A number of years ago at a conference in Hamburg, Germany, a European theologian asked me a question after my presentation on African Pentecostalism and World Christianity: “Why do your people [Africans] spend so much time praying about everything?” My answer was simple: “unlike you, when we pray ‘give us this day our daily bread,’…

Christians understand God to work in various ways. God created and sustains the universe, an ordered universe. The fact that gravity works in consistent, rather than capricious, ways is God’s good gift. As with sunshine and rain (Mt. 5:45), gravity is given through providence both to the just and unjust. When, through science, we study…

The accounts and experiences of miracles are pervasive among Christians in Africa. Millions of people claim this experience. It is incontrovertible that the miraculous is a significant part of the Christian experience in Africa. As Craig Keener says in his two-volume work Miracles, this phenomenon cannot be easily dismissed. The experience of miracles in Africa…

The topic to be discussed in the present Areopagite is quite intriguing: why do Christians outside the West experience God’s miraculous activities more than Western Christians? This question can be crucial to understanding the quintessence of Christian faith. Before trying to answer it, I would like to define the popular word “miracle” first in light…

Anyone who has talked to missionaries or has heard Christians from majority world cultures give their testimonies knows the experience. Such believers often have remarkable stories to share, supernatural encounters with God and with other spiritual entities: speaking in tongues, miraculous healings, exorcisms, witchcraft, you name it. Meanwhile, here you are, trained at a Western…

What, if anything, has divine providence to do with disability? This is the opening question of Reinders’s book. For me, there is no ‘if anything’ about it. This is one of the most pressing questions that could possibly be asked. The question of what divine providence has to do with suffering was instrumental in my…

We sometimes speak as if it would be enough just to see a miracle, longing to be astounded. We wonder why God heals one person but permits another to suffer and die. In this sixth week of Easter, we recall that God himself suffered and died, and that the miracles described in the gospels have…