TIME EUROPE
FEBRUARY 7, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 5
The Lord's Business
Christianity is booming in Africa with drums, guitars and promises of health and prosperity
By SIMON ROBINSON Monrovia
It is miracle week in Monrovia, Liberia, and inside a huge, open-sided, thatch-roofed cabana on Tubman Boulevard, some 4,000 Liberians are praying, singing and beseeching Jesus for help. Drummers thump out a beat as Reverend Isaac Winker prowls the stage shouting into a microphone: "Forgive us our sins, Father! Cure these cancers, these tumors! Get rid of blindness, get rid of lameness!" On the other side of the continent, at a lunchtime prayer service in Kisumu, Kenya, Pastor Onyeka Ezebuike roars out a similar message in a black-and-white tiled hall that was, until recently, a night club: "Poverty should be under our feet, amen! Fear should end, amen! I don't care if you had no food when you woke up this morning. You cannot go back there, amen! Reach out and accept what is coming. You deserve wealth! Yes, amen!"
In mud huts and giant tabernacles, city parks and suburban halls, Christianity is growing faster in sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else on earth. Adherents to the world's largest religion are increasing at 3.5% a year in Africa, compared with 2.5% in Latin America and Asia, and less than 1% in Europe and North America. The proportion of African Christians to all Christians has grown from one in 10 in 1970 to one in five today. On current trends, African Christians will soon outnumber European believers, leaving them second only to those in Latin America.
The spectacular growth has come in two waves: the rise of indigenous African churches during the last years of colonialism in the 1950s and '60s, and a more recent boom in evangelical and faith healing churches. Both turn the old missionary vision of Christianizing Africa on its head: by drawing on elements of traditional spirituality, African churches are transforming Christianity.
The Christian Church first came to Africa around 50 years after the death of Christ, spreading from Egypt across North Africa and south into present-day Ethiopia, where it survives in the form of the Coptic Church. Christian influence then ebbed until the 18th century when European colonizers began converting and baptizing across the continent. Christianity grew, but by the 20th century Africans had become tired of the paternalistic attitudes of many missionary and mainstream churches--
Anglican, Baptist, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist and Roman Catholic--and began seeking ways to combine traditional beliefs with their newfound faith in a Christian God.
African Independent Churches, as the breakaway movements became known, were first formed in a mood of ecclesiastical protest in the run-up to political independence following World War II. A second boom followed in the 1980s, fueled by American-style radio and TV evangelists. The first major African breakaway church--the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth, begun by Congolese preacher Simon Kimbangu in 1921--now has 6.5 million followers, including thousands in Europe. In total, there are an estimated 10,000 independent churches in Africa with new ones opening every week.
Both the A.I.C. and the evangelist churches have much in common. Most hold their services in the local language and focus on the Holy Spirit and miracles. Most mix traditional African spiritual beliefs--like ancestor veneration, witchcraft and the concept of good and bad spirits--with elements of Pentecostal worship, including drums, guitars and charismatic preachers. A growing number also embody a more fundamental theological shift away from European tradition. In place of the mainstream churches' offers of salvation in the next world for good deeds in this one, many newer African churches preach instant deliverance in the form of worldly wealth. It is this message, so-called Prosperity Theology, that appeals to the continent's poor and displaced. Says Stephen Jubwe, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Monrovia: "It is a miracle people are looking for. And they want it right here, not in the next life."
Such desires are often amplified by major social upheavals. Nigeria, for instance, experienced a Christianity boom after the 1967-70 Biafran war. "It taught us to trust God," says Pastor Ezebuike, a Kenya-based Nigerian preacher with one of Nigeria's largest churches, the Redeemed Christian Church of God. "We prayed to Him and the faith people developed became a catalyst for growth in peace times." In Liberia, where a civil war from 1990 to 1997 left more than 200,000 people dead, 1 million displaced and the economy in ruins, the number of churches has skyrocketed from 75 in pre-war Monrovia, the capital, to more than 200. "During the war people turned to religion as a means of escape. There were small daily services going on in houses across the country," says Plezzent Harris, head of the Liberian Council of Churches. "Now churches are popping up everywhere."
A drive through Monrovia provides evidence of the boom. Every few blocks a sign proclaims a new church: Faith Outreach Church; Foundation Faith Church; Blessed Hope Assembly of God; Lighthouse Mission Academy. One of the most popular is Reverend Winker's Dominion Christian Fellowship Center. Up to 5,000 Liberians attend Winker's impassioned miracle week services, held during the last seven days of every month. "In life, everybody wants joy, happiness, a place to ease the tension," he says. "Without God those daily needs cannot be met." Augustine Kar, a veteran of the civil war who now lives with 20 other former soldiers in a rundown government-provided house, sees church as a place to forget his problems: "There are no jobs for us. We never received what we expected, no compensation. Church takes us away from that." MORE>>
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