Darkly’, p. 132. ²⁵ Cited in Ryle, My God, My Land.

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the mission.²⁶ In other cases, indigenous missionaries brought elements of Polynesian culture to the western islands of Melanesia. Tongans brought with them their distinctive form of musical notation, tu’ungafasi, along with their love of choral singing and band music.²⁷ Sione Taufa, stationed among the mountain people on Bougainville at the turn of mid-twentieth century, initiated coffee plantations to encourage self-sufficiency, and distributed chickens to villagers to increase a reliable supply of protein.²⁸ Sometimes local revivals took Methodism in unexpected directions in these new Christian centres. In 1906, the Revd John Goldie led a pioneering mission in the western Solomon Islands, accompanied by Fijian and Samoan teachers who were later joined by Tongans. Just over half a century later, in 1961, the Christian Fellowship Church broke away under local indigenous leadership, claiming to represent a truer form of Methodism than its parent organization.²⁹ As we will see, these developments in Solomon Islands and elsewhere were drawing on a history of dissenting Methodist movements in the Fijian and Tongan homelands.

WHOSE CHURCH? The establishment of the Australasian Conference in 1855 transferred south Pacific missions from British to Australian control, with district chairmen assigned to Fiji, Tonga, and other mission fields. If this was a decolonization of sorts, its impact on the position of indigenous clergy and teachers was minimal for many years. King George’s creation of the Free Church of Tonga (hereafter ‘Free Church’) developed out of his dissent, shared by some white ministers, against the ongoing white domination of Methodist leadership in Tonga. The King and his supporters preferred Tongans and whites to have equal voices in synod and for Tongan leadership to replace the authority of the distant Australasian Conference. In 1874, Revd Shirley Baker, Methodist district chairman for Tonga, presided over reforms giving indigenous and white missionaries equal synod votes at synod, and the following year, 1875, working closely ²⁶ For a detailed analysis of the raid see Helen Bethea Gardner, Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania (Dunedin, 2006), pp. 66–84. ²⁷ Sione Lātūkefu, Church and State in Tonga: The Wesleyan Methodist Missionaries and Political Development, 1822–1875 (Canberra, 1974), p. 79. ²⁸ Sione Lātūkefu, ‘The Impact of South Sea Islands Missionaries on Melanesia’, in James A. Boutilier and others, eds, Mission, Church, and Sect in Oceania (Lanham, MD, 1984), p. 105. ²⁹ Frances Harwood, ‘Intercultural Communication in the Western Solomons: The Methodist Mission and the Emergence of the Christian Fellowship Church’, in James A. Boutilier and others, eds, Mission, Church, and Sect in Oceania (Lanham, MD, 1984), pp. 231–2.

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with the King, he developed the first Tongan constitution. They also created a Western-style civil service whose ranks were closed to those Methodists who remained faithful to the Conference hierarchy (hereafter known as the ‘Wesleyans’). Baker’s initiatives were welcomed by some (mainly Tongans) and rejected by others (mainly whites), depending on how sharply individuals believed in the superiority of white leadership.³⁰ Baker was recalled by the Australasian Conference, but returned to Tonga as Prime Minister in 1880. He and the King cut off state funding to the Wesleyans, who were forced to establish their own alternative schools, and commanded all current Methodists to break ties with the Australasian Conference. King George’s act of dissent against the conference authorities in Australia had now spawned dissenters of its own. Early historians of Fiji often focused on Methodism’s rapid spread by the mid-nineteenth century, masking more fundamental matters of dissent concerning race and leadership in later decades. The first talatala (Fijian minister), Josua Mateinaniu, was ordained in 1851 and sixty-eight more Fijian and Tongans had been ordained by 1880. Even so, a white missionary remained in charge of each of the district circuits. A 1853 report by Robert Young from Fiji, during a visit on behalf of the English society, called for indigenous ministers to receive higher recognition, yet he also coined the term ‘Native Assistant Missionaries’, suggesting a permanent inferiority.³¹ Fijian ministers did not attend district meetings until 1863, and only for separate sessions relating to indigenous clergy. In the 1870s matters came to a head when the ongoing marginalization of Fijian leadership in the church coincided with the introduction of indentured labourers from India after British rule began in 1874. A proposed subdivision of the original Fiji District into three smaller units would have allowed indigenous clergy greater authority, but Fiji’s white missionaries were divided in their support for the idea, and it was rejected by the all-white Australasian Conference in 1873. The district encouraged the growth of ordained Fijian ministry by creating the new position of vakatawa (catechist), requiring all Fijians aspiring to ordination to serve additional time in this intermediate rank. Well into the twentieth century, ‘the claim of the Fijian ministry for ownership of its church seemed as far away as the Methodist principles that had been put aside in shaping the structure of the Fijian church.’³² Once again, a denomination originally born in dissent had become intimately linked with authority, in this case racial authority. Unlike Tonga, where King George and

³⁰ Historians have tended to follow the lead of Baker’s critics, not least because their views were much better preserved than dissenting Tongan opinions. For an historiographical overview and revision of this tradition, see Noel Rutherford, Shirley Baker and the King of Tonga (Honolulu, 1996), pp. 2–4. ³¹ Thornley, ‘Through a Glass Darkly’, p. 135. ³² Ibid., p. 149.

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Shirley Baker had seized local control of (most of ) the Tongan church, white racial domination of Fiji’s church had persisted, not least because of the introduction of a new and growing population of indentured labourers from South Asia.

F I J I : TW O W O R L D S By the twentieth century, the Methodist mission to Fiji had adopted the ecumenically endorsed ‘three-selves’ goals: self-support, self-governance, and self-propagation.³³ This general approach inevitably existed in tension with racism and the power dynamics of colonial rule in Fiji. The self-government question, in particularly, was further retarded by the British colonial government’s decision to bring an increasing numbers of Indian indentured labourers to Fiji to work in the sugar industry. As in Kenya, Uganda, Malaya, and elsewhere, Britain’s policy of introducing a large and new non-indigenous population raised questions about whether a multiracial population could move either quickly or smoothly to fully democratic self-government. By 1901 there were about 17,000 Indo-Fijians in the islands: a prime field for missionary endeavour, but one fraught with difficulty. By this time the Bauan dialect was widely understood in the islands and on its way to becoming today’s Standard Fijian, but incoming Indians spoke a variety of languages. Their role as cash labourers made their social arrangements very different from Fijian villages with their chiefs and chapels. The mission’s commitment to the village-based model made it difficult for it to envision what was needed to evangelize the new Indian communities. There were also the views of Indians themselves who (as in India) were mostly uninterested in Christianity. Drawing on contemporary theories about race and culture, the mission leadership assumed that Fijians and Indo-Fijians were too different to be accommodated by a single mission structure. A separate mission was therefore created in 1901 for Indo-Fijians, along with separate schools, meaning there were now two missions that were failing to proceed along ‘three-selves’ lines. Although indigenous Fijian teachers and culture had been crucial to the expansion and success of Methodism in Fiji, catechists for the new Indian mission had to be recruited from India. One reason was to ensure a sufficient range of language skills. Another was the lack of Fijian teachers and ministers willing to work with Indo-Fijians due to racial prejudice against them and, later, fear of their rising economic and political power. Although some IndoFijians themselves eventually became teachers, and then ministers, progress ³³ Kirstie Close-Barry, A Mission Divided: Race, Culture and Colonialism in Fiji’s Methodist Mission (Canberra, 2015), pp. 15–16.

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toward this goal was very slow. Meanwhile, the segregated Indian mission and church was further proof of the cost of the church/state connection: it was the colonial government that had excluded Fijians from cash labour in the sugar industry, creating the need for imported labour, and establishing a gulf between the two peoples now living in Fiji. The decision to segregate the two missions underlined an emphasis on supposedly primordial racial qualities of each, and the inevitability of their separate paths to spiritual and material progress. The turmoil of World War I accelerated nationalist movements in many parts of the British empire. At the ecumenical missionary conference in Edinburgh in 1910, which few indigenous ministers attended (none from the south Pacific), questions had arisen concerning the aspirations of indigenous missionaries and their flocks. But in Fiji, only Fijians were considered to be ‘indigenous’. By the 1920s, inspired by Gandhi, Indo-Fijians were publicly protesting against their low wages and racial discrimination. Fijians had land rights, access to secondary and college education, and access to well paid jobs in teaching, the sugar industry, and the civil service. The Methodist mission’s racially segregated approach appeared to endorse this state of affairs and catechist John Bairangi, one of the mission’s few Indian teachers, resigned in protest in 1926 when the synod voted against his acceptance for full ministerial training.³⁴ Not until 1938 did the first talatala attend the International Missionary Council, but even then the Indian mission was still represented by a white missionary. In response to rising demands for fairer treatment, IndoFijian Methodists demanded their own synod, but in 1926 the Australian Conference agreed to their proposal only if a third, ‘European’, synod was placed above both of the others.³⁵ This simply highlighted the ongoing racial segregation (and European domination) of Fijian Methodism. Indo-Fijian Methodists were less interested in church independence than their Fijian counterparts, not least because their numbers remained so small. By 1943 only 140 communicating Indo-Fijian members were recorded, despite the fact that Indo-Fijians were about to become the majority of the whole Fijian population. Unlike Tonga, it was difficult to see how either of the two segregated missions could become a functioning church reflecting the ‘three-selves’.³⁶ But pressure from Fijians was growing. Sugar farmers from Toko, encouraged by their local Methodist minister to form their own independent agricultural businesses, presented 118 whale teeth and £500 to the Fijian Synod in 1941. The money was to support full independence from ³⁴ Ibid., pp. 65–6. ³⁵ Charles W. Forman, The Island Churches of the South Pacific: Emergence in the Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, NY, 1982), pp. 132–3. ³⁶ Close-Barry, A Mission Divided, p. 154. Also see Filimone Havii Mone, A Historical Comparison of Fijian and Tongan Methodism: Why Is One Divided and the Other United?, unpublished MA thesis, Pacific College, Suva (1991), p. 81.

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the Australian Conference; the whale teeth for distribution to chiefs who, according to Fijian tradition, would then be bound to accept the proposal. However, there was little Fijian support for church independence beyond Toko.³⁷ Meanwhile, education had become an increasingly dominant concern in the Fijian mission, especially the expansion of secondary education. Three (white) Methodist missionaries—R. L. McDonald, Leslie M. Thompson, and C. O. Lelean—became known as the ‘Three Musketeers’ as they aggressively pursued education funding for Methodist Fijian schools from both the British colonial government and the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR). This generated dissent in Australia: general secretary Revd John Burton preferred to fund new missions and schools for the marginalized Fiji Indians, and to resist dependency on outside funding in Fiji.³⁸ In contrast to earlier times, the Australasian Conference was now more critical of the church/state connection than dissenters like the Three Musketeers. Unlike most Methodists in either Australia or Fiji, Burton objected to the entire system of indentured labour, calling for its abolition in his 1910 book The Fiji of Today. The impact of his dissent was significant: the colonial government in Fiji called on the Australian committee to remove him from office. Supported by most of his Australian colleagues in the Conference leadership, Burton’s concerns would prevail, and by 1917 widespread condemnation of the system, and objections from the colonial government of India, would bring an end to indenture in Fiji.³⁹ Meanwhile, despite hopes of retaining church control of schools in Fiji, the role of the Fijian state continued to grow, and by the 1950s the colonial government was funding free primary and subsidized secondary education for all children in Fiji, with Fijian and Indo-Fijian students still attending separate schools: an inheritance from the Methodist mission’s segregated approach. Many primary schools were in fact still run by Methodists within this government assistance scheme. Even today, schools still tend to admit only Fijian, or Indo-Fijian, students exclusively.

CHURCH INDEPENDENCE IN TONGA Tonga’s road to political independence was unusual because the country was under British protection without being a British colony. A ‘Treaty of Friendship and Protectorship’ with Britain, signed in 1900, had reinforced the ³⁷ Forman, Island Churches of the South Pacific, p. 134. ³⁸ John Garrett, Footsteps in the Sea: Christianity in Oceania to World War II (Suva, Fiji, 1992), p. 391. ³⁹ Forman, Island Churches of the South Pacific, pp. 34–5.

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power of the Tongan monarchy in religious matters, and in 1924 the young Queen Salote tried to bring about reunification between the Free Church and the Wesleyans. Her marriage to William Tupou Tungi (a Wesleyan) had reunited the ancient Tongan dynasties: between them, the Queen and her husband had ancestors from all three of the traditional leading families of Tonga, enabling their marriage to re-establish ‘the unity of spiritual and chiefly power King Taufa’ahau I had personified’.⁴⁰ However, J. B. Watkin, current president of the Wesleyans, remained defiant in his old age, and Queen Salote was forced to dismiss him after he attempted unsuccessfully to get the Western Pacific High Commission (an arm of British imperial rule in the area) to intervene. Litigation about property rights, schools, and church buildings began flooding the Tongan courts, and a battle of Bibles began. The Wesleyans had updated the older Tongan translations of the Bible, but the Free Church continued to use the old mission translation of the King James Version. It became clear that if reunification was to succeed, even incompletely, both versions would have to be permitted for use.⁴¹ Meanwhile, missionary Revd A. Harold Wood arrived from Australia and found documents in the royal archives indicating that King George Tupou himself had hoped for ultimate reconciliation between the two churches. The Queen hoped that this would convince her Methodist subjects to unite once more, renaming the nowunified state church the Free Wesleyan Church. Many former Free Church members and Wesleyans did join the newly united church, ‘believing the reigning monarch, God’s anointed, had qualities of touch and gesture which derive from sacred, not human, sources’. Wood became principal of Tupou College and ‘supreme governor’ of the new church, but the Vava’u high chief was ‘the only noble out of 33 who did not support the Queen’, preferring to create yet another Methodist church—the Church of Tonga.⁴² There were now three Methodist churches in Tonga: the Free Church, the Wesleyans, and the Church of Tonga. Those who were concerned about the Queen’s revival of the Australian connection were proved right in one respect: white Australians continued to dominate key leadership positions in the newly reunited Tongan Conference. This was a deliberate decision on the part of the Queen—‘a way to offset rivalries between regional and factional groups’—but the fact remains that it took until 1971 the year following political independence, for a Tongan, Sione ‘Amanaki Havea, to become conference president.⁴³

⁴⁰ Garrett, Footsteps in the Sea, p. 383. ⁴¹ Ibid., p. 384. For more on reunification see Charles W. Forman, ‘Tonga’s Tortured Venture in Church Unity’, The Journal of Pacific History, XIII, 1 (1978), pp. 3–21. ⁴² Garrett, Footsteps in the Sea, p. 387. ⁴³ Forman, Island Churches of the South Pacific, p. 126.

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But because the church had remained village-centred in Tonga, these high-level developments did little to change the local expression of Methodism. The connection with education remained strong: until the 1930s Tonga’s state-funded primary schools were built by the villagers themselves, and only later by government workers. Inter-village competition could be fierce, both in rugby and in church life. As retired British colonial official J. S. Neill recalled, ‘The Tongan has a strong natural aptitude for music and in the church choirs he has an ample opportunity for developing his talents. There is a great rivalry between village choirs and a good choir can gain quite a reputation for its village.’⁴⁴ Meanwhile, the conservatism of Tongan ministers in the Free Church and Church of Tonga was producing a dissenting tradition concerning clerical dress, church decoration, and liturgy. Encouraged by rising indigenization movements in theology, the Australian mission board encouraged the introduction of indigenous dress, textiles, and figurative arts into the Free Wesleyan Church liturgy. It also began to replace the traditional black suits, worn by Tongan ministers since the early mission days, with what they considered to be ‘authentic’ traditional wear: the traditional Tongan wraparound tupenu or sulu. Free Church and Church of Tonga ministers, however, continued to define ‘tradition’ in their own way. Charles Forman has noted, ‘True indigenization can only mean adherence to the will of the indigenous people; any indigenization brought about by foreigners must be spurious.’⁴⁵ For Methodist ministers in the Church of Tonga, and among the remaining Wesleyans (today known as the Free Church of Tonga), the traditional black suit remains their tradition. In the wake of Queen Salote’s attempted reunification of Tongan Methodists, a senior chief had told her advisor Dr Wood ‘that if he insisted on trying to change this custom, he should return to Australia’.⁴⁶ The dissenting Methodists still proudly retain their traditional ministerial dress, scriptures, and liturgy, to the point that ‘someone wanting to know what church life was like at the end of [the nineteenth] century would probably get a good picture by visiting [them], because the way the ministers are dressed, the style of the services, the interpretation of the scriptures (the King James version), the moral code and the hymns have hardly been changed over the last 100 years’ and ecumenism is forbidden.⁴⁷ For all Tongan Methodists, Sunday is still a day of rest and ‘the huge majority of Tongans have grown in this tradition and so this practice is not challenged as, for example, in ⁴⁴ J. S. Neill, Ten Years in Tonga (London, 1954), p. 128. ⁴⁵ Charles W. Forman, ‘Foreign Missionaries in the Pacific Islands During the Twentieth Century’, in James A. Boutilier and others, eds, Mission, Church, and Sect in Oceania (Lanham, MD, 1984), p. 45. ⁴⁶ Lātūkefu, ‘The Impact of South Sea Islands Missionaries on Melanesia’, p. 99. ⁴⁷ Manfred Ernst, Winds of Change: Rapidly Growing Religious Groups in the Pacific Islands (Suva, Fiji, 1994), pp. 150–1.

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Fiji. The position of the faifekau (ordained minister) is still prestigious and comparable with the rank of a minor chief, while the power and authority of the church’s president is more extensive.’⁴⁸

CHURCH INDEPENDENCE I N F IJI The Methodist Church in Fiji became independent before Fiji did. Mindful of the schism in Tongan Methodism and anxious to prevent the same in Fiji, retired missionary George Brown, now general secretary of the Australian Conference, called in 1901 for greater participation by Fijian ministers and laity in all aspects of Fijian synod meetings, including their financial sessions. Despite strong objections by the older generation of paternalist Western missionaries, this reform was implemented in 1907 with strong support from Fijian ministers and teachers. Fiji gained its own conference in 1964, but its relationship with political conflict would make its situation very different from that of Tonga. As we know, the deep connection between Methodism and authority in Fiji had been recognized by the British colonial government, as when ‘the president of the Methodist mission could never enter a government office without all the clerks rising in his honour’.⁴⁹ It was nicknamed ‘the chiefs’ church’ and the location of its headquarters had remained at the seat of Cakobau’s kingship, the islands of Bau. Not until 1903 would the church move its headquarters to Suva, Fiji’s capital city.⁵⁰ Within Fijian Methodism, however, dissent had emerged concerning race relations. Fiji became politically independent in 1970, inheriting an increasingly confrontational racial situation from the British colonial regime. By now, Methodism had become so fully integrated with indigenous Fijian identity, and its links with political and social prestige were so strong, that its ability to provide a dissenting platform for the marginalized was deeply and ironically undercut. The end of Indian indenture in 1919 had presented the Methodist church with an urgent problem: how to increase their mission outreach to IndoFijians when mission schools had been built with support from the CSR, a notorious exploiter of indentured labour? Frustrated by her church’s neglect of Indo-Fijians, and its educational partnerships with the CSR and the colonial regime, Australian missionary Hannah Dudley (1864–1931) had arrived in Fiji in 1897 to teach and lead services for Indo-Fijians on the veranda of her ⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 150. ⁴⁹ Forman, ‘Foreign Missionaries in the Pacific Islands During the Twentieth Century’, p. 49. ⁵⁰ Forman, Island Churches of the South Pacific, p. 30.

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Suva home. Having served previously in India, Dudley had both appropriate language skills and a strong sympathy for Indo-Fijians. She was determined to lead by example and, when dealing with her own church hierarchy, was famously uncompromising. She was also the inspiration for future generations of women serving as sisita (single female Methodist missionaries) in Fiji.⁵¹ Dudley was personally popular, but her small circle of Indian Methodists began to see the Methodist Church as indifferent to their aspirations. However, their own internal divisions were more significant. Despite the eventual building of Dudley Memorial Church and the ongoing leadership of several prominent Indo-Fijian families in Suva, divisions of language and culture, along with theological differences concerning the infallibility of the Bible, kept the Indian Methodist community fractured.⁵² Iconic events, such as the Methodist centenary celebrations in 1935, did little to improve the situation; the Australian organizers focused on the achievements of the early British missionaries and the flowering of Methodism in indigenous Fijian culture. Seventh-Day Adventism, with its Holiness roots (and its vegetarianism) has proved considerably more attractive than Methodism to Indo-Fijians, most of whom remain either Hindu or Muslim. At the heart of Fiji’s racially divided mission lay questions about what it meant to be Fijian. The ancient connection between vanua (land and ancestry), church, and state appeared to exclude Indo-Fijians on a permanent basis. Matt Tomlinson notes that Western missionaries ‘brought the message that in Christianity […] everyone in the world could become part of a universal realm beyond the vanua’ but among Fijian Methodists there continues to be a ‘deep devotion to the vanua, a devotion that thwarts the ritual projects it generates’.⁵³ This became all too clear after the general election of 1987 produced a coalition including multiracial and Indian political parties, alienating Fijian nationalists. Lt. Col. Sitiveni Rabuka, a Methodist lay preacher who credited divine inspiration for his actions, promptly led two military coups that year designed to ensure Fijian supremacy. Methodism, introduced to Fiji by missionaries inspired by Arminian universalism, was now underlining a military dictatorship aimed at suppressing minority rights. Public demonstrations in favour of the Rabuka regime carried placards declaring ‘Noqu Kalou, Noqu Vanua’ (‘Our God, Our Land’). Revd Daniel Mustapha, minister to an Indo-Fijian Methodist community, resigned from the Governor-General’s council of advisors. ⁵¹ For more on Dudley and other members of the ‘Famous Five’ female pioneers, see John Garrett, Where Nets Were Cast: Christianity in Oceania since World War II (Suva, Fiji, and Geneva, 1997), pp. 243–5 and Elsabe H. Smith, Yesterday and Today: With the Indians in the Church in Fiji (Suva, Fiji, 1979). ⁵² Garrett, Footsteps in the Sea, pp. 393–4. ⁵³ Matt Tomlinson, ‘Passports to Eternity: Whales’ Teeth and Transcendence in Fijian Methodism’, in Lenore Manderson and others, eds, Flows of Faith: Religious Reach and Community in Asia and the Pacific (New York, 2012), p. 228.

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The impact of the coups went well beyond divisions between Methodism— most Indo-Fijians had remained either Hindu or Muslim—but it was the voices of conservative iTaukei Methodists that were loudest in support of restricting Indo-Fijian rights generally. Fijian Catholics, though small in number, had been quick to criticize the coup, highlighting the danger of privileging one group of Fijians over the rest. Other, even smaller denominations, did the same, but support from the Methodist Church ‘sent a powerful signal to the bulk of the Fijian community already torn between their political conviction and their Christian beliefs’.⁵⁴ Soon, however, dissent grew even within iTaukei Methodists. For example, when Rabuka began to relax Fiji’s strict Sunday laws in 1988, Methodist General Secretary Revd Manusa Lasaro led a massive protest that blocked roads in most of central Suva. Church president Revd Josateki Koroni suspended Lasaro, but was then overthrown himself by Methodist leaders loyal to Rabuka. The two men then led separate Methodist camps with rival church conferences, legal action, and hostile rhetoric. Each was supported by different geographical regions of Fiji, suggesting an even deeper level of political rivalry than the issue of Rambuka’s leadership. Something had to be done: the Methodist Church was appearing to be both authoritarian and racist. In 1989 Lasaro and his followers processed through the streets to the location of Koroi’s conference, and Lasaro ‘wept as he expressed repentance for past sins, and was welcomed very emotionally “back into the fold”’. This was a shrewd political move, whatever its spiritual motivations might have been: Lasaro was re-elected as General Secretary. Cynics observed that he also kept control of significant funds donated for rural youth, but used (his opponents alleged) to buy the loyalty of rural ministers with ‘chainsaws, outboard motors and boats’.⁵⁵ This was no surprise. Fijians had shaped Methodism in their own way, a way profoundly influenced by loyalties to chief, land, and village. Historian Varani-Norton has described four major contradictions between Methodism as originally introduced to Fiji, and Fijian Methodism in the early twenty-first century: tension between a Protestant emphasis on individual responsibility and the collectivist nature of Fijian culture; tension between Methodism (and other mainline denominations) concerning female leadership and the attractive emphasis on male headship in various new religious groups in Fiji; pressure from international organizations for the Methodist Church to champion a broad range of human rights; and the ongoing pressure on women to fulfil traditional village obligations concerning

⁵⁴ Brij V. Lal, Broken Waves: A History of the Fiji Islands in the Twentieth Century (Honolulu, 1992), p. 286. ⁵⁵ Ernst, Winds of Change, p. 209.

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hospitality, even as they are undertaking heavier responsibilities outside the village context.⁵⁶ Thus the impact of liberal theology and liberal secular values in the twentieth century has posed problems for Fijian Methodists as well as their Tongan counterparts. For Australian Methodists, the old ‘hellfire theology’ was no longer appropriate and should be replaced by an emphasis on the obligation of Christians to their fellow human beings under the reign of God.⁵⁷ But in Fiji, the leadership of indigenous village ministers had produced a distinctively Fijian mode of teaching and worship. Preachers ‘were often eloquent and graphic orators who lived the Bible’ and their people ‘used the oral word, with memorized hymns (largely translated and sung to imported tunes) and biblical chants, often preserved and transmitted by women and set to distinctive Fijian music’.⁵⁸ This did not necessarily hamper progressive developments in Fijian Methodism. The traditional prominence of women in organizing church liturgy might explain why the ordination of the first female Methodist ministers in Fiji in the 1990s generated less protest than it did in Tonga, although there are now female ministers in both countries. Fijian women had also played a significant role in healing the breach between Lasaro and Koroi after the 1987 coups through the unified example of their Methodist Women Fellowship group.⁵⁹ But as Varani-Norton explains, the demands of the traditional tali vunau—an elaborate meal prepared each Sunday to honour the minister—can be onerous for women, especially those from poorer families. ‘A Fiji Methodist church critic recently went so far as to allege that such church expectations that burden the poor congregation are “a travesty of justice”.’⁶⁰ Thus Methodism plays an ironic and contested role on both sides of questions concerning women’s rights and social inequality. It has fostered dissent at times, but it has also played a conservative role in affirming Fijian tradition.

NEW DENOMIN ATIONS AN D NEW CHALLENGES In the twentieth century passenger and cargo ships began providing regular communication between the main Pacific island groups for the first time. Later, air travel would bring to an end the era of isolation for many mission and church employees, and radio provided schooling alternatives for their ⁵⁶ Eta Varani-Norton, ‘The Church Versus Women’s Push for Change: The Case of Fiji’, Fijian Studies, III, 2 (2005), pp. 224–5. ⁵⁷ Forman, ‘Foreign Missionaries in the Pacific Islands During the Twentieth Century’, p. 42. ⁵⁸ Garrett, Footsteps in the Sea, p. 392. ⁵⁹ Mone, A Historical Comparison of Fijian and Tongan Methodism, p. 83. ⁶⁰ Varani-Norton, ‘The Church Versus Women’s Push for Change’, p. 230.

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children. Earlier generations had sent their children to school in Australia, New Zealand, or Britain, and in some cases parents and children never saw one another again. For islanders, too, communication with the wider world was easier than ever before. World War II was of particular importance. Neither Tonga nor Fiji were invaded, but both witnessed an influx of foreign troops en route to the western Pacific theatre. Before the war, British officials had worked together with indigenous elites to ‘protect’ islanders from new Christian sects and missions. Afterwards, contact with American troops and the advent of air travel joined rising urbanization to challenge the mainline denominations. Methodism had been village-based. After independence, both Tonga and Fiji struggled to provide infrastructure for growing and increasingly urbanized populations, and opportunities presented themselves for new denominations to provide resources such as new schools, paid for by foreign funds.⁶¹ Methodist churches in both Tonga and Fiji responded to these challenges through ecumenical cooperation and internal renewal, but with very mixed results. Today the picture of Christianity in both island groups is one of increasing diversity, with ‘new’ denominations succeeding at the expense of older communities. Early mission schools had centred on the residence of the missionary selected for the training of indigenous teachers and catechists, and these often grew into the founding tertiary colleges of their respective countries, such as Tubou College in Tonga (1849) and the Methodist Theological Institution in Fiji (1857). At these schools, the rhythm and discipline of village life was maintained. Students fished, tended the fields and gardens, and rebuilt classrooms and residences damaged during the typhoon season. ‘Instruction was also given in village etiquette’ and ‘In Tonga even today the theological school provides training in the actions and words of the kava ceremony and the proper relations between chiefs and commoners so that the future pastors will know how to behave.’⁶² Methodists also fostered vocational training. R. A. Derrick founded the first Fijian industrial school in 1919 and today’s state-run technical college is named after him. Fijian Methodists also founded an agricultural college in 1924, now run by the government. The role of Methodism in education has been steadily diminishing. In Tonga, where primary school has been compulsory since 1876, state schools provide the bulk of education and only about 10 per cent are still run by churches, mainly Methodist. This proportion rises dramatically at secondary school level where about 80 per cent of students are enrolled in church-run schools, but the largest of these is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) Liahona High School.⁶³ ⁶¹ Tomlinson and McDougall, ‘Introduction’, p. 13. ⁶² Charles W. Forman, ‘Theological Education in the South Pacific Islands: A Quiet Revolution’, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, XXV, (1969), p. 154. ⁶³ Ernst, Winds of Change, p. 144.

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Similar developments have been a common feature of decolonization elsewhere in the Pacific and beyond, even though the provision of better theological education for indigenous peoples had become a special priority for many mission churches. Discussions in 1938 at a global missionary conference in India were disrupted by World War II, resuming in 1948 at the South Pacific Christian Conference in Australia. Many looked to the example provided by Fiji’s Methodist college for teachers and ministers, founded in 1912.⁶⁴ Right after the conference, Tonga emulated Fiji by founding Sia’atoutai Theological College. Ecumenical collaboration was rising generally, producing the Pacific Conference of Churches in 1966, and Fiji’s ecumenical Pacific Theological College opened the same year with assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation.⁶⁵ Although some denominations were experiencing difficulty recruiting students for theological education in the 1960s, ‘the Fijian or Tongan Methodists [had] as many as ten candidates for every place available in the ministry’.⁶⁶ However, the increasing financial attractiveness of teaching, medicine, engineering, and civil service work was already exerting pressure on theological colleges and they were forced to compete for the best students. ‘We are getting only the inferior men’, a Fijian missionary complained in 1937, because of ‘the inadequate salaries paid to the native ministers as compared with teachers’ and medical practitioners’ salaries’.⁶⁷ It didn’t help that indigenous ministers made only very slow progress into theological college staff rooms. Only in 1967 was the first indigenous principal appointed. College life resembled village life less and less as an increasing number of students came from towns, meaning that churches had to pay for food and labour rather than expecting students to provide for themselves. Instruction in the local language was increasingly replaced by teaching in English or French. However, at some colleges traditional rules and village discipline persisted, such as gathering the school elders together to dole out punishments for ‘sloth’ or insubordination.⁶⁸ ‘Instead of putting emphasis on the original Protestant principle of individual conscience, “outward appearance” was made the priority. This is still the case today, as reflected in wearing Sunday best and strictly observing Sunday rules, with church obligations taking precedence above everything else.’⁶⁹ Meanwhile, Methodist communities in both Tonga and Fiji were experiencing their share of a global phenomenon: the rapid spread of ‘new’ denominations and missions.⁷⁰ Some of these were not really new at all: the first LDS mission to Tonga was in 1891. But during the later twentieth century,

⁶⁴ ⁶⁵ ⁶⁶ ⁶⁸ ⁶⁹ ⁷⁰

Forman, ‘Theological Education in the South Pacific Islands’, p. 156. The University of the South Pacific, also in Suva, opened shortly afterward. Forman, ‘Theological Education in the South Pacific Islands’, p. 161. ⁶⁷ Ibid. Ibid., p. 164. Varani-Norton, ‘The Church Versus Women’s Push for Change’, p. 232. Ernst, Winds of Change, pp. 3–4.

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membership in the LDS, Assemblies of God, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and The Seventh-day Adventist Churches grew at an unprecedented rate. In Tonga, the Free Wesleyan Church, product of Queen Salote’s unification movement, still has the largest number of adherents among Christians: 36 per cent according to a 1992 study, with the next largest group being LDS (15 per cent) who were continuing to grow rapidly compared with the Roman Catholics, the traditional second-place denomination.⁷¹ However, dissent within Tongan Methodism has also contributed to declining membership in recent decades. For example, the Tokaikolo Christian Fellowship broke away in 1978 under the Revd Senituli Koloi, a Free Wesleyan minister inspired by historical Holiness movements. Concerns about the church’s close ties to the Tongan monarchy, and disturbed by the deference shown to church ministers, Koloi named his movement Tokaikolo, ‘Christ is in our midst’.⁷² He took one hundred lay preachers and about 3000 members from the Free Wesleyan Church, particularly in the capital city of Tongatapu. Senituli preached fiery sermons prophesying doom if Methodist torpor was not dispelled by a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit: ‘Here was the original fervour of Tongan Wesleyan experience, re-appearing in Senituli.’ Historian John Garrett believed that the Fellowship will not long survive its founder’s death in 1980, since it had been such a strong expression of traditional Methodist characteristics.⁷³ But will its followers return to an identification with Methodism? Pentecostalism is now claiming the Tokaikolo Fellowship as one of their churches, raising questions about who owns Methodist dissent in Tonga.⁷⁴ For historian Manfred Ernst, Tongan Methodism now finds itself ‘between traditions, ecumenism and some attempts for spiritual renewal, a dilemma that helps explain the consistent decline in membership’.⁷⁵ But this decline might reflect more casual changes in denominational affiliation.⁷⁶ Increasing education and urbanization have increased the availability of religious options, and ‘Tongans have been able to savour a smorgasbord of religious snack

⁷¹ Ibid., p. 146. ⁷² Makisi Finau, ‘The Emergence of the Maamafou’ou Movement from the Free Wesleyan Church of Tonga’, in Makisi Finau, Teeruro Ieuti, and Jione Langri, eds, Charles W. Forman, Island Churches: Challenge and Change (Suva, Fiji, 1992), p. 164. ⁷³ Garrett, Where Nets Were Cast, p. 389 and John Garrett, ‘The Churches in Tonga since World War II’, in Deryck Scarr et al.,eds, Echoes of Pacific War (Canberra, 1998), p. 96. Also see Finau, ‘The Emergence of the Maamafou’ou Movement from the Free Wesleyan Church of Tonga’, p. 194. ⁷⁴ Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge, 2013), p. 156. ⁷⁵ Ernst, Winds of Change, p. 150. ⁷⁶ Shulamit R. Decktor Korn, ‘After the Missionaries Came: Denominational Diversity in the Tonga Islands’, in James A. Boutilier et al., eds, Mission, Church, and Sect in Oceania (Lanham, MD, 1984), pp. 395–422.

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foods.’⁷⁷ In Tonga today, the King attends a different (mainline) denominational church each week. The traditional presentations of food, money, and goods to ministers have now become interdenominational competitions. There is dissatisfaction when only some of this wealth comes back in the form of new churches, clergy salaries, and social services, but as for its relationship with the monarchy and aristocracy, the church has grown increasingly confident in dissenting from government policies. In the 1970s, it had begun to pressure the government about more equitable land distribution. Along with overpopulation, social activists both in Tonga and international NGOs were blaming lack of access to land for rising poverty and social dislocation. In 1975 the Tongan Council of Churches, led by the Free Wesleyan Church, held an ecumenical conference to discuss the matter, earning a reproof from the government for meddling. In this respect at least, historian Ian Campbell believes, the Methodists in Tonga have returned to their dissenting origins ‘being aligned in a modest way against the regime, and resuming a more prophetic role in society in an active attempt to bring about reform’.⁷⁸ It remains to be seen whether this prophetic activism will extend to the church’s internal affairs as well. For example, whereas new denominations use English for worship, the Free Wesleyan Church, other Methodists, and Roman Catholics use Tongan, including the special vocabularies reserved for references to God, the King, and the nobility. This honorific vocabulary highlights the antiquity of these liturgies, something deeply valued by most Christians in Tonga, but it also underlined traditional social status boundaries in a way that English-language services do not.⁷⁹ Perhaps English is becoming the language of dissent in Tonga. Fiji’s Methodists, like their Tongan counterparts, face vigorous competition from other Christian denominations. The position of both the Methodist Church of Fiji and the Fiji Council of Churches was permanently weakened by their support for iTaukei nationalism, and although the church has grown during the 1990s, it did so more slowly than the LDS, Assemblies of God, and other ‘new’ churches. These other groups have been more successful in attracting formerly Hindu or Muslim Indo-Fijians, as well as former Methodists from both racial groups.⁸⁰ The 2007 census revealed that only 35 per cent of Fijians identified as Methodists (just under 300,000 people),⁸¹ compared with 74 per cent in 1982.⁸² ‘The ideal of a Fijian way, dominated ⁷⁷ Garrett, ‘The Churches in Tonga since World War II’, pp. 87–98; cited in Martin Daly, Tonga: A New Bibliography (Honolulu, 2009), p. 111. ⁷⁸ I. C. Campbell, Island Kingdom: Tonga Ancient and Modern (Christchurch, New Zealand, 1992), p. 217. ⁷⁹ Niko Besnier, On the Edge of the Global: Modern Anxieties in a Pacific Island Nation (Stanford, CA, 2011), p. 223. ⁸⁰ Ernst, Winds of Change, p. 205. ⁸¹ Ryle, My God, My Land, p. xxxii. ⁸² Ernst, Winds of Change, p. 206.

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by Methodist values as represented in the Three Pillars structure, is now seriously challenged.’⁸³ Dissent from both within and without has undermined the virtually unchallenged relationship between land, church, and state in Fijian tradition.

CONCLUSIONS In 2003 the world’s media was both fascinated and baffled when Fiji hosted an elaborate ceremony of apology for descendants of Revd Thomas Baker, killed on Viti Levu in 1867.⁸⁴ Other apologies have been made elsewhere in the south Pacific, for example the ceremony hosted on New Britain in 2007 to atone for the killing of four Fijian Methodist missionaries there in 1878.⁸⁵ The bafflement was generated by the transgression—even inversion—of familiar norms concerning apologies made by governments to indigenous peoples. Until fairly recently, in academic circles at least, missionary activities have been constructed as destructive invasions. Challenged by the self-understanding of islanders themselves, and taking more seriously indigenous conceptions of Pacific Christianity, scholars have begun to take a more nuanced view of who may apologize, and for what.⁸⁶ Veteran historian of Methodist missions Andrew Walls, speaking to the 2005 conference of the Wesley Historical Society in New Zealand, underlined the importance of viewing Pacific Methodist history on its own distinctive terms. ‘Pacific peoples have contributed a profound insight to historical study in the recognition that the future is behind us’, he emphasized. ‘It is hidden, behind our backs. It is the past that is in front of us; the recent past at our feet, the more remote stretching further and further back to the horizon….’⁸⁷ For Tongans and Fijians, gazing at their rich cultural traditions, Christian missionaries had come to remind them of what was already theirs, and it remains to be seen whether or not more Western views of ‘progress’ in new denominational movements can ever overtake this deeply cherished view.

⁸³ Ryle, My God, My Land, p. xxxii. ⁸⁴ For example ‘Fiji Villagers to Say Sorry for Eating British Missionary’, Daily Telegraph (15 Oct. 2003); ‘In 1867 Fijians Killed and Ate a Missionary. Yesterday Their Descendants Apologized’, Daily Telegraph (14 Nov. 2003) and ‘Fijian Table Manners’, Daily Telegraph (14 Nov. 2003). ⁸⁵ Margaret Reeson, Pacific Missionary George Brown 1835–1917: Wesleyan Methodist Church (Canberra, 2012), p. 338. ⁸⁶ For more on the Fijian apology see Ryle, My God, My Land, pp. 65–9. ⁸⁷ Walls, ‘Methodists, Missions and Pacific Christianity’, p. 9.

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S E L E C T B I BL IO G R A P H Y Barker, John, ed. Christianity in Oceania: Ethnographic Perspectives (Lanham, MY: University Press of America, 1990). Boutilier, James A., Daniel T. Hughes, and Sharon W. Tiffany, eds. Mission, Church, and Sect in Oceania (Lanham ND: University Press of America, 1984). Close-Barry, Kirstie. A Mission Divided: Race, Culture and Colonialism in Fiji’s Methodist Mission (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2015). Ernst, Manfred. Winds of Change: Rapidly Growing Religious Groups in the Pacific Islands Suva, (Fiji: Pacific Conference of Churches, 1994). Forman, Charles W. The Island Churches of the South Pacific: Emergence in the Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1982). Forman, Charles W., ed. Island Churches: Challenge and Change (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific, 1992). Garrett, John. To Live Among the Stars: Christian Origins in Oceania (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1982). Garrett, John. Footsteps in the Sea: Christianity in Oceania to World War II (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1992). Garrett, John. Where Nets were Cast: Christianity in Oceania since World War II (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies,1997). Gunson, Niel. Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas, 1790–1960 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978). Latukefu, Sione. Church and State in Tonga: The Weslyan Methodist Missionaries and Political Development, 1822–1875 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974). Reeson, Margaret. Pacific Missionary George Brown 1835–1917: Wesleyan Methodist Church (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2012). Rutherford, Noel. Shirley Baker and the King of Tonga (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996). Ryle, Jacqueline. My God, My Land: Interwoven Paths of Christianity and Tradition in Fiji (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010). Smith, Elsabe H. Yesterday and Today: With the Indians in the Church in Fiji (Suva: Lotu Pasifika Productions, 1979). Thornley, Andrew. ‘ “Through a Glass Darkly”: Ownership of Fijian Methodism, 1850–80’, in Phyllis Herda, Michael Reilly, David Hilliard, and Niel Gunson, eds, Vision and Reality in Pacific Religion: Essays in Honour of Niel Gunson (Canterbury: Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2005). Tomlinson, Matt. In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Tu’ineau, Fangailupe. ‘The outrigger of the canoe: Tongan women missionaries to Melanesia.’ Pacific Journal of Theology 20 (1998): 12–20. Varani-Norton, Eta. ‘The Church versus Women’s Push for Change: The Case of Fiji.’ Fijian Studies 3,2 (2005): 223–47. Walls, Andrew F. ‘Methodists, Missions and Pacific Christianity: A New Chapter in Christian History’, in Peter Lineham, ed., Weaving the Unfinished Mats: Wesley’s Legacy—Conflict, Confusion and Challenge in the South Pacific (Auckland: Wesley Historical Society, 2007).

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Index Abaroho movement, eastern Africa 46–7 ABCFM, see American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Abel, Charles 401, 402 Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) 189 Abrams, Minnie 343 Adeboye, Enock A. 59–60 Adeoye, David 62 AFM Bible College, Soshanguve 65 African Christianity 21–49, 52–71, 73–84 black Christian movements and ideologies 26–34 development of Charismatic Churches 57–66 dissent 22–4 evangelicalism, legacy of 24–6 indigenization 25, 26–7, 80–3 nationalism 32, 34–42 prosperity gospel 66–70, 71 religion and politics 81 secessionism in 23, 24 vernacular translation 42–9, 76–80 African independent/instituted churches (AICs) 46–9, 53–4, 55, 67 African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church 33, 218, 221, 229 African Orthodox Church (AOC) 221, 364 AHS (National Federation of Atheist, Humanist, and Secular Student Societies) 309 AICs, see African independent/instituted churches Akin, Daniel L. 210–11 Akindayomi, Josiah O. 59 Akinsowon, Christianah Abiodun 83 Aladura movement, western Africa 46–7, 48, 81–2 Alliance of Baptists 198 All Nations for Christ Bible Institute 58 All Nations Pentecostal Assembly 226 All-Union Council of Evangelical ChristiansBaptists (AUCECB) 272 Alpha courses 267 AME, see African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church American Bible Society 360

American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) 98, 101, 397–8 Syria Mission 145–6, 149, 153–5 American Southern Baptist Church 29 American Tract Society 360 Anaba, Eastwood 61 Anderson, Justice C. 318 Anderson, Rufus 135, 399 Annis, Sheldon 373 anti-syncretism 99 AOC (African Orthodox Church) 221, 364 Apostolic Church of Pentecost of Canada 248–9 Apostolic churches 54, 248–9 Apostolic Faith Church 59 Apostolic Faith Mission 64, 247, 248 Apostolicism 46–7 Apostolic Overcoming Holy Church of God 248–9 Apostolic Pentecostalism 243–4 Appiagyei, Kingsley 288 architecture, religious 102–3, 281, 407, 414 Armenian Evangelical Church, Istanbul 146 Arnott, John 256 Asamoah-Gyadu, J. Kwabena 54, 69 Asberry, Richard and Ruth 247 Ashimolowo, Matthew 65 Asia 89–104 Asian agency and dissenting legacies 90–2 Asian Christianity 94–7 church and state 97–100 faith traditions 89–90 forms of Dissent in 107–8 markers of Dissent 100–3 megachurches in 102–3, 106–25 nationalism in 94, 95–6 origins, traces, and parallels 92–4 Assemblia Apostólica de la Fe en Cristo Jesús, La 248–9 Assemblies of God 111, 116, 244, 248, 427–8 Assemblies of God Africa 54, 56, 63–4, 68 Assembly Halls, China (Juhuichu/ Juhuisuo) 134, 137 Assembly of God (Assembléia de Deus), Brazil 328 Association of Vineyard Churches 256 atheism 308–10

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Index

AUCECB (All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists) 272 Auna (deacon) 398 Austin-Sparks, T. 141 Australasian Conference 415, 419 Azusa Street Mission 247 Azusa Street Revival 53, 338, 343, 368–70 Badr, Yusif 148–9, 152, 153, 154 Bairangi, John 418 Baker, Shirley 415–16 Baker, Thomas 412, 430 Bakker, Jim 58, 183, 251 Bakker, Tammy 251 Baldwin, Deborah 325 Balokole (East African) Revival 40–1, 62 Baltic Mission Centre 280 baptism in Africa 42, 54 baptism in the Spirit 252–3 believer’s baptism 199, 200–1, 202, 204, 209 in China 138 infant baptism 199, 200, 209, 353 in Korea 109, 113 Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (BEM) 282 Baptist Bible Union of North America 170 Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec 172 Baptist Deaconesses’ Home and Mission 284 Baptist Faith and Message 210 Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) 36n42, 286 Baptist movement 263 in Asia 95 beliefs and practices 202–4 in Brazil 327–8 conversion 186, 195, 201, 202, 204–5, 207, 208, 209 in Eastern Europe 281 in Europe 268–9, 270–1, 274–7, 279–80, 285 historical-theological identity 200–1 immigrants and 288 missionaries 287 in North America 169, 170 TULIP formula 203 see also Southern Baptists Baptist World Alliance (BWA) 269, 270–1 Barber, Margaret E. 133, 140 Barratt, Thomas B. 264, 265, 343 Barrére, Dorothy 400 Barrett, David 44–5, 46n73 Barrios, Justo Rufino 323 Bartleman, Frank 264 Bartlett, Reginald 396 Barton, Bruce 182

Basham, Don 254–5 Bastian, Jean-Pierre 325 Baxter, Richard 102 Bays, Daniel H. 128&n2 BCC (British Council of Churches) 281–2 Beasley-Murray, George 275 Bebbington, David 207, 261 Bediako, Kwame 81 Beirut Bible Society (Evangelical Society of Beirut, Jam’iyyat Bayrut al-Injiliyya) 148 Belgian Congo (Central Africa) 36 believing without belonging 292–9 belief and believing 297–9 Census for England and Wales (2001) 293 church attendance 294–6 denominational affiliation 294 denominational attendance 296–7 BEM (Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry) 282 Bennett, Dennis 253 Berg, Daniel 327, 328 Berger, Peter L. 300, 317–18 Bethel African Church 29, 31 Bethel World Outreach, Monrovia 61 Bethune, Mary McLeod 230–2 BFBS (British and Foreign Bible Society) 321, 360 BFM (Board of Foreign Missions), Presbyterian Church, USA 145–6, 155 Bhengu, Nicholas 57, 64 Bible Presbyterian Church, Singapore and Malaysia 90 Bible Standard Churches 248–9 Bingham, Hiram 398 Black Atlantic movement 26–7, 220–1 Black Church 216–38 black-led interracial organizing 226–8 critical racial accommodation 224–6, 228–34 currents within dissenting tradition 222–34 Freedom Churches 219 global context 216–17 new theological traditions of religious dissent 234–7 and segregation 218, 222–4 tradition of religious dissent 217–22 Black Theology movement 234, 236 Blyden, Edward W. 23, 28 BMS (Baptist Missionary Society) 36n42, 286 Board of Foreign Missions (BFM), Presbyterian Church, USA 145–6, 155 Bob Jones University v. United States (1983) 189–90 Boddy, Alexander 265 Bogue, David 392 Bonnke, Reinhard 57, 58

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Index Boone, C. C. 221–2 Booth, Bramwell 266 Booth, Catherine 277 Booth, Joseph 33 Bosworth, Fred F. 249 Bowman, Matthew 175n24 Boyce, James P. 210 Braide, Garrick Sokari (later Elijah II) 30, 31–2, 81–2 Branham, William 249 Brazil 323, 327–8, 330–1 Brazilian Baptist Convention 330–1 Breese, Phineas 351 Brethren movement 271, 275, 280, 286, 287 Brierley, Peter 295–6 Briggs, Charles A. 168 Briggs, John 136n26 British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) 321, 360 British Columbia Baptist Convention 172 British Council of Churches (BCC) 281–2 British Evangelical Alliance 271 British Malaya 100 British Social Attitudes (BSA) surveys 294, 304 British Syrian Mission (BSM), Beirut 149 Broad Ax, The (Chicago weekly newspaper) 224–5 Broken Yoke Foundation (later Fountain Gate Chapel), Ghana 61 Brotherhood of Pullman Porters 231 Brown, Callum G. 299 Brown, Douglas 266 Brown, George 414–15, 422 Brown University 169 Brown v. Board of Education (1954) 187 Brownson, Orestes 205–6 Bruce, F. F. 275 Bruce, Steve 303 Brusco, Elizabeth 333 Bryan, William Jennings 177, 180 BSA (British Social Attitudes) surveys 294, 304 BSM (British Syrian Mission), Beirut 149 Bubile, Jennifer Bwalya 40n53 Buck, Pearl S. 172 Bunyan, John: The Pilgrim’s Progress 41, 102 Burma 92, 93, 95–6: see also Myanmar Burroughs, Nannie H. 225 Burton, John 419 Burton, William 286 Bustani, Alice and Louisa 148 al-Bustani, Butrus 147–8, 161 Butcher, Ben 401 Buxton, Thomas Fowell 80 BWA (Baptist World Alliance) 269, 270

435

Cakobau of Bau 412, 414 Calhoun, Simeon 149–50 Calvary Chapel network 255–6 Calvin, John 102, 208, 319–20 CAM (Central American Mission) 368, 375–6 Cambodia 107 Campbell, David E. 199 Campbell, Ian 429 Cannell, Fenella 406 Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940) 185 Carey, Archibald J., Sr. 229 Carey, William 92, 204, 392 Cargill, David 412, 414 Caribbean: Black Anglicans in 361–3 Carman, John B. 77 Carpenter, Joel 212 Carrera, Rafael 321 Carroll, Colleen 307 Carter, Jimmy 197 Cashwell, Gaston Barnabas 248 Catholic Action 331 Catto, Rebecca 309 CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) 183, 251 CCA (Christian Church in Africa) 41n56 CCs, see Charismatic Churches Celestial Church of Christ 47n78, 48 Central American Mission (CAM) 368, 375–6 cessationism 255 Ceylon 92, 96 Ceylon Pentecostal Mission 96 CGM (Christian Growth Ministries) 254–5 Chadwick, Samuel 266 Chalmers, James 400–1 Chamberlain, Elsie 278 Chan, Simon 103 Chang Po Ling 130 chaplains 304 Charismatic Churches (CCs) 3, 47, 48–9, 52–71 in America 241, 251 development of 57–66 in East Africa 61–3 in Ghana 58–61 in Nigeria 56, 58–61 prosperity gospel 66–70, 71 southern Africa 63–6 Charismatic Ministries Network, Ghana 61 Charismatic Renewal 251–9 Charleston Tradition 204 Chatterton, Percy 401 Chelelwa, Ernest 63 Chen Chonggui 100 Cheng Ching-yi 129n7, 130n11

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436

Index

Cherubim and Seraphim, Aladura movement 59, 82, 83 Chesnut, Andrew 379 Chicago Colored Baptist Churches 229 Chicago Defender 225 Chikane, Frank 64–5 Chile 330 Congregationalism 322–3 early Protestantism in 339–40 Methodism in 340–1 National Methodist Church 326, 347 Pentecostalism in 329–30, 338–57 Pentecostalism, contemporary 355–6 Pentecostalism, revival in 325–7, 341–7 Pentecostalism, schism in 347–50, 351–3 Chilean Methodist Pentecostal Church (CMPC) 371 schism in 347–50, 351–3 Chilembwe, John 33, 39–40 Chiluba, Frederick 63 China 70, 92, 93, 94, 97, 107, 127–43, 286 dissenting traditions: development stages 127–8 dissenting traditions: first stage 129–35 dissenting traditions: second stage 135–8 drivers of dissent 138–42 indigenous movements 128–43 indigenous movements development: first stage 129–35 Jiaoan religious incidents 129n3 Miao 100 post-Cultural Revolution 96 Three–Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) 100, 127, 128, 129–30, 135, 136–7 China Centenary Missionary Conference, Shanghai (1907) 101n39 China Continuation Committee 131 China Inland Mission (CIM) 93, 98, 127–8: see also Overseas Missionary Fellowship Chinese Christian, The (Zhongguo Jidutubao magazine) 130 Chinese Christian Independent Church (Zhongguo Jidujiao zilihui) 130–1 Chinese Christian Independent Church (Zhonghua Yesujiao zilihui) 130 Chinese Christian Union (Zhonghua jidutuhui) 130 Chiudza, Richmond 64 Cho, David Yonggi 59, 66, 109–10, 111–15, 116–17, 118, 119–20, 121–2 and cell group system 123–4 Cho, Paul Yonggi 377 Choi, Jashil 112, 115, 124 Christ Apostolic Church, Aladura movement 82

Christ Army 32 Christ Embassy, Nigeria 60 Christ for All Nations 58, 64, 65 Christ for the Nations Institute, Dallas, Texas 58, 64 Christian Action Faith Ministries, Ghana 60–1 Christian and Missionary Alliance 177 Christian Association of Nigeria 60 Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) 183, 251 Christian Church in Africa (CCA) 41n56 Christian Churches of North America 248–9 Christian Conference of Asia, Chiang Mai, Thailand 104 Christian Conference of Asia, Singapore 104 Christian Congregation (Congreação Cristã), Brazil 328 Christian Fellowship Church 415 Christian Growth Ministries (CGM) 254–5 Christianity Today (magazine) 172 Christian Life Church, Uganda 62 Christian Tabernacle, The (Jidutu huitang) 132 Christian Union 56 Christian World (British weekly newspaper) 261 Churches’ Unity Commission 282–3 Church Growth International 116–17 Church Missionary Society (CMS) 80, 98, 411 Church of God 248–9 Church of God by Faith 248–9 Church of God in Christ (COGIC) 221, 226, 227, 248 Church of God Mission International 58 Church of God of Prophecy 248–9 Church of God of the Mountain Assembly 248 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) 426, 427–8 Church of North India (CNI) 95, 96–7 Church of our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith 248–9 Church of Pentecost, Ghana 60, 66 Church of South India (CSI) 95, 96–7 Church of the Nazarene 277, 280, 351 Church of Tonga 420, 421 CIM, see China Inland Mission Cinco Calles Church, Guatemala City 376 City Harvest megachurch, Singapore 103 Civil Rights Act (1964) 187 civil rights movement 186–7, 233–4 Classical Pentecostals 244, 257–8 Clements, Keith 282 Cliff College, Derbyshire 266 Clifford, John 284, 285

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Index CMPC, see Chilean Methodist Pentecostal Church CMS, see Church Missionary Society CNI (Church of North India) 95, 96–7 Coffin, Henry Sloane 168–9, 178–9 Coleman, Simon 284, 289 Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR) 419 colporteurs 320–1, 360–1 Coltman, Constance 277 Coltrane, John William 364 Commonwealth Missionary Society 287 Communism 271–2, 281, 285 Community of the Gifts of Fire, Zimbabwe 70 Conference of European Churches 283 Congreação Cristã (Christian Congregation), Brazil 328 Congregational Council for World Mission 287 Congregational Holiness Church 248 Congregationalism in Asia 95, 277 in Brazil 323 in Chile 322–3 in Europe 274, 278, 280 North America 168 Conscientious Objectors (COs) 269–70 Conservative Baptist Association 172 conversion 97n20, 99, 170, 176, 178, 243 African converts 30, 31, 35, 37, 38, 41, 42n59, 44n65, 47, 57, 69 Asian converts 92 Baptists 186, 195, 201, 202, 204–5, 207, 208, 209 Chinese converts 129, 132, 133, 139–40 Evangelicals 195 Methodists 186 in Pacific region 412–13 Conwell, Russell 178 Cook Islanders 400–1 Cooperative Baptist Fellowship 198 Coordinating Council on Community Organizations 233 Copeland, Kenneth 66, 257 COs (Conscientious Objectors) 269–70 Côte d’Ivoire 61 Cotton, Emma 229 Council for World Mission 104, 287: see also London Missionary Society (LMS) Council of Charismatic Ministers 61 Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion 27n16 covenant communities 255 Cox, Harvey 54, 183, 214 Cox, Jeffrey 279 Crawford, Florence 248 Cross, William 412, 414 Crouch, Jan 251

437

Crouch, Paul 251 Crowe, Frederick 321–2 Crowell, Henry 180 Crowther, Samuel Ajayi 29, 80, 81–2 CSI (Church of South India) 95, 96–7 CSR (Colonial Sugar Refining Company) 419 Cullis, Charles 243 cultural globalization 5–9 Daejo Full Gospel Church (Tent Church), Korea 112–14 Daneel, Marthinus 67 Darwin, Charles 168, 243 Davie, Grace 279, 293, 299, 302–3, 304 Day, Abby 298 Dayton, Donald 350–1, 353 Deeper Christian Life Ministry 59 Deeper Life Bible Church, Nigeria 59, 66 Delany, Martin 34n37 Deng Xiaoping 137 denominationalism 23, 213–14, 279 denominational affiliation 294 denominational attendance 296–7 Derrick, R. A. 426 Devandandan, P. D. 103 Diangienda, Joseph 38 Díaz, Porfirio 323, 324–5 Dillenbeck, Nora 132 Dissent definitions of 2–3 global Dissent 10–16 Dockery, David 196 Dodd, C. D. 274 Dollar, Creflo and Taffi 251 drift and disengagement 299–302 changing values 299–300 neoliberalism 301–2 welfare state provision 300–1 Driver, E. R. 229 DuBois, W. E. B. 228, 362–3 Dudley, Hannah 422–3 Duff (missionary ship) 392–3 Dumit, Jabir 160n38 Dumont, Jean-Paul 390 Duncan-Williams, Nicholas 60–1, 62 du Plessis, David J. 244, 252, 253, 254 Durham, William H. 243, 249 Dussel, Enrique 332–3 Dutch Reformed Church 65 East African (Balokole) Revival 40–1, 62 Eastern Europe 283, 284, 288 Eastern Orthodox Church 364 East Timor 96 Eaton, James 325 Ebenezer Baptist Church 29n24

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438

Index

EBF, see European Baptist Federation Eccles, Janet Betty 309 Ecclesial Base Communities 331 ecumenical movement 95, 281–3 Eddy, William 154 education system African dissenting movement and 35–6 Fiji 426–7 Tonga 426–7 Eglise Orthodoxe Apostolique Haitienne 361–2 Église Protestante Baptiste Oeuvres et Mission Internationales, Côte d’Ivoire 61 Elijah II, see Braide, Garrick (later Elijah II) Elim Pentecostal Church 265 Ellis, Suzanna (later Rankin) 401 Ellis, William 398 El Salvador 374–5 Eltis, David 34 Endeavor (missionary ship) 393 Engel v. Vitale (1962) 189 English, Donald 273–4 English Church Census (2005) 306, 307 Episcopal Methodist mission 98 Epperson v. Arkansas (1968) 189–90 Ernst, Manfred 428 eschatology: North American fundamentalism 170–1 Ethiopianism 27–9, 32–3 European Baptist Federation (EBF) 268, 279, 280 European Free Churches 283 Evangelical Armenian Churches, Anatolia 161n Evangelical Church of Beirut, see National Evangelical Church of Beirut Evangelical Independent Church, Syria 147, 148, 152, 154, 156, 159–60, 161 Evangelicalism 2–3 African evangelicalism, legacy of 24–6 Anglican evangelicalism in Asia 89–90 in China 139 global evangelicalism 10 Evangelicalism, American 194–214 beliefs 206–8 demographic and cultural realities 199–200 influences shared with Southern Baptists 208–13 public scrutiny 197–9 and Southern Baptists 195–7 Evangelical Pentecostal Church 371 Evangelical Society of Beirut (Jam’iyyat Bayrut al-Injiliyya, Beirut Bible Society) 148 evangelism 263–8, 285 Everson v. Board of Education (1947) 185

evolutionary theory 168, 180 Eyre, John 392 Fair Employment Practices Commission 231 faith healing 243 Faith Tabernacle, Nigeria 60 Family of God, Zimbabwe 64 Federal Council of Churches of Christ (FCC) 169, 179, 232 Fediakova, Evguenia 355 Fedorov, Vladimir 283 Fellowship of Reconciliation (FoR) 269–70 FGBFI (Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International) 96, 252 Fiddes, Paul 275 Fiji 388, 394 Church independence in 422–5 Church, state, and culture 414–15 education 426–7 female ministers 425 Indo-Fijians 417–18, 419, 422–4, 429 iTaukei nationalism 424, 429 Methodism 409–10, 412–13, 416–19, 429–30 new denominations 427–8 three-self approach 417 Fiji Council of Churches 429 Filadelfia church, Stockholm 250, 265 Finished Work Pentecostals 243–4 Finney, Charles G. 242 Fire-Baptized Holiness Church 248 Fischbacher, Elizabeth 140–1 Five-fold Salvation 113 Flory, Richard 308 Focus on the Family 197–8 FoR (Fellowship of Reconciliation) 269–70 Ford, George 151 Forman, Charles 388–9, 421 Forsyth, P. T. 102, 274 Fosdick, Harry Emerson 171, 182 Fountain Gate Chapel (formerly Broken Yoke Foundation), Ghana 61 Francescon, Louis 328 Fraternal Council of Negro Churches 231, 232 Fraternidad Cristiana, Guatemala City (MegaFrater) 377 Free Church of Scotland 34 Free Church of Tonga 415, 421 Free Church traditions 90, 261–89 church–state relations 268–73 and Communism 271–2, 281 evangelism 263–8 identity issues 278–83 social/global involvement 283–8 theology and spirituality 273–8 and war 269–71

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Index Freeman, Derek 396–7 Free Methodist Church 351 Free Wesleyan Church of Tonga 8n20, 420, 421, 428, 429 Free-Will Baptist Church 248 Freston, Paul 366–7 Fuller, Andrew 204 Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California 172, 256 Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International (FGBFI) 96, 252 Full Gospel Central Church, Korea 114–15 Fullihan, David 151 Fundamentalism 255 in Asia 90 North America 169–70, 211–12 Furman, Charles and Carrie 328–9 Furman, Richard 205–6 Fuzhou 98 Gardner, Lucy 270 Garrett, James Leo 195–6, 207–8 Garrett, John 428 Garrick Braide movement 30 Garvey, Marcus 363 Garveyism 363–5 Gates, Edith 277 Gee, Donald 252, 276 Geldbach, Erich 275 gender equality 277–8 General Association of Regular Baptists 172 General Baptists 201 General Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States for Foreign Missions 205 Genevan movement 274 George Tupou I, see Taufa’ahau (King George Tupou I) of Tonga Ghana 42, 56, 58–61, 66, 70 Gifford, Paul 54, 62, 66, 68, 81 Gladden, Washington 178 Glad Tidings Fellowship, Zimbabwe 64 Global Baptist Church, Seoul, Korea 109 global evangelicalism 10 globalization 4–9 Gloege, Timothy 181 glossolalia, see speaking in tongues Gold Coast 42 Goldie, John 415 Gouldbourne, Ruth 277 Grace Bible Church, Soweto, South Africa 65 Grady, J. Lee 381 Graham, Billy 186, 197, 212, 266–7 Guam 107

439

Guatemala 321–2, 323, 372 charismatic religion 366 Pentecostalism in 327, 328–9, 330, 335, 374–6 Presbyterianism 323 Protestantism 334 Gullicksen, Kenn 256 Guridy, Frank 363 Guti, Ezekiel 64 Ha, Polly 103 Hagin, Kenneth 65, 66, 122, 183, 257 Hah, Yongjo 109 Haiti 361–2 al-Hakim, Salim 154 Handman, Courtney 402–3 Hankins, Barry 208 Harris, Alana 308 Harris, William Wadé (Prophet Harris) 41–2, 81–2 Harrist Churches 42 Hastings, Adrian 267 Havea, Sione ‘Amanaki 420 Hawai’i 397–400 Hawaiian Evangelical Association 399 Hawaiian Missionary Society 399 Haweis, Thomas 392 Haya de la Torre, Raúl 368 Hedger, Violet 277 Heelas, Paul 307 Helwys, Thomas 200 Henry, Carl 212 Henry, Matthew 102 Heward-Mills, Dag 61, 65 Hey, John 392 Hill, John C. 323 Hinson, E. Glenn 195 Hodgkin, Henry 270 Hoehler-Fatton, Cynthia 83 Holiness movements 117, 248 in America 242–3, 246 in China 140 North America 351 and speaking in tongues 246 Wesleyan 315 Holiness Pentecostals 243 Holly, Alonzo Potter 363 Holly, James Theodore 361–2 Holmes, Lowell 397 Holy Fire Ministries, Ghana 61 Holy Nazarene Church of the Apostolic Faith 226 Hong, Jung-gil 109 Hong Kong 99, 107 Hooker, Josephine 361 Hooker School for Girls, Mexico City 361

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440

Index

Hoover, Mary Anne Hilton 343 Hoover, Willis Collins 326, 342–4, 345–7, 352, 371 Hope of Glory Tabernacle, South Africa 64 Hopu, Thomas 398 Hornsby-Smith, Michael P. 298 Hoskins, Franklin E. 145–6, 153–4, 157, 159, 160 Houghton, Bishop Frank 93 Household of God, Nigeria 60 Hungarian Baptist Aid 286 Hunt, John 413 al-Hurani, Ibrahim 160n38 Hurtado, Alberto 330 Hutchins, Julia W. 247 Hutchinson, John 412 ICFG (International Church of the Foursquare Gospel) 248–9, 255–6 ICP (Inter-Church Process) 283 Idahosa, Benson 57–9, 62 Idahosa, Margaret 59 identity issues believing without belonging 292–310 Census for England and Wales (2001) 293, 294, 309 denominational affiliation 294 dissent and nonconformity 306–8 drift and disengagement 299–302 vicarious religion 302–6 Idowu, Bolaji 74 Iglesia Apostólica de la Fe in Cristo Jesús, La 248 Iglesia Episcopal de Panamá 364–5 Iglesia Metodista de Chile (IMC) 371 Iglesia Metodista Nacional (National Methodist Church), Chile 326, 347 Iglesia Metodísta Pentecostal, see Methodist Pentecostal Church Igreja Cristã de Nova Vida (New Life Christian Church) 379 Igreja Internacional da Graça de Deus 379 Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD) 377, 378–81 Ileto, Reynaldo 390 IMC (Iglesia Metodista de Chile) 371 IMC (International Missionary Council) 95 imperial expansion 4, 6 Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions 172 Independent Episcopal Church 364 India 92, 93, 95–7, 100, 107 indigenization 131, 387–407 African Christianity 25, 26–7, 80–3 definition of 389–92 three-self characteristics 389–90

Indonesia 93, 95–6, 97, 100, 101, 107, 388 Inspiration Network 251 Inter-Church Process (ICP) 283 Interchurch World Movement 170 International Bible Worship Centre (later Royal House Chapel), Ghana 61 International Central Gospel Church, Ghana 61 International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (ICFG) 248–9, 255–6 International Fellowship of Christian Churches 65 International Fellowship of Evangelical Students 47 International Missionary Council (IMC) 95 International Pentecostal Holiness Church 248 Italian Free Churches 283 Italy 265, 283 IURD (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus) 377, 378–81 Iviyo (Legion of Christ’s Witnesses), South Africa 70 Ivory Coast 42 Jam’iyyat Bayrut al-Injiliyya (Evangelical Society of Beirut, Beirut Bible Society) 148 Japan 92, 93, 102 Jeffreys, George 265 Jeffreys, Stephen 265 Jehovah’s Witnesses 185, 427–8 Jenkins, Philip 263 Jessup, Henry Harris 145, 149, 151, 152–3, 154 Jessup, Samuel 154, 160 Jesus Alive Ministries, Nairobi, Kenya 62 Jesus Family (Yesu jiating) 132–3 Jesus Movement 255 Jesus Name Pentecostalism 243–4 Jesus Worship Center, Zambia 63 Jidutu huitang (The Christian Tabernacle) 132 Jing Dianying 128, 132, 134 John XXIII, Pope 253 Johnson, James 28, 30–1, 80, 81–2 Johnson, William B. 209 Jones, Charles Price 248 Jones, Keith 279, 280 Joseon Dynasty, Korea 118 Joshua, Temitope B. 60 Jowett, J. H. 274 Juárez, Benito 323 Judson, Adoniram 92 Kalaaauluna, John E. Phelps 398 Kalaioulu, Richard 398

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Index Kalley, Robert and Sarah 323 Kall Four Square Gospel (KFSG) 250–1 Kalu, Ogbu 55, 58, 66–8, 73 Kamooula, William 398 Kampala PentecostalChurch (later Watoto Church), Kampala, Uganda 62 Kargel, Ivan 275 Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti 276 Kassab, Salim 153, 160n38 Kaumualii 398 Kawkab Amirka (The Star of America, English-Arabic periodical) 151–2 Kayiwa, Simeon 62 Kenya 41, 62 Kessler, J. B. A. 346 Keswick Conference 140, 141 Keswick Holiness teaching 41 Keswick movement 93 Keyes, Charles 390 KFSG (Kall Four Square Gospel) 250–1 Khairallah, As’ad 160n38 Kielaa, George Tyler 398 Kim, Soo-hwan 121 Kimbangu, Simon 36–8 Kimbanguism 36–9, 54 King, Martin Luther, Jr 233 Kingsway International Christian Centre, London 65–6 Kolarz, Walter 281 Kolenda, Daniel 58 Koloi, Senituli 428 Korankye-Ankrah, Sam 61 Korea 92, 93, 94, 95, 100, 108–17 Koroi, Josateki 424, 425 Kraft, Charles 256 Kresge, S. S. 180 Kumuyi, William Folorunso 59 Kupelii 398 Kuzmic, Peter 283, 283, 286 Kwato Extension Association 401–2 Laidlaw, Nellie 345, 346–7 Lalive d’Epinay, Christian 329–30, 339, 373 LAM (Latin American Mission) 372 Laos 100, 107 Lasaro, Manusa 424, 425 Latin America 315–36 missionary movement in 318–28 Pentecostal revivals in 325–9 Pentecostal spin-offs 375–7 Pentecostalism 315, 317–18, 324, 325–31, 365–81 Pentecostalism as dissent 374–5 Pentecostalism, second wave 372–4 Pentecostalism, social contexts of 329–31 Pentecostalism, third wave 377–81

441

Protestantism in 315–25, 331–5, 367–71 Protestantism, First Wave 367–71 Protestantism, late-twentieth-century growth in 331–5 Protestantism, locally-led 324–5 Protestantism, missionary origins of 318–24 Latin American Mission (LAM) 372 Latter Day Saints 402 Latter Rain Movement 250, 254, 257 Lawes, William 400, 401 Lawry, William 412 Laymen’s Foreign Mission Inquiry (1932) 172 Layten, Sarah Willie 225 LDS (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) 426, 427–8 Lee, Dong-won 109 Lee, Edward and Mattie 247 Legion of Christ’s Witnesses (Iviyo), South Africa 70 Lelean, C. O. 419 Lenshina Mulenga, Alice 40, 83 Liberia 41–2, 61 Lidgett, Scott 273 Liese, Andreas 271 Lighthouse Chapel International, Ghana 61 Lindsay, Gordon 58 Little, Eric Selby 97n20 Little Flock (Xiaoqun), China 93, 134, 137, 141 Living Faith World Outreach Center, Nigeria 60 Living Water Church, Malawi 63 Lloyd-Jones, Martyn 274 LMS, see London Missionary Society localization 390–2 Lombardi, Giacomo 265 London Confession (1644) 210 London Missionary Society (LMS) 23n4, 103–4, 287 in Asia 95 in Pacific region 388, 392–7, 398, 400–1, 411, 412 Tahiti 410 see also Council for World Mission Lovedale Church 34 Lumpa churches 40, 54, 83 Lutheranism 89 Ma, Wonsuk 103 McAlister, Walter Robert 379 Macartney, H. B. 149 McCauley, Ray 65 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 286 McDonald, R. L. 419

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442

Index

McDonnell, Kilian 244 Macedo, Edir 378–9, 380, 381 McFarlane, Samuel 400 McGiffert, Arthur Cushman 168 McGuire, George Alexander 363–4 Machen, J. Gresham 171, 172 McIntire, Carl 90 Mackay, D. J. 37 McKinley, William 403–4 McPherson, Aimee Semple 181, 249, 250–1 Malawi 63: see also Nyasaland Malaya 93, 100 Malaysia 90, 93, 97, 107 Manly, Basil, Jr 210 al-Maqdisi, Jirjis al-Khuri 160n38 March on Washington Movement (MOWM) 231 Marquesas islands 399 Marsden, George 179n31, 207, 211 Marshall, Daniel 205 Martin, David 317, 318, 333, 348, 353–4, 355 Masaryk, T. G. 285 Masland Methodist Church, Sibu, Sarawak 101 Mason, Charles Harrison 248 Matatore (deacon) 398 Mateinaniu, Josua 416 Mathews, Shailer 169 Mau movement 395–6 Maxwell, David 55–6, 68 Maya 328, 334, 373–4 Mazaev, D. I. 269 Mead, Margaret 396 megachurches 56 America 198 in Asia 102–3, 106–25 assessment of 117–25 cell group system 114–15, 123–5 church–state relationship 117–19 in Korea 108–17 leadership 119–21 Nairobi, Kenya 62 and poverty 109, 111–13, 122 MegaFrater (Fraternidad Cristiana, Guatemala City) 377 Melanesia 388, 415 Men and Religion Forward Movement 183 Meshoe, Kenneth 64 Messenger of Peace (missionary ship) 394 Methodism 279, 287, 328–9, 410–30 in America 241–2 in Asia 89, 92, 95 black secession from Wesleyan conference 27 British 354 in Chile 340–1

and ecumenicalism 283 in Europe 266, 273–4, 280 Fiji 409–10, 412–13, 416–19, 429–30 Indo-Fijians 417–18 North American, constitutional theological instabilities in 350–4 Methodist Church of Fiji 429 Methodist Episcopal Church, Chile 338, 340–1, 342, 349 Methodist Pentecostal Church (Iglesia Metodísta Pentecostal), Chile 338 schism in 347–50, 351–3 Mexico 322, 323, 324–5, 330, 360–1 Meyer, F. B. 264 Michaelson, Wes 197 Micklem, Nathaniel 274 Micronesia 388, 399 Milingo, Emmanuel 70 Miller, Donald E. 308 Miller, Kelly 225 al-Mishalani, Faris 160n38 al-Mishalani, Khalil 160n38 Misión Cristiana Elim El Salvador 376–7 Misión Cristiana Elim Guatemala 376–7 Misión Cristiana Elim Internacional 375–6 Miskito Coast, Nicaragua 320 missionary movement 3, 6–8, 248–9, 266 in Africa 23, 24, 25–6, 44–5 in Chile 340–1 in China 286 and colonialism 34–5 in Europe 286–7 in Latin America 318–31, 367–8 Moravian missionaries 320 North American Methodist missionaries 352 North American Pentecostal missionaries 117 Open Brethren 93 Southern Baptist missionaries 404–5 ‘Syria and the Mission Work’ antimissionary pamphlet 148–51, 155–7, 159, 161 and translation 77, 78–9 Miyanda, Godfrey 63 Modalist Pentecostals 244 Mohler, Albert 210 Mokone, Mangena 32–3 Montúfar, Lorenzo 321–2 Moody, Dwight 170, 176 Moody Bible Institute, Chicago 170, 180, 181 Moore, Jennie Evans 247 Moore Memorial Church, Shanghai 101 Moral Majority 197–8 Moravian Lutheranism 89 Morgan, Campbell 274

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Index Morris, Aldon 234 Mother of God community 255 Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries, Nigeria 60 Mouw, Richard 196 MOWM (March on Washington Movement) 231 Mumba, Nevers 63 Mumford, Bernard ‘Bob’ 254–5 Munger, Theodore 168 Murray, Stuart 107 Mustapha, Daniel 423 Mwila Marie 38 Myanmar 92, 100: see also Burma Mzimba, Pambani 34 Namirembe Christian Fellowship, Uganda 62 Nam Seoul Church, Seoul, Korea 109 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 231, 233 National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) 172 National Baptist Convention (NBC) 170, 221, 225–6 National Baptist Foreign Mission Board, United States 39n51 National Church of Christ, China 131 National Council of Churches 186 National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) 230, 231 National Evangelical Church of Beirut (NECB) 145–6, 148, 152–61 National Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Guatemala 330–1 National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon 146 National Evangelical Union of Lebanon 146 National Federation of Atheist, Humanist, and Secular Student Societies (AHS) 309 National Methodist Church (Iglesia Metodista Nacional), Chile 326, 347 National Youth Administration (NYA) 230 nationalism African 32, 34–42 in Asia in 94, 95–6 iTaukei nationalism, Fiji 424, 429 Tembu people 32 Nation of Islam 363 Nations Institute, Dallas 63 Native Baptist Church 29 NBC (National Baptist Convention) 170 NCNW (National Council of Negro Women) 230, 231 Ndovi, Stanley 63 NECB, see National Evangelical Church of Beirut

443

Nee, Watchman (Ni Tuosheng) 93, 128, 133–4, 137–8, 140–1 Negro Women’s Cabinet 230 Neill, J. S. 421 Neill, Stephen 393 Nelson, William 160 Neo-Evangelicalism 212 Neo-Pentecostalism 245, 257, 377–81 Nevius, John 93 New Atheists 309 Newbigin, Lesslie 94 New Britain 414–15 New Dissent 2–3 New Hampshire Confession (1833) 210 New Jerusalem Church 40n53 New Life Christian Church (Igreja Cristã de Nova Vida) 379 New Light Baptists 204–5 Newton Theological Institute 169 Ngidi, Richard 57 Niagara Bible Conferences 170, 243 Niger Delta Pastorate Church 29–30 Nigeria 48, 56, 58–60, 70 Niger Mission 80 Niles, D. T. 103 Norris, J. Frank 211 North America 165–92 Baptists 169, 170, 172 church and state 184–91 Congregationalism 168 consumer individualism 174–84 ecumenism 179 Evangelicalism 185n, 194–214 fundamentalism 166, 169–76, 180–2, 211–12 institutional fragmentation 171–4 intellectual modernism challenge to dissent 166, 167–74 liberal social gospel 175 liberals (mainline) 166, 171–5, 180, 182–3 Presbyterianism 168–9 protest politics 177 religious pluralism 184–8 revivalism 175, 176–8, 181 Social Gospel 178–9 Southern Baptists 194–214 theological fragmentation 167–71 Northern Baptist Seminaries 170 Northfield Summer Conferences 170 Norway 264 Nuelsen, John 284 NYA (National Youth Administration) 230 Nyasaland 39–40: see also Malawi Oak, Han-eum 109 Ockenga, Harold 212

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444 O’Higgins, Bernardo 321, 339 Ojo, Matthews 68–9 Okotie, Chris 60 Olazábal, Francisco 370 Old Dissent 2 Olofinjana, Israel Oluwole 288 Olukoya, Daniel Kolawole 60 Olutayo, Dayo 62 OMF (Overseas Missionary Fellowship, formerly China Inland Mission) 104 Oncken, Johann Gerhard 263 Oneness Pentecostalism 243–4 Onibere, Simeon 70 Onnuri Community Church, Seoul, Korea 109 OPC (Orthodox Presbyterian Church) 172 Open Brethren 93, 97n21, 141, 262 Opukahaia, Henry 398 Orthodox Dissent 274 Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) 172 Osborne, T. L. 58 Otabil, Mensa 61, 62 Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF, formerly China Inland Mission) 104 Owen, John 102 Oyakhilome, Chris 60 Oyedepo, David 60, 62 Ozman, Agnes 246 P. T. Forsyth Society, Japan 102 Pacific region 410–30 contextualization of Christianity in 387–407 conversion in 412–13 definition of indigenous Christianity 389–92 definition of region 388 Hawai’i 397–400 Melanesia 388, 415 Methodism 410–30 Micronesia 388, 399 Papua New Guinea 400–3 Philippines 92, 93, 95–6, 107, 388, 403–6 Polynesia 388, 392–4 Samoa 394–7 see also Fiji; Tonga pacifism 269–70 Paloo, Samuel J. Mills 398 Papua Ekklesia 401 Papua New Guinea 400–3 Parham, Charles F. 246–7, 249, 369 Park, Myung-soo 119–20 Particular Baptists 201, 210 Paul, Jonathan 264, 276 Paul VI, Pope 244, 253 Pavlov, Vasiliy 269

Index Payne, Ernest A. 282 PCUSA, see Presbyterian Church in the United States of America Peake, A. S. 273 Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada 248–9 Pentecostal Assemblies of Newfoundland 248–9 Pentecostal Assemblies of the World 226, 227, 248–9 Pentecostal-Charismatic movements 3, 48–9 Pentecostal Church of Chile 371 Pentecostal Church of Christ 248 Pentecostal Church of God 248 Pentecostal European Fellowship 280 Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) 60 Pentecostal Free-Will Baptist Church 248 Pentecostal Holiness Church 248 Pentecostalism 3–4, 257–8, 263–6, 287, 377–81 Africa 47, 48, 52–71 in America 241, 243–5 in Asia 89, 96 in Brazil 327 and Charismatic Renewal 251–9 in Chile 338–57 in China 138–9 continuing forms of Pentecostal dissension 249–50 definition 52–3 early dissension 246–9 in Europe 263, 276–7, 280 growth of 263–4 in Guatemala 327, 328–9 immigrants and 287–8 and indigenization in China 131 in Latin America 315, 365–81 and media 250–1 revivals in Latin America 325–9 social contexts of, in Latin America 329–31 Sweden 250, 264–5 technology to advance the gospel message 250–1 Pentecostal Mission Church 371 Pentecostal Missionary Union 138n35, 286 Pentecostal World Conference (PWC) 244, 252 Pethrus, Lewi 250, 264 Pew Research Center surveys 332, 366, 379–80 PFN (Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria) 60 Philippine Independent Church 93 Philippines 92, 93, 95–6, 107, 388, 403–6 pirates 359 Plymouth Brethren 133, 140, 141 Polhill, Cecil H. 138n35, 286 Polynesia 388, 392–4

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Index Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity 244 Poor People’s Campaign 234–5 Popohe, Stephen 398 poverty 57, 83–4, 109, 111–13, 122 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr 229 Powell, Adam Clayton, Sr. 225 Praise the Lord (PTL) network 183, 251 prayer: teenagers and 304–5, 307–8 Presbyterian Church, Chile 341 Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) 168–9, 170, 172, 179, 186 Presbyterianism 34, 93–4, 95, 168–9, 287, 323, 328 Primitive Methodists 279, 328–9, 350 Prince, Derek 254–5 Prokhorov, Constantine 281 prosperity theology 66–70, 71, 257, 377–8, 379–80 Protestant Episcopal Society for Promoting the Extension of the Church Among Colored People 362 Protestantism in Asia 89 in Latin America 318–24, 331–5, 359–82 Latin America, late-twentieth-century growth in 331–5 in Latin America, missionary origins of 318–24 Mexico 324–5 Providence Baptist Association 218 Providence Industrial Mission 39n51 PTL (Praise the Lord) network 183, 251 Putnam, Robert D. 199 PWC (Pentecostal World Conference) 244, 252 Qanawati, Antun 157–9 Quakers 97, 269–70, 284–5 Rabuka, Sitiveni 423, 424 racial issues 236–7 Black Church and 216–20, 222–34 CMS and 80 racial segregation 13, 32, 186, 217, 218, 219, 220, 222–4, 226–9, 232–3, 234–5 see also Civil Rights movement Rainer, Thom 199–200 Ramabai, Pandita 92 Rankin, Melinda 323 Ransom, Reverdy 228, 229, 232 al-Rasi, As’ad Abdullah 154 Rastafarianism 363 Rauschenbusch, Walter 178 Reagan, Ronald 197

445

Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Nigeria 48, 59–60, 66 Regular Baptist Missionary and Educational Society of Canada 172 Regular Baptists 172, 209 Religious Roundtable 197–8 revival movements 175, 176–8, 181, 250 Balokole (East African) Revival 40–1, 62 First Great Awakening 204–5, 209 Pentecostal revivals 325–9, 341–7 Second Great Awakening 209, 242 Spiritual Revival Church 364–5 Welsh Revival 264 see also Azusa Street Revival Rhema Bible Training Centre, Johannesburg, South Africa 65 Richard, Timothy 93, 94 Richey, Raymond T. 249 Ríos Montt, Efraín 334, 335, 373 Ríos Montt, Mario 374 Ríos Paredes, Otoniel 376–7 Rivadavia, Bernardino 321 Robert, Dion 61 Roberts, Oral 122, 183, 249, 251 Roberts, Owens J. 230 Robertson, Pat 251 Robinson, Ezekiel G. 169 Robinson, H. Wheeler 274 Robinson, John 300–1 Robinson, Philip 97n21 Robinson, T. H. 274 Rochester Theological Seminary 169 Rockefeller, John D. 180 Roe v. Wade (1973) 189 Romania 265 Roosevelt, Eleanor 230 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 230–1 Rowley, H. H. 274–5 Royal House Chapel (formerly International Bible Worship Centre), Ghana 61 Royden, Maude 270 Ruatoka (leader of Cook Islanders) 400–1 Ruel, Malcolm 297 Rushbrooke, J. H. 269, 285 Rwanda 40–1 Ryland, John 392 Ryle, Jacquelyn 409 Saenz, Moisés 368 Sahlins, Marshall 400 Saillens, Rueben 269 St John William Coltrane church, San Francisco 364 St Joseph’s Spiritual Episcopal Church, Colón, Panama 364

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446

Index

St. Paul’s Breadfruit Anglican Church, Lagos 29, 30 Salote, Queen of Tonga 420 Salvation Army 97, 101, 177, 266, 277, 283–4 Samoa 394–7 Samson, Matt 334 sanctification 140, 242–3, 246, 247 Sande, Abel 64 Sandeen, Ernest 211 Sandy Creek Tradition 204–5 San Martín, José de 321 Sanneh, Lamin O. 25n8, 45, 75, 76, 78, 79, 82 Sarang Community Church, Seoul, Korea 109 Sarkis, Khalil 148, 152, 159–60 Sarkis, Salim 152–3 SBC, see Southern Baptist Convention Scandinavia 264, 280 Schmidgall, Paul 263 Schneider, Carl 270 Scofield Bible 93, 171, 243 Scofield, C. I. 171 Scopes monkey trial 171, 172, 180 Scottish Presbyterians 93 Scripture Union 47, 48, 56 Scroggie, Graham 275 secessionism: in African Christianity 23 Second Great Awakening 209, 242 Second London Confession of Faith (1677) 201 Second Vatican Council 253–4 Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity 244 Sell, Alan 274 Senyonga, Jackson 62 Separate Baptists 204–5, 209 Sepúlveda, Juan 345, 348, 349, 352 Serrano Elias, Jorge 376 Seventh-Day Adventism 402, 423, 427–8 Seymour, William Joseph 241, 246–7, 369 Shakarian, Demos 252, 254 Shakespeare, J. H. 268, 278–9, 281 Shepherd, Nicholas M. 307 Shepherding Movement 254 Sheppard, William Henry 221–2 Sierra Leone 27, 28–9, 42 Simpson, Charles 254–5 Singapore 90, 92, 97, 99, 103, 104, 107 Sio Vili 395 Six Principle Baptists 203 Skinner, Gary 62 Smith, Amanda Berry 224 Smith, Chuck 255–6 Smith, Eli 149–50 Smith, Lucy Wilmot 225 Smith, Rodney (Gipsy) 266 Smyth, John 200

Soares, R. R. 379 Social Gospel movement 367–8 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) 360, 411 Society for the Support of the Christian Churches of Peking 136 Solomon, Robert 92, 103 Solomon Islands 415 Solórzano Aldana, Sergio Daniel 376 Song, C. S. 103 Sono, Mosa 65 Soper, Donald 273 South Africa 32–3, 64–5, 221 South African Council of Churches 65 South India United Church 95 Southeast Asia 93 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) 172, 194–214 and chattel slavery 205–6 ‘The Controversy’ 198 denominationalism 213–14 formation of 205–6 International Baptist Seminary, Czech Republic 280 International Baptist Seminary, Switzerland 280 International Mission Board 405 missionaries in Philippines 404–5 Southern Baptists and American Evangelicalism 195–7 beliefs and practices 202–4 demographic and cultural realities 199–200 First Great Awakening 204–5 historical-theological identity 200–1 influences shared with Evangelicalism 208–13 public scrutiny 197–9 Triennial Convention 205 Southern Christian Leadership Conference 233 Soviet Union: evangelicalism in 285 Spanish Inquisition 359 speaking in tongues (glossolalia) 57, 62, 247 in America 243, 245–7, 248 Brazilian Baptists 328 in China 138, 139, 140–1 Holiness Movement and 246 Pentecostals and 276 Yoido Full Gospel Church, Korea 109, 113, 115 SPG (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts) 360, 411 Spiritual Gifts Movement, China 131 Spiritual Revival Church 364–5 spiritual warfare 113, 256, 377–8

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Index Star of America, The (Kawkab Amirka, English-Arabic periodical) 151–2 Stearns, Shubal 205 Stelzle, Charles 178, 179, 183 Stevens, James 392 Steward, Lyman 180 Stoll, David 317, 333, 365 Stone v. Graham (1980) 189–90 Street Pastors 305–6 Strong, Josiah 178 Stuart, John 287 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 233 Student Volunteer Movement 7n18 subjective-life 307 Sudan 41 Sunday, Billy 180, 181 Sunday Assembly 309 Sung, John 90 Swaggart, Jimmy 183, 251 Sweden 264–5, 283 Synagogue Church of All Nations, Nigeria 60 syncretism 96, 99, 349, 394, 397 Syria 145–61 biblical foundations for dissent 156–9 resistance to western missionary power 147–52 schism in Protestant community 152–61 ‘Syria and the Mission Work’ antimissionary pamphlet 148–51, 155–7, 159, 161 Tackie-Yarboi, Nii 61 Tahiti 392–3, 398 Tahiti, Henry 398 Taiwan 93 Tanzania 41, 70 Taufa, Sione 415 Taufa’ahau (King George Tupou I) of Tonga 8n20, 412, 413–14, 415–16, 420 Taylor, Hudson 93, 94 Taylor, John V. 43 Taylor, William 325–6, 340, 352 TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network) 251 Tembu National Church 32 Temple, William 282 Templo de Salomão, São Paulo 377, 379, 380 Tent Church (Daejo Full Gospel Church), Korea 112–14 tent evangelism 57 Tenui, William 398 Thailand 93, 95, 100, 104 Thatcher, Margaret 301 Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion 241 Thomas, John 412

447

Thompson, Leslie M. 419 Thomson, James 321 Thomson, William 149–50 Three-fold Blessing 113, 122 Three–Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), China 100, 127, 128, 129–30, 132–4, 135–7 three-selves strategy 28, 30n25 Tile, Nehemiah 32 Tokaikolo Christian Fellowship 428 Tomlinson, Ambrose Jessup 248 Tomlinson, Matt 394, 423 Tompkins, Oliver 401 Tonga 426–9 Church independence in 419–22 Church, state, and culture 413–15 education 426–7 female ministers 425 Methodism 410, 412–17 new denominations 427–8 Tongan Conference 420 Tongan Council of Churches 429 Toren, Christina 409–10 Toronto Blessing 256 Torregosa, José 341 Torrey, Reuben A. 266 Tow, Timothy 90 Towler, Robert 298 translation 42–9, 76–80, 102 Trinitarian Pentecostals 244 Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) 251 triumphalism 6–7 True Jesus Church (Zhen Yesu jiaohui), Beijing 131, 138–9 Trumbull, David 322–3 TSPM, see Three–Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), China Tull, James 195, 196 Tunolashe, Moses Orimolade 83 Turner, Bishop 33 Turner, Dr 401 Twumasi, Ofori 61 Uganda 40–1, 62, 70 UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) 363 Union of Regular Baptist Churches of Ontario and Quebec 172 Union of the Armenian Evangelical Churches 146 United American Methodist Episcopal 218 United Church of Canada 189 United Church of North India 95 United Churches of Christ 146, 186 United Methodists 279 United Native Africa Church 29

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448

Index

United Reformed Church (URC) 262, 282–3, 287 Uniting Church, Sweden 283 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) 363 University of Chicago 169 Urban League 231 URC, see United Reformed Church Üxküll, Baron Woldemar von 269 Van Dyck, Cornelius 149–50, 154, 161 Van Dyck Bible 158 Varani-Norton, Eta 424–5 Vatican 244 Venn, Henry 30n25, 80, 135 Vetter, Jakob 264 vicarious religion 302–6 Victory Bible Church, Ghana 61 Victory Faith Ministries, Zambia 63 Vietnam 92, 100, 107 Vingren, Gunnar 327, 328 Voas, David 297, 303, 306 Voronaev, Ivan E. 276–7 Voting Right Act (1965) 187 Wagner, C. Peter 244–5, 256–7 Walls, Andrew F. 25n9, 74, 390, 397, 406–7, 430 Walter, Karl Heinz 280 Walters, Alexander 225 Walton family 182 Wanamaker, John 150, 180 Wang Ming-dao 128, 131–2, 134, 136–7, 139–40 Wanjiru, Margaret 62–3 Ward, Kevin 362 Washington, Booker T. 224 Washington, James M. 234 Waters, Alexander 229 Watkin, J. B. 420 Watoto Church (formerly Kampala PentecostalChurch), Kampala, Uganda 62 Watson, David 265 WCC (World Council of Churches) 95, 282 Weatherhead, Leslie 273 Weber, Max 120 Wei, Isaac 131, 139 Wei, Paul Enbo 131, 138–9 Welby, Justin 308 Wells, Ida B. 228 Welsh Revival (1904–5) 264 Wesley, John 77, 92, 120, 241, 346, 350, 411 Wesleyan Church, Tonga 420, 421 Wesleyan-Holiness movement 3

Wesleyan Methodist Church 27, 32 Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS) 411 Wesleyan Methodists 279 West, Cornel 236 Westin, Gunnar 262 Westminster Confession (1644) 201 West, Morris 282 West Papua 95–6 Wetherell, David 402 Whale, J. S. 274 White Christianity 217, 218, 222–4 Willems, Emilio 329, 373 Williams, George 97 Williams, John 393, 394–5 Willis, H. O. 392 Wimber, John 256 Winchester, Olive May 277 Winners Chapel, Kenya 62 Winner’s Chapel, Nigeria 60 WMMS (Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society) 411 Wood, A. Harold 420, 421 Woodhead, Linda 300, 301–2, 307 Woodson, Carter G. 228 Woods River Baptist Association 218 Word of Faith movement 56, 57, 183 Word of God community 255 Word of Life church, Sweden 265 World Alliance of Reformed Churches 146 World Council of Churches (WCC) 95, 282 World Missionary Conference (Edinburgh, 1910) 6–7, 94, 130n11, 131 Wright, Nigel 277 Wümpelmann, Knud 282 Wutawunashe, Andrew 64 Wu Yaozong 135 Xiaoqun (Little Flock), China 93, 134, 137, 141 Yesu jiating (Jesus Family) 132–3 YMCA 97 Yoido Full Gospel Church, Korea 108–10, 112–14, 115–17 blessing 121–3 growth of 115–16 healing 121–2 speaking in tongues 109, 113, 115 Yorubaland 79–80, 83 Young, Robert 416 Youngnak Presbyterian Church, Korea 108–9 Yu, Dora 133 Yu, Guozhen 128, 130, 134 Yung, Hwa 103

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Index Zambia 40, 63, 70, 83 Zaoga (Zimbabwe Assemblies of God Africa) 63–4, 68 Zarub, As’ad 149, 151, 153, 154, 156, 159 Zhen Yesu jiaohui (True Jesus Church), Beijing 131, 138–9 Zhongguo Jidujiao zilihui (Chinese Christian Independent Church) 130–1 Zhongguo Jidutubao (The Chinese Christian magazine) 130

Zhonghua jidutuhui (Chinese Christian Union) 130 Zhonghua Yesujiao zilihui (Chinese Christian Independent Church) 130 Zimbabwe 63–4, 70 Zimbabwe Assemblies of God Africa (Zaoga) 63–4 Zionism 46–7, 54 Zulu, Alpheus 70

449