Studies in World Christianity – serie

Christian missionaries in China have been viewed as agents of Western imperialist values. Yang Huilin, leading scholar of Sino-Christian studies, has dedicated himself to re-evaluating the history of Christianity in China and sifting through intellectual and religious results of missionary efforts in China. Yang focuses upon local histories of Christianity to chronicle its enduring good. China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture illuminates the unexplored links between Christianity and Chinese culture, from Christianity and higher education in China to the rural acculturation of Christian ideology by indigenous communities. In a distinctly Chinese voice, Yang presents the legacy of Western missionaries in a new light, contributing greatly to now vigorous Sino-Christian theology.

Lida V. Nedilsky captures the public ramifications of a personal, Christian faith at the time of Hong Kong's pivotal political turmoil. From 1997 to 2008, in the much-anticipated reintegration of Hong Kong into Chinese sovereignty, she conducted detailed interviews of more than fifty Hong Kong people and then followed their daily lives, documenting their involvement at the intersection of church and state.Citizens of Hong Kong enjoy abundant membership options, both social and religious, under Hong Kong's free market culture. Whether identifying as Catholic or Protestant, or growing up in religious or secular households, Nedilsky's interviewees share an important characteristic: a story of choosing faith. Across the spheres of family and church, as well as civic organizations and workplaces, Nedilsky shows how individuals break and forge bonds, enter and exit commitments, and transform the public ends of choice itself. From this intimate, firsthand vantage point, Converts to Civil Society reveals that people's independent movements not only invigorate and shape religious community but also enliven a wider public life.

If there is one question that haunts Indian Christians, it is this: "What does it mean to be Indian and Christian?" This matter of identity presents a unique challenge, especially today, in the face of a Hindu nationalist challenge insisting that to be truly Indian, one must be Hindu. Christianity Remade, however, offers a unique path forward by studying the rise and character of Indian-initiated churches (IICs), Christian movements founded by Indians to address Indian issues, needs, and opportunities.IIC is not a common term in Indian church life or theology today. Only a few scholars have focused on Christian movements arising in India. Based on firsthand experience from research conducted through the Mylapore Institute for Indigenous Studies, Paul Joshua's groundbreaking work presents a truly striking discovery: IICs represent a pivotal, re-formative phase in the nearly twenty-century history of Indian Christianity. They result from critiques of the inherited structures and outlook of mission-founded Christianity. They respond to the deep needs of people on the lower rungs of Indian society, and they fashion their spiritual answers and modes of being from deeply Indian religious materials. Thus, they engage in a creative combination of Indian popular piety and the gospel of Jesus Christ as found in an Indian reading of the Bible.Joshua engages specific IIC movements to draw out singular contextual ingredients: the rise of Indian nationalism, the generative power of Christian revivalism, the movement for national independence, the bhakti tradition of popular Hindu devotional practice, the challenge of Hindu spiritual power, and the dynamism of contemporary urban culture. From these ingredients, and drawing on insights from postcolonial studies, Joshua reveals how a "subaltern" sensibility and vision from the margins of Indian society challenged both the colonial overlords and the mission-church hierarchs to create a Christianity made in India.

In this sweeping history, Tibebe Eshete presents a new view of Ethiopian Christianity. Synthesizing existing scholarship with original interviews and archival research, he demonstrates that the vernacular nature of the Ethiopian church played a critical role in the development of a state church. He also traces the effects of the political on the religious: the growth of other ""counter-cultural"" movements in 1960s Ethiopia, such as renewal movements, youth discontentment, and the Marxist regime (under which the church still flourished). This strikingly authentic work refutes the thesis that evangelicalism was imported. Instead, Eshete shows, it was a genuine indigenous response to cultural pressures.

Amidst a catastrophic civil war that began in 1983 and ended in 2005, many Dinka people in Sudan repudiated their inherited religious beliefs and embraced a vibrant Anglican faith. Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan chronicles the emergence of this grassroots religious movement, arguing that Christianity offered the Dinka new resources that allowed them to cope with a rapidly changing world and provided answers to the spiritual questions that war raised.Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan is rooted in extensive fieldwork in South Sudan, complemented by research in the archives of South Sudanese churches and international humanitarian organizations. The result is a detailed profile of what Christianity means to a society in the middle of intense crisis and trauma, with a particular focus on the roles of young people and women, and the ways in which the arrival of a new faith transformed existing religious traditions.Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan stakes out a new field of inquiry in African Christianity. Jesse Zink has written a must-read for all interested in the ongoing crises in Africa and, in particular, the vexed relationship between violence and religion.

In nineteenth-century Ghana, regional warfare rooted in profound social and economic transformations led thousands of displaced people to seek refuge in the small mountain kingdom of Akuapem. There they encountered missionaries from Germany whose message of sin and forgiveness struck many of these newcomers as irrelevant to their needs. However, together with Akuapem's natives, these newcomers began reformulating Christianity as a ritual tool for social and physical healing, as well as power, in a dangerous spiritual and human world. The result was Ghana's oldest African-initiated variant of Christianity: a homegrown expression of unbroken moral, political, and religious priorities.Focusing on the southeastern Gold Coast in the middle of the nineteenth century, Healing and Power in Ghana identifies patterns of indigenous reception, rejection, and reformulation of what had initially arrived, centuries earlier, as a European trade religion. Paul Grant draws on a mixture of European and indigenous sources in several languages, building on recent scholarship in world Christianity to address the question of conversion through the lens of the indigenous moral imagination. This approach considers, among other things, the conditions in which Akuapem locals and newly arrived displaced persons might find Christianity useful or applicable to their needs.This is no traditional history of the European-African religious encounter. Ghanian Christians identified the missionaries according to preexisting political and religious categories - as a new class of shrine priests. They resolved their own social crises in ways the missionaries were unable to understand. In effect, Christianity became an indigenous religion years before indigenous people converted in any appreciable numbers. By foregrounding the sacrificial idiom shared by locals, missionaries, and native thinkers, Healing and Power in Ghana presents a new model of scholarship for both West African history and world Christianity.

Dubbed the ""Billy Sunday of China"" for the staggering number of people he led to Christ, John Song has captured the imagination of generations of readers. His story, as it became popular in the West, possessed memorable, if not necessarily true, elements: Song was converted while he studied in New York at Union Theological Seminary in 1927, but his modernist professors placed him in an insane asylum because of his fundamentalism. Upon his release, he returned to China and drew enormous crowds as he introduced hundreds of thousands of people to the Old-Time Religion.In John Song: Modern Chinese Christianity and the Making of a New Man, Daryl Ireland upends conventional images of John Song and theologically conservative Chinese Christianity. Working with never before used sources, this groundbreaking book paints the picture of a man who struggled alongside his Chinese contemporaries to find a way to save their nation. Unlike reformers who attempted to update ancient traditions, and revolutionaries who tried to escape the past altogether, Song hammered out the contours of a modern Chinese life in the furnace of his revivals.With sharp storytelling and careful analysis, Ireland reveals how Song ingeniously reformulated the Christian faith so that it was transformative and transferrable throughout China and Southeast Asia. It created new men and women who thrived in the region's newly globalized cities. Song's style of Christianity continues to prove resilient and still animates the extraordinary growth of the Chinese church today.

Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, Africa has generated unique expressions of Christianity that have, in their rapid development, overtaken older forms of Christianity represented by historic missionary efforts. Similarly, African Christianity has largely displayed its rootedness in its social and cultural context. The story of Pentecostal movements in urban Kenya captures both remarkable trends. Individual accounts of churches and their leaders shed light on rich and diverse commonalities among generations of Kenya's Christian communities. Exploring the movements' religious visions in urban Africa, A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya highlights antecedent movements set against their historical, social, economic, and political contexts. Kyama Mugambi examines how, in their translation of the Gospel, innovative leaders synthesized new expressions of faith from elements of their historical and contemporary contexts. The sum of their experiences historically charts the remarkable journey of innovation, curation, and revision that attends to the process of translation and conversion in Christian history.While outlining a century of successive renewal movements in Kenya between 1920 and 2020, the study also delves into features of recent urban Pentecostal churches. Readers will find a thorough historical treatment of themes such as church structures, corporate vision, Christian formation, and theological education. The longitudinal and comparative analysis shows how these Pentecostal approaches to orality, kinship, and integrated spirituality inform Kenyans' reimagination of Christianity.

In eleven short years, from 1918 to 1929, Faith Tabernacle Congregation, a small divine healing church in Philadelphia, spread over the Guinea Coast, garnering over 250 branches and nearly 11,000 members without ever sending missionaries from the United States. Communications were made solely through the exchange of literature, letters, money, and the occasional radiogram across the Atlantic. This rapid expanse constituted a great revival: the West African Revival.In The West African Revival, Adam Mohr compiles historical documents from Faith Tabernacle's archive in Philadelphia as well as several other churches that branched from Faith Tabernacle in West Africa (mainly Ghana and Nigeria) and the United States such as the First-Century Gospel Church, the Apostolic Church, the Christ Apostolic Church, and the Church of Pentecost. Writing for an audience of scholars from the fields of African Christianity, Global Christianity, and African Studies, Mohr engages literature from the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919, African Traditional Religion (predominantly anti-witchcraft cults), the relationship of capitalism to Christianity, political and social conflict, and early Pentecostalism in West Africa.Significantly, the West African Revival was the predecessor to Pentecostalism in West Africa--Ghana and Nigeria particularly. Mohr's findings compel scholars to rethink the historical relationship of African indigenous churches to Pentecostalism in West Africa in addition to the historical relationship between South African Zionism and Nigerian Aladura.

The first Christian communities were established among the population of Hindi- and Urdu-speaking North India during the middle of the nineteenth century. The evangelical North American Presbyterian and Methodist missionaries who arrived in what were considered the Hindu heartlands discovered a social and religious landscape far more diverse than expected. With its Hindu majority and significant Muslim minority, the region also proved home to reform and renewal movements both within and beyond Hinduism. These movements had already carved out niches for religious difference, niches where Christianity took root. In Missionary Christianity and Local Religion Arun Jones documents the story of how preexisting indigenous bhakti movements and western missionary evangelicalism met to form the cornerstone for the foundational communities of North Indian Christianity. Moreover, while newly arrived missionaries may have reported their exploits as totally fresh encounters with the local population, they built their work on the existing fledgling gatherings of Christians such as European colonial officials, merchants, and soldiers, and their Indian and Eurasian family members. Jones demonstrates how foreign missionaries, Indian church leaders, and converts alike all had to negotiate the complex parameters of historic Indian religious and social institutions and cultures, as well as navigate the realities of the newly established British Empire. Missionary Christianity and Local Religion provides portrayals and analyses of the ideas, motivations, and activities of the diverse individuals who formed and nurtured a flourishing North Indian Christian movement that was both evangelical and rooted in local religious and social realities. This exploration of new Christian communities created by the confluences and divergences between American evangelical and Indian bhakti religious traditions reveals the birth and early growth of one of the many incarnations of Christianity.