CHARISMATIC CHRISTIANITY There Is Much Debate Surrounding The

CHAPTER TWO CHARISMATIC CHRISTIANITY There is much debate surrounding the appropriate use of terms to identify a growing number of Christians who t loosely into the catego- ries “charismatic” and “Pentecostal”. Both have speci c meanings: the former term has tended to be applied to the “Charismatic Movement” within the mainline Catholic and Protestant churches; the latter to the classical Pentecostal churches which stem from the religious revival of early twentieth-century America. Both mainline Charismatic and classical Pentecostal Christians are characterised by a concern with the experience of the Holy Spirit and the practice of spiritual gifts. Since the late 1970s, however, signi cant growth has occurred among a group of Christian churches or “ministries”, which strictly speaking are neither “Pentecostal” in the classic sense nor “Charismatic” even though they are characterised by the practice of spiritual gifts and the power of the Holy Spirit. These newer groups are not part of the Charismatic Movement proper because they are non-denominational, and neither do they necessarily adhere strictly to the doctrinal concerns of classical Pentecostalism, such as “initial evidence” (“speaking in tongues” to con rm a conversion experience). Sometimes these newer groups are called “neo-Pentecostal” or simply “new” to denote their more recent origins and to distinguish them from classical American forms of Pentecostalism. Statistics suggest that there may be as many as 500 million Chris- tians worldwide who fall into the Pentecostal/charismatic category,1 but 1 Walter J. Hollenweger, Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1997, 1. David Martin estimates a slightly more “conservative” 250 million (Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, 1). The Pentecostal/charismatic phenomenon is global, its in uence having spread to large parts of Africa and Asia, especially Korea (Boo Woong Yoo, “Response to Korean Shamanism by the Pentecostal Churches”, in International Review of Missions, 75, 1986, 70–4; Sung-Ho Kim, “Rapid Modernisation and the Future of Korean Christianity”, in Religion, 32, 2000, 27–37, which suggests that Korean Pentecostalism is actually in decline). Its rapid growth in Latin America has led some to suggest that the Catholic majority is “turning Protestant” (David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), and in Europe, its 36 chapter two deciding on satisfactory terms to describe the various manifestations of the charismatic and Pentecostal phenomenon is not an easy task and I tend to agree with Allan Anderson that it is better to speak of “a range of Pentecostalisms” to denote such diversity.2 However, Walter Hollenweger’s three-fold de nition, which Anderson also uses, provides a useful guide. Hollenweger distinguishes between (1) Classical Pente- costals; (2) the Charismatic renewal movement; and (3) Pentecostal or “Pentecostal-like” independent churches.3 The Ghanaian churches examined in this book fall into the third category, though I do not intend to dwell on the issue of where exactly they should be located on the Pentecostal/charismatic spectrum. It suf\ ces for my purposes to describe empirically the main character- istics of Ghana’s Pentecostal-like churches, which hereafter are called “charismatic”, “new” and “born-again” interchangeably. Where I speak of the Pentecostal/charismatic phenomenon cross-culturally, as I do in this chapter, unless stated otherwise the terms “charismatic” and “Pentecostal” are used in their broader sense to mean “a range of Pentecostalisms”. The “New” Charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity Given the dif\ culties with determining what Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity is, it may be helpful to begin by explaining what it is not. Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity is not religious fundamentalism,4 even though some Pentecostals may have a “fundamentalistic” popularity is evident among diaspora communities (see, for example, Nicole Rodriguez Toulis, Believing Identity: Pentecostalism and the Mediation of Jamaican Ethnicity and Gender in England, Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997). 2 Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity, Cam- bridge: CUP, 2004, 10. 3 Hollenweger, Pentecostalism, 1. 4 Despite earlier references to the spread of “fundamentalist Christianity” in Africa and Latin America (Paul Gifford, The New Crusaders: Christianity and the New Right in Southern Africa, London and Concord, MA: Pluto, 1991, 96), Bruce argues that the term “fundamentalist” is so tied to its American roots that it is simply not appropriate in the context of the “third world”. This is the case even though the term has been expanded since the publication of “The Fundamentals” in 1920 to include “the most conservative expression of some religious bloc”. He adds that the term should be used with some caution because it has often been used as a term of abuse by some liberal strands of religion to denigrate more conservative circles for a perceived lack of intellectual maturity (Steve Bruce, Fundamentalism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, 12). Although Brouwer, Gifford and Rose remark that the terms “fundamentalist”, .

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