Africa Afire

Here’s a curious thing: the church in Kenya has some striking similarities to first century Christianity. It’s more than just passing similarities of fellowship or support in the face of adversity. There are things that happen here that are practically repetitions of events recorded in the Book of Acts or Paul’s epistles. Overwhelmingly, these events and trends center around a single reality. What’s that reality, you ask? Why, dear reader, it is none other than the sort of otherworldly manifestation of the Holy Spirit that started at the Pentecost following the Ascension of Christ, and continued to be so prevalent in early church Sabbaths and worship services.

But let’s back up for a second, because that is a huge, startling, somewhat uncomfortable assertion that makes a lot of people, including myself at times, very suspicious. We hear Holy Spirit-fueled Pentecostalism, and we start looking for the wires and mirrors. So let me offer some background, throw out a few facts from a class discussion, and then you can decide whether you want to listen to my thoughts on the charismatic bonanza that is the Church in East Africa.

Most churches here are Pentecostal. I don’t mean that most churches are planted by Pentecostal denominations, nor that Pentecostal groups tend to be the most popular. I mean that churches in general are predominantly Pentecostal. Denominations indigenous to this continent are almost exclusively Pentecostal. The foreign denominations that do the best are largely Pentecostal as well. But the most telling phenomenon is that sects that would not be Pentecostal in other contexts, that might even officially disavow Pentecostalism, have dozens of Pentecostal congregations here. Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans: you name it, there’s a Pentecostal version here.

Indulge me while I give a brief lesson in Pentecostalism for my unholy non-rolling readers. Pentecostalism is so called because it is the theological system based on the miraculous, demonstrative gifts of the Holy Spirit first evidenced among the followers of Christ at Pentecost. The story is in Acts 2, and it goes about like this: All of the Apostles and assorted other disciples of Christ are following Jesus’ instruction to be cool and lay low in Jerusalem until they receive this other manifestation of God. At the first Pentecost—a harvest festival (I think) in Judaism that occurs roughly forty days after Passover—after Jesus tells them this, they’re all together in the morning and suddenly there’s tornado-type sound and fire from Heaven appears, hovering over them, and they start doing all sorts of crazy things. They speak in different foreign languages that they’ve never learned, and even angelic tongues. They start prophesying different things. The whole scene is so rambunctious that it becomes the focal point of the city for the day, with people from all over the world who are in town for Pentecost listening to what’s going on and speculating about it—the predominant view being that they’re all just hammered drunk. But then people start realizing that, regardless of the fact that they don’t speak the same language, they can all understand what’s being said. In the middle of this boisterous, perplexing, deafening spectacle that’s pouring out into the street, good old St. Peter stands up and gives a sermon explaining that, rather than being drunk, these guys are being filled with the Spirit of God. The sign and Peter’s interpretation are so convincing that three thousand people come to the disciples’ faith that same day. From that point on, these miraculous signs of the Holy Spirit, along with miraculous healings, become a distinguishing characteristic of Christianity during the first few centuries A.D.

Fast-forward about one and a half millennia. The Holy Spirit gifts have come to be regarded by the church across the world as a thing of the past, miracles that were important for the first Christians but that have been replaced by sound doctrine, established sacraments, and the teaching and work of the Church through the centuries. Then some Methodists in the hills of the Southeastern U.S. get the idea that true Christians should do more than just attend Church, believe the right things, and carry on with life as usual. They decide that Christians need to live differently from everyone else on earth, and place a huge emphasis on righteous living and adherence to the ethical behaviors listed in various places in the New Testament.

They consider this true holiness, and so come to be known as the Holiness Movement. Their communities get established, and then, a few generations down the road, some of them start experiencing the gifts of the Spirit that were thought to have passed away with the Early Church. About the time, certain Methodist revivals in the Southeast (Kentucky and Tennessee, mostly, I think) start experiencing the same things. So, the Holiness folks and the ones from those revivals that experience this Pentecostal phenomena join up and start their own church based on the assumption that other Christians are generally right, but they’ve missed this crucial part of Christianity that the Holy Spirit has shown them. Since then, Pentecostalism has become the focal point for several American denominations. Furthermore, in the last fifty years or so, as non-denominational churches have emerged, many have been open to this kind of thing. However, since they haven’t wanted to adopt the whole theological systems of the Pentecostal churches, they have opted to accept the label “charismatic,” which I’m pretty sure they didn’t come up with but have since been happy to wear.

Now, a few disclaimers. First of all, I’m not trying to persuade you to accept Pentecostalism as such. I’m reporting what I’ve observed, and trying to understand it in a systematic way. Secondly, the last two paragraphs are just what I remember from a couple of books, a couple of college Religious Studies classes, and things I’ve heard. Any particular fact may be wrong, and this isn’t a complete picture of global Pentecostalism, but I’m confident that it’s pretty accurate overall. And, meta-narrative notice number three, I’ll use the terms Pentecostal and charismatic interchangeably, because I’m not talking about whole theological systems here, and because the Africans don’t much seem to care about the distinctions. Now, move with me to modern Africa.

Here in Kenya, the controversy over Pentecostalism that exist in the modern West and that has waxed and waned in Christian theology ever since the first century looks very different. As I’ve said, the Pentecostals aren’t a fringe minority here. They’re a large majority, and the question isn’t so much a debate between the religious establishment’s theology and the small faction’s new discovery as it is a huge majority saying, “Look what keeps happening. Will you join us?” And the most common answer is yes, even among congregations beholden to theological systems that haven’t the least trace of Pentecostalism in North America or Europe. I’m told the situation is much the same in the churches of South America and Southeast Asia, but I can’t speak with any authority to that.

In Kenya, this perceived presence of the Holy Spirit takes a large number of different forms. One of the most common, and I think perhaps the most palatable for non-Kenyans, is the empowerment of their pastors. Many, maybe even most, pastors here have little or no training, and it is the widely-held belief of my friends and students here that the Holy Spirit is the only possible explanation for why these unschooled men can be such effective ministers. These are people with high school educations, usually, who work normal jobs as maintenance men or shopkeepers or factory workers nine to five, six days a week. But at some point, they feel a call to share what they have come to believe about God, so they begin a preaching career. Take my good friend Peter Rono, for example. Peter was a taxi driver with a basic education who was supporting a growing family when he felt that God wanted him to become a pastor. Now Peter is a Bible college student with an unusual depth of insight who does great work at theology in his second language. He has had nearly inexplicable success at this unexpected new course of study and career, and when he couldn’t figure out how to pay for the rest of the program, his estranged brother called him up for the first time in years and told him that he wanted to pay for Peter to go to school. Nor is this story uncommon, even among the small student body of Discipleship College. Under-qualified, uneducated people across Kenya deliver powerful sermons every week, and are receiving miraculous provision to pursue seminary and ordination in their various denominations. The story kind of reminds me of some redneck commercial fishermen from a place in northern Israel who suddenly had an ability to preach incredible sermons and who started the world’s most prominent religion.

But the wonders of the Kenyan churches don’t stop with their pastors, nor with qualifying the called. People experience large, boisterous manifestations of the Holy Spirit often enough that it isn’t unexpected, and people report glacellalia (the possibly-misspelled academic term for speaking in tongues), miraculous healings, and other “signs and wonders” across the country. It has become such a presence in their churches and such an important aspect of their faith that Kenyans have left non-Pentecostal churches in droves. Nor is this an exclusively Kenyan trend. My Ugandan and Rawandan students tell me that the situation is much the same in their countries. Indeed, the most heartfelt and adamant defense of charismatic work that I’ve heard here came from my Rawandan student Janvier.

Janvier came to faith because his mother was healed after seven years of illness. Her story reminds me of the story of the Woman with the Issue of Blood from the gospels, where we get the famous line from Jesus, “Who touched me?” Janvier’s mother contracted some kind of intestinal disease that sounds to me like a major foodbourne illness. She went to several doctors over those seven years, but the disease was resistant to all treatment. Finally, although her family wasn’t religious, she allowed a neighborhood pastor to pray for her. She was healed suddenly and surprisingly, as if the past seven years had never happened. The event was so startling that Janvier, already a young adult at the time, decided to change his whole belief system and became a Christian. Another incident later led him to decide to enter into ministry.

This kind of thing happens all the time here. Most of my information comes from a couple of class discussions I had with five students, and as I pressed to find the differences in their various experiences and see how they each understood what had been happening, one commonality emerged. All of these people had experienced God, through his Holy Spirit, in some miraculous way. They were a set of people including three different nationalities, both sexes, various socio-economic classes, and ages from early twenties to mid-fifties. Yet every one of them had multiple stories of having experienced or been close to incidences of speaking in tongues, prophecy, miraculous healing, and other more individualized empowerments that seemed utterly miraculous. It was even more clear and concrete than my young years spent in a Pentecostal denomination (I tipped my hand there, see?). It was like stepping right back into the Early Church and seeing all the things we take for biblical history as present reality.

So, that’s the situation on the ground here, which in itself is interesting as a social phenomenon and as a religious trend. But I’m not just telling a story or reporting a trend. I’m also asking a question, and maybe even cautiously leveling something of an indictment. Forgive me if you think it inappropriate, but I shall state it nonetheless: Why don’t we see this in America? Could it be that we are missing something very important and very real, which we’ve been missing, by and large, for centuries?

Let’s talk about Tim Tebow: everyone else is doing it. And, let me go ahead and say that I know nearly nothing of football, as evidenced by the fact that I’m not sure whether I’ve got his surname spelled correctly. Anyway, I do know enough to know that people have some strong opinions about Tebow, which seem to me to come down to him either being a rare paragon of faith in modern popular culture, or a self-righteous and overly pushy football player who receives attention out of proportion to his ability, due to his faith. One of my friends who knows a good deal more than I about sports, though, once postulated something. He noted that a lot of people seemed to be waiting to see what would happen to Tebow; essentially, to see when and how Tebow would fail. He argued that the reason for this might be that people don’t want to have to live up to the Tebow standard. They don’t want to believe that they need to live out their faith more openly, and so they find reasons to make those who do into either super-people or sub-humans. Either way, those people aren’t normal people, so the rest of us can just go about our lives and not have to do any better or worse.

I’d heard about this situation in Africa in passing a few different times before coming here, but no one made a big deal out of it. And, now that I’ve been on the ground and seen and heard a few things here, that strikes me as truly odd. If the Spirit of God really is here doing miraculous healing and giving people all sorts of supernatural abilities, shouldn’t we be making it into a big deal? Maybe the Kenyans are wrong, theologically mistaken or rationally deficient. But maybe it’s not them. Maybe we’ve got Holy Spirit brand Tebow syndrome, and it’s just easier to treat stories about this kind of thing as distant realities that don’t have to apply to us. They are either better than we can hope for, or worse, but they don’t have any bearing on our world. Or do they?

Here in Kenya, they have a word for non-Pentecostal churches. The churches that doctrinally refuse the theology of Pentecostalism and deny the legitimacy of charismatic gifts are losing membership rapidly. They’ve already lost the majority presence in Kenya, and are beginning to struggle just to remain significant. Catholic, Mainline Protestant, Evangelical, Jehovah’s Witness and Mormons alike find themselves in much the same position. The Kenyans have seen this, and they have a name that they apply to all such churches, regardless of doctrinal rigor, exuberance, financial wellbeing or international clout. They call them, “Religious.” If you’re keeping score at home, you probably just lost points. That is, if the Kenyans are right.

Now, let me give you an explanation that may make you a little more comfortable. I can see where one might think that I’m implying that our churches are without the Holy Spirit. I’m not saying that. If we are doing anything worthwhile in America, which we are, then it can only be through the Spirit of God in some way or another. I think it perfectly reasonable to assert that we have the same access to and presence of the Holy Spirit as the Africans. It’s just manifested differently, for whatever reason. It could be that God has chosen not to relate to us the same way that He relates to the Kenyans. Just as likely, it could be that in our theological resistance to the Holy Spirit, we have reasoned ourselves out of Pentecostalism. It could be that God, in allowing us the great gift of our free will, has decided that if we are intentionally set against charismatic gifts, then He will respect our decision as His children. That, I think, would be a pity, but it’s not theological or spiritual suicide.

Yet I’ve heard arguments that are rather more assertive than a simple theological rejection of the Holy Spirit in response to the presence of such phenomena. See, there are churches all across the States, North America, and Europe that see Pentecostal gifts all the time, so it isn’t as if whatever is going on in Africa simply doesn’t happen on our civilized continents. In response to this, there are those who go much farther than to argue that these phenomena are out of place, or exaggerated. Many assert ardently that any charismatic experience of the Holy Spirit beyond what is reported in the Bible is a fiction, perpetuated by the ignorance of its audience. So, let’s talk about Historical Arrogance.

Historical Arrogance is an increasingly observable tendency of our society to assume that our ancestors believed wrongly, and were generally ignorant, superstitious peasants because of their ignorance of our modern scientific knowledge and philosophical sophistication, and their illiteracy. You can observe it in the term “Dark Ages.” There’s this idea that for a long time in history, everyone was really dumb, which is why we have all sorts of fairytales emerging out of this time, and why there weren’t any real advances in science or philosophy until the Renaissance. But the problem is that the more we study our predecessors, the more we find that they weren’t so dumb as we often imagine. As it turns out, there were miniature Renaissances throughout the Dark Ages, like the Carolingian one, and that there was all kinds of good philosophy being done, it just wasn’t the kind of philosophy our Greco-Roman-influenced system prefers. Many people want to dismiss anything before the Enlightenment as part of a pitiable lack of intellectual rigor, worsened by a nearly insurmountable weight of superstition. Yet continually, when we study the writings and philosophy of these early ages, we find that it is we who are prejudiced. The ancient Egyptians wrote a book of philosophy, for example, that speaks of a fascinating and complex system of social ethics. Thousands of such things exist, and we are slowly coming to see that people have never been all that much less intelligent than ourselves. They have just been less refined, and even that is up for debate. The reason this is important is that this same historical arrogance is applied to reports of miracles, including most of those surrounding the Holy Spirit. Anything occurring after the Early Church period, and sometimes even much of what is reported there, is summarily dismissed as the hallucinations or deceptions of ignorant peasant folk who wouldn’t have had such outlandish notions if they had been able to reason and analyze properly. Yet we’re coming to find that those people were much more insightful and reasonable than we give them credit for being.

But even aside from that argument, there is another problem I’m starting to see. Kenyans hold education and science in high regard. I know of at least three children who live in mud huts yet whose parents insist that they go to school five days a week, and half a day on Saturday. If our contemporaries, who are not much less educated than ourselves, are still experiencing the sorts of phenomena that we ascribe to the ignorance and superstitions of our predecessors, then the premise for our historical arrogance is false. And if a premise fails, then the theory which is based on it likewise fails. That’s Scientific Method 101. Who are the ignorant ones then?

We can be as skeptical as we like, and indeed as skeptical as our cynical rationalist minds insist on being, but Janvier is not an idiot. The man lived in a shack that was little more than a hut, working, eating, and sleeping right beside the rest of his family. He is perfectly capable of telling whether or not a human being is ill, and he is in perfect proximity to his mother to know how serious and ongoing her disease was. If the man says that his mother was seriously ill for seven years, and then had an immediate recovery after being prayer for, it is unscientific not to accept this evidence, even if one doesn’t buy his explanation.

It then becomes a lot harder for us to dismiss the Kenyan religious experience. This isn’t to say that Pentecostalism is the only true faith, nor that there aren’t deep-seated problems in the charismatic congregations, just like everywhere else. There are problems. In fact, there are problems in spades. There are problems that were declaimed as heresies and hucksterisms by the Early Church. I know this because I grew up in a Pentecostal denomination, and I’ve seen signs of the same warts and perversions here that I saw back then. The huge emphasis on charismatic gifts often means that the importance of other gifts are diminished. There are those who go so far as to condemn the “Religious” churches, certain that they aren’t really Christians. Furthermore, if the modern Western Church has replaced the Pentecostal gifts with sound doctrine and structure, the reverse is often true in Pentecostal congregations. The experience of exciting, demonstrative contact with the Holy Spirit comes to be emphasized over the understanding of God through theology and the practice of the more basic sacraments given by that same Holy Spirit. Indeed, my student Grace tells me that one of the quickest ways to get rich in Kenya is to found a huge church and provide an overwhelming emotional experience. She jokes that she is going to take me to Nairobi, set me up in a church service as a learned doctor from America, hire a big choir and stir up an exciting spectacle, and just watch the money roll in. This scenario, meant for comedy, is more a satire of a very present reality than a wild exaggeration. Janvier even tells of people who offer lay people the chance to pay to get the Holy Spirit, and everything that goes with it. There are prophets and “miraculous” intercessors who will pray for you and promise any number of blessings. I seem to remember a certain Simon the Sorcerer who tried the same thing in the first century. St. Peter wasn’t overly impressed then, and I don’t imagine God would be too much more approving of the notion now.

There are also some very good characteristics of the American Church that come from not being purely first-century in our faith. I mean, have you ever read the Epistles to the Corinthians? Or the part in the beginning of St. John’s Revelation where Jesus starts airing the Church’s dirty laundry? The first century church was the prototypical church, and to be a prototype is to have a lot of kinks that need working out. Early Christianity was one giant, nasty beta test. But it was also a piece of Heaven on earth that most pastors and theologians, and more than a few of us lay people, wish we could get back. It was a prototype that a lot of people loved enough to die for.

I just can’t look at what’s going on here and dismiss it altogether. It may be exaggerated, by accident or for profit. But I just don’t see any way to altogether ignore or dismiss something that dominates the Church across at least a huge portion of a whole continent like this does. Then, too, there’s the fact that most of the Christians I’ve spent time with here are people with genuine faith and active devotion. If it were all just a show or hallucination, I can’t imagine that it would be so fruitful and beneficial to individuals and society as a whole here. Thus, I can’t escape the question of why things are so different between this church and the one in America. I’ve got a few guesses, influenced by the answers of students and pastors alike here and abroad.

Let’s go back to my first point that uneducated men have ministries here flourishing far beyond what I imagine the global average must be. Grace postulates that, in America, our pastors go to seminary, become educated, and are thereby qualified to preach. Here, though, their pastors have no opportunity for seminary, so they have to just make the frightening move of stepping up in front of a crowd of people, hoping and believing that God will give them the right words. The very inception of their ministry is utterly dependent on the direct intervention of God. American pastors usually don’t have to take such a large leap of faith, and they know that the system whereby they will become pastors includes at least a solid foundation of credible education. They know that the manufactured system will give them all they really need to start a ministry, so they don’t have to depend on anything else. The Kenyans have a faith-based, sink-or-swim experience, whereas we Americans get extensive swimming lessons before we get into the deep end.

Now, I’m not knocking seminary here. Actually, Kenyan pastors long to go to seminary, and their denominations and congregations often bend over backwards to find the funds that will make this possible. My point is not that training is bad, but rather that training may become a crutch when it is expected. Kenyan pastors have to act on a great deal of faith because there is no alternative: they might never receive any training at all. Faith is a necessity here. Back home, we can get by without it. And that principle, dear readers, extends far beyond ministerial leadership. Let’s talk about doctors. Grace tells me that miraculous healings here are pretty common, and follows this up by joking that if it weren’t for the Holy Spirit, no one here would get healed. But it’s not really a joke. Want to guess how many permanently practicing cancer specialists there are in Kenya, according to a radio program I heard on my miserable ride from Nairobi to Eldoret? Four. Cancer is one of the most common and lethal diseases of our modern society, and there are a total of four people in all of Kenya who specialize in treating it. Want to guess how widespread these practitioners’ treatment facilities are? One city. There is one city in Kenya that contains the entirety of the nation’s equipment and knowledge for adequate cancer treament. And most Kenyans can’t even afford the transportation to that city, much less the treatment cost. So, your treatment options if you’re among the vast majority of Kenyans who don’t live in Nairobi are basically limited to a miraculous healing or, well, that’s pretty much it. Miraculous gifts of God aren’t a nice sign here, they’re a necessity, and people are desperate enough that they’re willing to set aside their suspicions and pride and try anything that might work.

But I’m not sure it’s only necessity that makes the Holy Spirit’s presence here so prevalent. Were that the case, all the truly impoverished congregations in the States, and throughout the world for that matter, would suddenly have all their needs miraculously met and the privileged few here in Africa would restrict themselves to more mundane religious experiences. I think it may be about openness, too. I wonder if necessity is only a contributor to the real cause. Janvier’s mother had access to some doctors, albeit doctors who hadn’t the resources to treat her disease, so in her case it wasn’t purely about necessity. Instead, the ongoing inability of the doctors created an openness in her to any possible option. So, despite her family not being especially religious, she went to a pastor assuming that, since nothing else had worked, maybe God would. She was desperate enough that she was open to even an outlandish possibility that she could receive some divine intervention. And she did. Maybe it’s really about openness. Maybe the difference between the American Church in general and the Kenyan Church, even the African church, isn’t that God has chosen to related to us in different ways, but that we have chosen to be open to God, and closed off from God, in different ways.

Which brings me to the end of this little essay. Is the American Church deficient? Is what’s happening in Africa genuine? Does the Kenyan Church have something right that we have wrong? More practically, can we fix whatever deficiency may exist? I think so, but the how and why of that is a much lengthier, more controversial discussion that I’d rather have in person. Let me, then, just say this. There are some wonderful, active, fruitful congregations here in Kenya that have a great deal of faith in these Pentecostal gifts. Those congregations think of congregations that oppose such gifts as strictly “religious.” There were groups in the first century that were called “religious,” too, by the Church Fathers and even Jesus. And it was pretty much never a compliment.