In Africa’s new charismatic Christianity (what I previously referred to as contemporary Pentecostalism) prosperity in both its spiritual and material senses remains a major theme. This Christianity shares the supernatural worldview associated with traditional religion in which evil powers are held responsible for the problems that people face in life, including the failure to prosper materially. This much…

In my next two posts I’d like to explore the hypothesis that there is a strong relationship between the prevalence of witchcraft beliefs and accusations on the one hand and economic prosperity and social wellbeing on the other. In other words, in African societies where people experience socio-economic uplift, they tend to fear that envious…

Over 20 thousand street children, most of them orphans, roam the streets of Kinshasa. In response to the biblical call for God’s people to care for orphans, an organization of Congolese pastors led by Pastor Abel Ngolo called Equipe Pastorale Aupres des Enfants en Détresse (Pastoral Team for Children in Distress), and in partnership with…

For three years I have waited impatiently for a representative of the “global Christianity paradigm” articulated by scholars such as Andrew Walls, Philip Jenkins, Lamin Sanneh, Jehu Hanciles, and others to respond to Robert Wuthnow’s 2009 critique of their paradigm in his Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches (University of Calif Press). So…

A few nights ago a visiting pastor from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (let’s call him Rev. Basua) came to my room in Bangui, CAR where I’ve been visiting, to tell me a story about witchcraft and to show me his accompanying home-made video. The story concerned his brother-in-law (let’s call him Nzuzi), a…