Abstract This article explores the marginalisation of Black African church leaders in the early Apostolic Faith Mission ( AFM ) in Zimbabwe (1915–1962). The main focus is on Enock Gwanzura, a pivotal figure in the growth and expansion of the AFM in Zimbabwe, whose contributions have largely been erased from official church history. Using a qualitative historiographical methodology, the study draws on interviews and unpublished archival materials from the National Archives of Zimbabwe to interrogate factors behind this diminished recognition, leading to Gwanzura’s expulsion from the church. This study reveals that White missionaries viewed Gwanzura’s ability to perform miracles with skepticism, attributing such phenomena to African spiritism rather than to manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, this theological dispute, intensified by entrenched racial discrimination, produced a deep and lasting divide. The article contributes to the discourse on Africanising the study of African Pentecostalism and recognising the agency of Africans in the rapid growth of African Christianity.
This article examines the complex negotiation of religious identity among Arabicspeaking Evangelicals in Israel, focusing on their struggle for official recognition as a religious community. In Israel, religious communities are responsible for personal status law, making affiliation with a recognized religious community essential. Civil marriage is unavailable. While Evangelicals theologically reject the notion of being Christian by birth rather than by personal faith, they must navigate a legal system that fundamentally contradicts their self-understanding. Through fieldwork conducted in Nazareth, this study analyzes how the Convention of Evangelical Churches in Israel, established in 2005, pursues official recognition while grappling with theological tensions. Despite distancing themselves rhetorically from "traditional" Christianity, Evangelicals pragmatically adopt many of its elements. This reveals how the prevailing religious framework in Israel - a reinvention of the Ottoman millet system by British colonial authorities, and continued by Israel - continues to shape Christian identity beyond individual faith convictions.
Recent studies in world Christianity have established that the missionary mothertongue Bibles contributed essentially to the rise of indigenous forms of Christianity and its meteoric growth in Africa. However, these studies hardly give attention to the background processes that advanced missionary Bible translations. Yet attention to these background processes will provide a more holistic and nuanced account of the incalculable impact of missionary Bible translations on African Christianity. Using a case study approach and through a close reading of archival data on two missionary Bible translations in West Africa: the Ga Bible (1854-1866) of the Basel Mission and the Ewe Bible (1858-1913) of the North German Mission, this article reconstructs the multi-step background processes that produced these pioneering translations in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Through this longitudinal approach, the article widens and nuances existing understanding of the creative nexus between the Bible and Christianity in Africa by arguing that the impact of missionary-translated Bibles on African Christianity was co-determined by intercultural background processes which defined the kind of biblical texts that African Christian converts read/heard and appropriated in their mother tongues.
This essay looks at the impacts of postcolonial reasoning on Christian theology today. It focuses on the influence of some trends of Postcolonialism on some forms of reasoning in contemporary Christian theology to discern both the valuable and the problematic ramifications on the understanding of theology that such trends of postcolonializing orientations leave in relation specifically to the notion of `binarism' and its traces in some relevant theological views. In the postcolonial realm of reasoning, there are scholars who claim that binarism is one of the surviving debris of colonialism, and they explain that postcolonialization means exposing binarism to serious transformation. The essay would demonstrate that, in its sustained reliance on binarity, there are trends of postcolonial theology that are still lingering within the zone of coloniality, or, one might say, floating within a nebulous sphere of pseudo-postcoloniality. By focusing on three particular concentrations in the studied postcolonial theologization circles of reasoning today, the essay demonstrates that the postcolonial theologians who endorse these orientations neither hybridized binarism to lessen its impact, nor do they subalternize and displace it to liberate the circle of theologization from it. They, rather, opt for mimicking this colonial binarism in their very postcolonial attempt at ridding theology from it. They did this by binarizing `hybridity' instead of hybridizing binarity.
This article addresses the complicated ways in which the interests of the indigenous Christian community of Egypt, known as Copts, have been represented at state and global levels. While Copts may be easily defined as a community, the representation of their interests is complicated by internal and external forces. Internally, the community has long witnessed the rivalry between Church authorities and the lay leadership. Since the late twentieth century, a restive and assertive diaspora has challenged the domestic leadership of the Copts. What is more, the involvement of global Christian and human rights groups has arisen to speak for Coptic issues as well. As a greater panoply of groups speaks up for Coptic interests, the traditional neo-millet leadership of the Coptic Orthodox Church seeks both to co-opt and harness global forces that challenge it.
Using mission diaries and sheet music preserved in the Genadendal Music Archive, the article explores how Moravian music was adapted and transformed in the eighteenthand nineteenth-century mission community of Genadendal in the South African Cape Colony. On the one hand, the article argues that Moravian practices of musical teaching and music-making in the mission of Khoisan populations must be understood as a forced cultural transfer which operated under colonial circumstances, which included claims of `white supremacy'. On the other hand, it documents an active role of the Khoisan in adopting Moravian music practice. Considering the example of choral singing by Khoisan children and the enduring tradition of the "Posaunenchor", the article invites the reader to consider to what extent music practised by the Genadendal community can be seen as an African music tradition.
Building on recent research in early modern Moravian history, this article introduces the term “Moravian Churches” to emphasise the diversity of the Moravian Church. Scholars of Moravian studies usually underline the group cohesion of a single global “Moravian Church”. Drawing on concepts such as the “network”, they privilege the cohesiveness of Moravians over the considerable inner-Moravian plurality. By contrast, this contribution explores how the global Moravian Church was a community that comprised distinct Moravian Churches. Indeed, by examining church discipline in the Moravian mission to the Black enslaved people in the Danish West Indies, it highlights the Moravians’ entanglement with the surrounding slave society. Moreover, White eighteenth-century Moravians themselves stressed that the Danish West Indian Moravian Church was dependent on several different centres, further highlighting the significance of polycentricity as an analytical tool in the study of religious plurality.
Using mission diaries and sheet music preserved in the Genadendal Music Archive, the article explores how Moravian music was adapted and transformed in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mission community of Genadendal in the South African Cape Colony. On the one hand, the article argues that Moravian practices of musical teaching and music-making in the mission of Khoisan populations must be understood as a forced cultural transfer which operated under colonial circumstances, which included claims of ‘white supremacy’. On the other hand, it documents an active role of the Khoisan in adopting Moravian music practice. Considering the example of choral singing by Khoisan children and the enduring tradition of the “ Posaunenchor ”, the article invites the reader to consider to what extent music practised by the Genadendal community can be seen as an African music tradition.
As a central component of Moravian identity, both culturally and spiritually, music- making flourished in the settlement communities of North America, continuing the musical legacy established in Europe. Often within just a few years of settlement, a collegium musicum would be formed to train musicians and provide a “wholesome” pastime for the performers. This paper explores the collegium musicum as a continual site of cultural exchange within the North American Moravian communities that served to both internally and externally define the community. This became progressively more important as German-speaking immigration grew in the nineteenth century and Germans increasingly saw themselves as the people of music. Swept up in the ensuing debate over Germanness and the place of these new immigrants in the United States, Moravians foreshadowed what would happen to other German-speaking communities as they used music to create a shared sense of identity, while also interacting with those outside.
This article discusses two letters from the formerly enslaved Euro-African Moravian evangelist Rebecca Protten (1718–1778) to her second husband, Christian Protten (1715–1769), a Euro-African of Ga-Danish descent. It argues that these seemingly trivial letters shed light on the daily life and experiences of ordinary Moravians and as such can inform theory. In doing so, this article aims to make a methodological contribution to the growing body of literature that reflects on Moravian text production and the role the circulation and communal reading of texts played in the community, focusing specifically on private letters, written by ordinary Moravians. Annotated transcriptions and translations of Rebecca’s letters are included in the article to illustrate the argument.
Syncretism is a significant concept in religious and theological discourse, that used to describe the blending of two seemingly opposing paradigms. Rooted in Greek philosophical thought, it has two motives, either a religious survival strategy or a form of contextualization. However, the legacy of colonialism and racial ideologies that promote nationalistic and purity-based frameworks have rendered syncretism pejorative in many Christian theological contexts. In response, scholars and theologians have often adopted alternative terms such as "hybridity" or "double belonging." In this article, I seek to reclaim the importance of syncretism by drawing on vernacular religious practices and arguing that these two motives are insufficient. Through the life and ministry of Kyai Ibrahim Tunggul Wulung (1800-1885), a Javanese mystic and evangelist, I propose the third motive: liberation. For marginalized communities facing interlocking forms of oppression, syncretism becomes a means of reclaiming religious agency and resisting hegemonic theo-political paradigms.
This article presents an exploratory study of one of the most significant emerging mission movements in contemporary China, Mission China 2030 (MC 2030), with a particular focus on its continuity and divergence from the Back-to-Jerusalem (BTJ) movement. Through a structured analysis, this study examines the historical origins, theological foundations, and strategic approaches of MC2030, highlighting its efforts to mobilize the Chinese church for global evangelism. While BTJ emphasized an indigenous and eschatologically charged vision, MC2030 reflects a pragmatic shift, embracing strategic planning and fostering international partnerships, particularly through its connection to the Lausanne Movement. Ultimately, the study underscores the movement's eclectic nature, integrating elements from BTJ, the Lausanne Movement, and the legacy of Western missionaries, while navigating the challenges of government restrictions and the evolving global mission context.
