ABSTRACT
Each Sunday morning, millions of people in Eastern Africa gather in Pentecostal churches to pray, sing, give their offerings and listen to sermons, just as they did in NPC Woodley that day I visited. During the eight years that I have spent in
Eastern Africa, I have met many people in the Pentecostal movement, talked to them and learned to love them. What has struck me is the diversity of people who belong to Pentecostal churches as well as the diversity of ways to be Pentecostal. Even just looking at one church, like the one above, so many different faces together shape the Pentecostal setting: the choir, the congregants, the pastors, the bishop, the women, the men, the children, the youth, and the elderly. There are the un-educated and the well-educated, the rich, the middle-class and the poor. In academic literature, some faces of this movement tend to be more common than others, such as the early African prophets and the fashionable leaders of urban mega-churches.2 Too often, ordinary believers and their everyday life are left out of the picture, as are rural areas, non-Anglophone countries, mission-initiated denominations, small or middle-sized congregations, pastors outside the eyes of the media and more traditional church services that don’t stand out as “different” from a Western point of view. There is a danger that Western academia concentrates on what is perceived as most exotic – where the Otherness of Africa and/or of Pentecostalism seems clear – missing out on the settings that are less colourful but equally important. This chapter brings some of those settings into the discussion. It does not focus on what many others have discussed in relation to Pentecostalism in Eastern Africa, such as demon-possession, spiritual warfare, healing, prosperity gospel, money and politics.3 This is not to say that these subjects are not important – they are – the aim is instead to suggest ways to broaden our understanding and look at this topic from a slightly different perspective. In this overview I aim to paint a general picture of Pentecostalism in Eastern
Africa and to look at two factors – the ritual factor and the Nordic factor – that have contributed to its growth and diversity but so far have not been sufficiently addressed by academic research. Taking as a starting point the multi-faceted nature of Pentecostalism, I explore how its diversity4 is manifested on national, organisational, theological and ritual levels in Eastern Africa. However, speaking of diversity presumes that these settings also share some similarities, an idea that I come back to throughout my discussion. I will argue that this diversity calls both for detailed historical and ethnographic studies in specific settings and for broad comparative studies where the richness of the Pentecostal tradition may be explored. Such an argument is not unique,5 but as a Swedish theologian, brought up as a child of Pentecostal missionaries to Eastern Africa and now doing ethnographic research on worship in Pentecostal/Charismatic churches in Nairobi, I hope to bring in a new perspective as well as some new sources.6
