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,’…

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…

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…