Grassroots Ecumenism in Conflict – Introduction

This Special Issue of JSAS explores the little-recognised, shifting importance of grassroots ecumenism in religious experience and public life.¹ The cases that we present come from across southern Africa, from Rwanda to Angola, to Zambia and Botswana, to South Africa and Swaziland. We match this breadth with arguments that also draw widely, for an emerging area of interest in popular religious change, with contributions from anthropology, social history, theology and religious studies. Among the ecumenical changes we discuss are, perhaps most surprisingly, ones in which counterpublics² are anti-establishment, transgressive, even disruptive, as they bring strangers together, with religious motives and moral passion,³ and oppose dominant publics in the making of public cultures.

In our cases, the ecumenical and the agonistic transform together. Most of the believers are Christians who contend, among themselves, with endemic differences and divisiveness, with entanglement in ethnic or identity politics, with dialogue that appeals for reconciliation but that risks an argumentative, not assuaging, encounter. Anti-establishment critique, condemning the theology and practice of entrenched churches, often thrives alongside or even motivates appeals for new, more inclusive unity, even extending between Christianity and other faiths, an extension labelled ‘inter-religious’. Some Christians who seek unity and fellowship do so more or less uneasily in the presence of schism and competition, occasionally to the exclusion of those castigated as not ‘real Christians’. Given their religious diversity, others take turns, sharing more or less wholeheartedly in common ritual, such as at funerals, where everyone agrees on a spiritual vision of the good death, with consolation for the bereaved. Still others find themselves in conflict over how and even whether Christians should cross over and enter into any religious co-habitation with non-Christians, for example by participating in animal sacrifice and other traditional ritual or by celebrations and rituals with Jews or Muslims and others.⁴

We focus our accounts of variable transformations in grassroots ecumenism on a series of inter-related questions. How far and in what ways is grassroots ecumenism ordinarily home-grown, spontaneous or emergent according to conflict or competition in distinctively local circumstances? Does it change radically or in response to the growth of other social and cultural movements, such as the anti-apartheid movement or nationalism, and, if so, how? When and where does it owe much to institutional ecumenism, to considered design or deliberate cultivation by national or transnational agencies such as ecumenical councils much devoted to social justice and the improvement of support for social welfare? Why, or at least how, does it come not into easy co-ordination with institutional ecumenism but into disjuncture, defence and even opposition against it or even against state-backed church unity? How is grassroots ecumenism made to wax and wane, in one form or another, under contradictory pressures in a local or national crisis?

We look to the long view, extending through the colonial and post-colonial periods and having regard for the predicaments of publics and counterpublics embracing great religious diversity. To discover the ways that grassroots ecumenism turns into many changing things, we start with the starkest extremes, and begin this special issue with accounts of popular religious change in post-conflict societies. If usually precarious or somewhat awkward in many societies, grassroots ecumenism is acutely contested or politicised in post-genocide and post-apartheid societies, perhaps most acutely in efforts towards reconciliation and forgiveness, and in post-war ordeals over silence, the spoken and the unspoken. In the second half of this special issue, the turn is from post-conflict societies and their intractable uncertainties to parts of southern Africa relatively free of the trauma of war, of festering distrust and alienation, of deeply disturbing legacies of past violation. Nevertheless, in these parts too we show that tensions prevail within and between ecumenical and anti-ecumenical processes.

But how strong is our claim positioning this special issue and its interest in grassroots ecumenism at a frontier of analysis in an emerging area of interest? One good measure of that can be seen in certain influential reviews in the anthropology and social history of forms of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. For example, in the Annual Review of Anthropology, Joel Robbins offers a rich, wide-ranging critique of approaches to these forms in ‘the current era of cultural globalization’.⁵ Outside the critique, however, is the consideration of any relation between the spread of these forms and ecumenism. Similarly, in his well-informed, illuminating and highly topical reflections as retiring editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa, David Maxwell reviews ‘African Christian Studies from the 1990s onwards and suggests new directions for research’, but he does so without drawing our attention to ecumenical issues.⁶ Most recently, writing with the historian Joel Cabrita, Maxwell foregrounds the importance of a worldwide ecumenical movement, but with grassroots ecumenism somewhat in the background. In their wide-ranging, magisterial introduction to a collection on contemporary ‘World Christianity’ – an umbrella term seen to be more or less expansive according to fashionable scholarship – Cabrita and Maxwell trace the antecedents of ‘World Christianity’ to the global ecumenical movements of the interwar years. They also examine the extent to which Christians, who view their faith as a global phenomenon, create ecumenism and imagine universal bonds.⁷

By contrast, where a few anthropologists and social historians are only beginning to tread, there is already a growing flood of work by concerned theologians and scholars of comparative religion. This concern has become so significant that, since 2013, the American Academy of Religion has supported a major section devoted to ‘inter-religion and inter-faith Studies’.⁸ At issue, among other things, is a view that the global Christian ecumenical movement has, in the 20th century, made ‘the most significant turning point in Christian history since the 16th century’.⁹

The very fact of the remarkable interest in the changing phenomena of global ecumenism makes it all the more important to consider carefully, as we do in this special issue, pioneering social research on early grassroots ecumenism in Africa. The outstanding contribution in anthropology is the one made in the late 1970s by Bennetta Jules-Rosette: on the emergence of grassroots ecumenism as it develops in an initial, embedded phase.¹⁰ Characteristic of such initial-phase grassroots ecumenism, Jules-Rosette shows, is limited boundary crossing, in several respects. It brings together in ‘religious union’ groups which are ‘doctrinally close’, indeed, once of the same church.¹¹ It is embedded and sustained in a context of socio-economic interdependence (members of a poorer church found work in the businesses of members of the richer church). Its ritual practice and organisation, like the inequality between members in daily life, is ‘asymmetrical’.¹² Jules-Rosette comprehends, also, the tenuous, ephemeral and expressly limited aspects of first-phase grassroots ecumenism – for example, collaboration in one case – at a funeral – was for that occasion only, ‘not the beginning of repeated collaboration’.¹³

The history of the modern ecumenical movement appears, overwhelmingly in the accounts of scholarly ecumenists, to be a big story of leadership, conferences, meetings and milestone councils, notably the 1910 Edinburgh Missionary Conference, the founding of the World Council of Churches in 1948 and the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65.¹⁴ An important, rich and highly illuminating complement to these histories are accounts of national ecumenism.¹⁵ The main story is about the oikumene, the inhabited universe, the whole world, as it has become a modern concern of leading Christian authorities in their debates about theological problems and their humanitarian deliberations – that is, about racism and social justice, social welfare and public service, international peace and church–state relations. Most striking is the continuing growth at the global ecumenical level of international umbrella organisations, sometimes called ‘World Communions’, about which the prominent Pentecostal ecumenist Cecil Robeck Jr. observes:

[t]he Pentecostal Council for Promoting Christian Unity functions in this way [with rich ecumenical encounters] for the Catholic Church. The World Communion of Reformed Churches, The Baptist World Alliance, the Methodist World Council, the Anglican Consultative council, and to a lesser extent, the Pentecostal World Fellowship are all examples of ‘World Communions’ that hold periodic meetings where issues, problems, opportunities and hopes with representatives and delegates throughout the world can be raised.¹⁶

Robeck makes it plain, from his own long personal experience of such World Communions,¹⁷ that close friendships develop across religious lines and that, while being a devout Pentecostal, he, like his fellow Christians of different denominations, gained access to a considerable range of Christian world leaders.¹⁸ In such worldwide ecumenical advance, a troubling concern for ecumenists has been elitism. Among them on most umbrella councils, women, students and youth have been relatively few, the overwhelming majority being men who were prominent religious authorities, distinguished by their sophisticated competence in theological interpretation and argumentation.¹⁹ Global yet highly personal networking continues to be advanced very selectively, above all for elites, in tandem with the growth of global ecumenism. Hence other troubling concerns, most strongly raised by African scholars of religion who point critically to:

(1)	The dominant role of Euro-American theology in the ecumenical movement and the difficulty of expressing the piety and theological articulation to be found in churches of the Third World, the result being that discussion and exchange are problematic;
(2)	The cerebral, verbal nature of many ecumenical activities and, at the same time, the often times superficiality of theological analysis (conditioned by the lack of common life – ‘conviviality’).20

The big story of the modern Christian ecumenical movement is, remarkably, full of controversy. It is also remarkable that, in this big story, it is the churches among the most aggressive in proselytising and with phenomenally increasing numbers that have historically long been outstandingly against ecumenism, namely the Pentecostal churches. The Pentecostals have feared the corruption of a super-church contrary to their reading of biblical texts; in modern times, from the mid 20th century onwards, they have dominantly, if not wholly, promoted anti-ecumenical doctrines and byelaws that are anti-ecumenical.²¹ Bucking the trend has been the demanding struggle for leading Pentecostal ecumenists like Cecil Robeck, Jr., who take pride in engaging in deep dialogue and even shared worship across the oikumene – across the whole world – with their fellow theologians, irrespective of their churches.

Much of this big story, focused around Christian leaders of very different churches, rehearses their disparate top-down appeals over the second half of the 20th century: their competing calls and successive pronouncements for unity, after rival models with unlike slogans and contentiously disparate visions of how Christians might come together and yet be separate or somehow distinct.²² For some ecumenists, the call is fundamentally humanitarian, for the unity of all mankind expressed, with social justice, in the brotherhood of man and the Fatherhood of God. For others, the appeal is biblical or Christological, for unity among all with faith in Jesus Christ. How to overcome the pervasive rivalry and competition with a positive, truly Christian impact down to the local level is taken to be the great challenge.

The big story is not the only story, of course. We make no claim to being the first to take up the less well-known story of grassroots ecumenism. It has significantly begun to be explored in social movement research along with the study of other social movements and their mutual impact or intertwining. For example, Graham Duncan and Anthony Egan look back on ecumenism in the anti-apartheid struggle primarily by addressing organisational developments and the leadership of prominent individuals. But they also offer this general view of the relative impact of grassroots ecumenism: ‘[a]t the base of the Church, in local communities, in youth, student and working class organisations, the type of struggle waged was more radical and more ecumenical than at the level of church hierarchy’.²³ Even more illuminating on grassroots ecumenism is North American research on ecumenism and movements for social justice and empowerment: for example, research on the civil rights movement in relation to ecumenical fellowships for popular collaboration between Catholics and Protestants following Vatican II.²⁴

Ecumenists see new frontiers for Christian unity where the modern ecumenism movement meets other social movements, such as the black consciousness movement of the 1960s. An example is the emergence of ‘Black Ecumenism’, which, according to Paul Crow, a leading ecumenical theologian, gives priority to an agenda of empowerment and liberation, and which pursues the unity of African American churches in ‘the struggle for justice, rather than theological consensus’.²⁵ Although much of Crow’s account of ecumenism in North America focuses on the leadership of clergy, such as black pastors in the National Black Evangelical Association, his account is exceptionally revealing on ecumenical dialogue and on the links between crises over the past 30 years in American churches and recent crises in long-serving ecumenical bodies and institutions.

Given the dominance of mainstream ecumenical interests, we see the need for a shift in focus: we aim in this special issue to take the big story of global and institutional ecumenism as background in order to foreground analysis of ecumenical and anti-ecumenical processes in grassroots movements.

Grassroots ecumenism, bringing people together in local settings, despite and without effacing their religious differences, is often a yearning, an ideal and a hope of highly valued religious unity and spiritual fellowship. Rarely is it a firm, unchallenged accomplishment. Indeed, ecumenism itself, seen as a modern idea in religious debate, is what the philosopher W. Gallie calls ‘an essentially contested concept’,²⁶ which significantly shifts with the times and under pressure, if within arguably reasonable limits.

Many grassroots ecumenical movements, occasions and fellowships in Africa, as elsewhere, turn out to be remarkably fragile and contested. They often arouse a disturbing tension between what is felt to be ecumenical and what is not; between the truly inclusive and the anti-ecumenical, which is exclusive; sometimes, also, national or transnational initiatives generate institutional ecumenism, which usually appeals to universal religious values and yet may become problematic locally. Given efforts on grassroots ecumenical occasions to foreground the sharing and the mutuality of the much-desired ideal, one sometimes has to read between the lines, as it were, to catch all in the background that is contentious, awkward and anti-ecumenical. Nevertheless, the subversion is not always unintentional or ephemeral; it is often unmistakeably up-front, and the occasions, especially afterwards, may be open to explicit criticism and condemnation, even by once willing participants.

Such ecumenical fragility is all the more problematic where the local history of religious tolerance is itself chequered. People are aware of having grievous memories of past religious majority–minority relations with a legacy of religious oppression over fairly long periods, and their concerns extend to the present and for the foreseeable future. They extend even more to the forceful emergence of anti-ecumenical churches or movements that condemn ‘deviation’ or ‘backsliding’ as anti-Christian; some campaign for ‘spiritual warfare and a politics of suspicion’ (see Ilana van Wyk, in this issue).

Just as boundary crossing and religious polemics about true boundaries become problematic in further developments of grassroots ecumenism, so too the cross-overs for our emerging area of interest and the very definition of its boundaries present fresh challenges. We meet these in part by revising a bold approach by Michael Warner that conceptualises the oppositional and transgressive force of counterpublics.²⁷ Warner’s idea is that discussion within counterpublics is ‘understood to contravene the rules obtaining in the world at large, being structured by alternative dispositions or protocols, making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying’.²⁸ Warner draws attention to the ways in which a counterpublic takes up a project in the transformation of strangers. But, for our purposes, his view of the counterpublic and its project is too distinctively modern, or perhaps post-modern, in that it is directed almost entirely through discourse.²⁹ Moreover, by attending mainly to queer theory and gender issues, he has very little to say directly about religious change in general or, more specifically, about ecumenism.³⁰ Following Warner, but with a departure that is valuable for our main interest, Harri Englund pushes the discussion a step forward in his edited collection.³¹ This opens debate about publics to questions of Christian public culture, though not to those of ecumenism, and it calls for more of the ‘impulse to revision’, which Englund himself sponsors, in the light of a broader yet still carefully situated perspective on religious change through grassroots ecumenism.

Modern Ecumenism, Revivalism and African Reprise

An important part of the background for much of our discussions – the making of Christian grassroots ecumenism as a modern phenomenon from the 19th century onwards – is global, if apparently American in origin. Although surprisingly neglected in standard accounts of top-down ecumenism and elite ecumenists,³² this modern history, at least in its transformative mega-event, is so familiar and well-recognised that we barely mention it elsewhere in this special issue. There are good reasons, however, for foregrounding this historical transformation and giving it a prominent place here in the introduction.

One reason is simply sharper contrast. It sets the southern African cases more in relief. Another reason is even more illuminating for modern grassroots ecumenism not only in southern Africa but in many parts of the world. This is what we can appreciate from looking closely at that background: a 20th-century ecumenical watershed as a socio-cultural accomplishment of a counterpublic – an accomplishment in its ambiguities and uncertainties, its transformation and transformative impact over time, and above all, its living legacies. Even more, by recognising in these legacies a heritage not only from America but from Africa and slavery also, we can bring into perspective a process of reprise – it is the still obscure process in grassroots ecumenism of the re-circulation of religious ideas and practices, including spirit possession, from and back to Africa via America, and even, in another step, back to Africa via Latin America, in particular Brazil, as Ilana van Wyk shows in this issue.

The following, relatively brief appreciation of that watershed takes us back to the early history of the Pentecostal movement, whose offshoots now globally loom so large. The place we come to is 312 Azusa Street, Los Angeles, and the time the early 1900s. The address 312 Azusa Street, Los Angeles, bears no visible trace of its actual or fabled significance in the greatest boom in modern Christian history. Yet there, the Apostolic Faith Mission, under the African American pastor, William J. Seymour, globalised grassroots ecumenism. Now, for short, we speak of the Azusa Street revival.

Across differences in race, gender, class, ethnicity and even national origin, a Christian avant-garde came together, beginning in April 1906, for spiritual deliverance and faith-healing at the Apostolic Faith Mission. They created a remarkably extensive counterpublic, in our terms somewhat revised from Michael Warner’s,³³ by contravening many of the rules obtaining in the world around them. Their ecstatic transgression of public norms of subordination was striking, deliberate and, indeed, scandalised in the popular press of that time.³⁴ There, too, at the Mission over three-and-a-half years, enthusiastic Christians in their thousands were speaking and singing in tongues, finding proof of Baptism in the Spirit, swooning to the ground, slain by the Holy Ghost, and proclaiming the End of Days before the Return of Jesus Christ. The prevailing ethos was that of equality before God. The practice was remarkably ecumenical in prayer and worship. It was, indeed, a ‘project for the transformation of strangers’ in their very being, and it became a global movement of indefinite extension. A break with past religious traditions became striking, as the historian David Maxwell argues for the movement’s development as Pentecostalism, ‘[b]roadly, it emerged in opposition to what Pentecostals perceived to be the corrupting influences of priestly supremacy and liberal theology in Established churches’.³⁵

In Los Angeles itself, at the time, the public signs of Christian pluralism were gloriously dazzling in the very names of a multitude of nearby churches and prayer meetings.³⁶ All of these churches adopted the signature practice of the Azusa Street revival – speaking in tongues – but hardly any shared much of the ethos of the Azusa Street Mission.

If now unmarked in Azusa Street, in its time the revival was an exceptional mega-event. It has the reputation, not entirely unchallenged, for being the birth of Pentecostalism.³⁷ As David Maxwell argues, ‘Los Angeles may well not have been the place where Pentecostalism was first born but the Azusa Street Revival was certainly the dynamo, and most subsequent revivals emerged directly or indirectly from its tutelage’.³⁸

There is a well-known origin story, some might say an origin myth, of rupture and rapture, as if the mega-event was a spontaneous happening. As this story was made famous at the time in the Los Angeles newspapers and international religious periodicals, the plot begins in a moment of rapturous unity, breaking with the past. Radical ideas and new religious experiences take hold, until, after the peak of religious enthusiasm, fragmentation follows. Early Pentecostal historians, looking back on the revival, carried this plot forward. According to their origin story, from one Apostolic Mission’s visionary, ecstatic encounter with a new spirituality came a Pentecostal multitude – it became as fragmented in passionately held difference as were the ever multiplying churches themselves. Homogeneity gave way to diversity – so goes the story. If the apocalypse remained in the offing, the change was, nevertheless, radical. Almost eclipsed was grassroots ecumenism itself.

Gaston Espinosa offers an acute insight into the continuing dynamics of the growing movements, under the extended rubric of Pentecostalism:

Pentecostals’ experience-oriented spirituality leads its people to a ‘holy restlessness’ … This creates a desire in their spiritual orientation to place a premium on direct, unmediated revelatory experiences with God, which possess some of them until they can work them off through action. They invoke them to authenticate and justify their divine callings and to pull rank on their denominational leaders … ³⁹

What dominated in the religious imagination and the expressed moral passion of the Apostolic Faith Mission was the Christian drama around Resurrection, as it culminated in the powerful encounter of the Apostles with the Holy Ghost on the Pentecost. A deep concern was this: how to restore that overwhelming moment of egalitarian oneness with God?

Many Americans in the decades of the 19th century before the birth of Pentecostalism turned to Christian travel on religious missions in long journeys, both collective for congregations and also personal for seekers as separate individuals. For the collective tradition, frontier life in the pioneer settlement of the USA had left an ecumenical legacy of prayer camps. There Christians could meet, irrespective of denomination and from remote places often without local churches of their own. The prayer camps were held in temporary tents for ecstatic revivals, praying and preaching, almost non-stop, from early in the day through the night. If strongly Methodist, it was often fervent, egalitarian fellowship and grassroots ecumenism in action.

Carrying forward this tradition, in the second half of the 19th century, small, localised congregations underwent an overriding of their boundaries through gatherings in great numbers with strangers from distant places in the moving enthusiasm of prayer camps. Participants commonly came to moments of ecstatic, egalitarian fellowship, moments of an extraordinary high in passionate religious experience. If we turn to 21st-century Africa, it is as if in the new mass prayer camps, most strikingly in West Africa, we witness a return of the same boundary-crossing and ecstatic religious experience.⁴⁰ In the USA, during the period immediately before Pentecostalism, there were also other personal religious journeys that were remarkably ecumenical. These journeys were widespread among seekers of divine empowerment and biblical truth. Itinerant preachers, some being evangelists without permanent congregations, were notable for vast travel on odysseys of their own. Many would cross the country, opening themselves and their Christian ways to training, reform and renewal under the sometimes ecumenical and egalitarian yet contradictory influences of distant faith healers, pastors or evangelists as celebrated men and women of God.

Paradoxically, in the turn toward a quest for divine empowerment in oneness with God, there emerged in late 19th-century American Christianity not unity but contention – the theological convictions and sacred practices became ever more acutely conflicting. The textual motive, driving the emergence of new counterpublics and their impact for Christian public counter-cultures, was striking. Given the idea that the more primitive the Christianity, the more holy and Godly it was, the Bible was intensely mined for original teachings of truth. The scriptures, paramount in significance for some Christians, would be secondary or ignored by others. The quest drove many Christians well beyond the established Catholic and Protestant churches. Despite the ecumenical moments, competition for worshippers, like dissent, intensified as did divisions within and between churches.

Feeding this paradoxical Christian ferment and, in turn, fed by it were other passionate changes in religious pluralism. Perhaps most important for grassroots ecumenism in the 1906 revival was the radical activism within and around the holiness movement in the second half of the 19th century. In this period, it was the holiness movement that promised the coming of a new age at one with the Apostles through the saving efficacy of good works, piety and the purity of holiness among Christians.

To the holiness movement originally belonged a good number of the leading members of the Apostolic Faith Mission, including its pastor, William Seymour. And William Seymour is the individual who stands out in the revival as the most influential protagonist of grassroots ecumenism.

For our general argument about counterpublics and grassroots ecumenism, it is important to stress an anti-establishment motive in the revival itself – it is the motive informed by eschatological ideals. The theologian Harvey Cox finds this motive for Seymour, ‘… he believed that God was sending the Holy Spirit in these latter days to purge the church of its sinful man-made divisions and to present her as a spotless bride, prepared for the coming of the divine bridegroom whose descent was expected soon’.⁴¹ Given such eschatological expectations, Seymour himself asked the question, ‘is this movement a new sect or denomination?’, and he answered it by appealing against divisive churches and for the restored unity of ‘the old-time apostolic assembly’, ‘[n]o, it [the movement] is undenominational and unsectarian. We believe in unity with Christ’s people everywhere, in the Word of God. It is the old-time apostolic assembly, the same old teaching of 1900 years ago. It is new to the world, in these last days, but its teaching and doctrine is as old as the New Testament’.⁴²

In some respects, Seymour was a classic bearer of charisma. He cultivated the ways of an exemplary figure of spiritual devotion and asceticism (at least until he married and, consequently, lost some of his most important white, female supporters and with them his newspaper);⁴³ he had his own aspirational vision, and he found his place, with a deep sense of religious mission, at the very centre of a worldwide charismatic movement. In himself, however, he was not understood to be numinous, apart from his acceptance that, like others before him, he was inspired to speak in tongues and receive Second Baptism, and, like these others, he too trusted in healing objects, such as handkerchiefs, to pass on divine healing power.

Nevertheless, Seymour did not have the magical powers or the profound authority of the charismatic figure in the model of leadership and charisma that we owe to Max Weber. If admittedly a leader, Seymour was, in a sense, not the dominant master or exceptionally empowered personality of the usual Weberian interest. Instead, Seymour was, as a religious figure, the very humble servant of God and his people among whom charisma was dispersed. Seymour was, in terms of charisma, not the leader but initially his congregation’s follower. Members of his congregation were the first to speak in tongues and appear charismatically inspired. This part of the movement’s story is necessarily abbreviated here, for present purposes of our discussion of grassroots ecumenism elsewhere.⁴⁴

Seymour’s spiritual career illuminates the impetus he gave for the development of an egalitarian ethos and grassroots ecumenism in the Azusa Street Revival. Highly important in that is the making of his personality as a servant: when still a very young man, Seymour left his family of ex-slaves in rural southern Louisiana for work in the urban north, first as a waiter in Indiana and Ohio, then back to the south and jobs in Texas. Dissatisfied with the Methodist Church, his first adult choice after his childhood baptism as a Catholic, Seymour converted to the holiness movement, in which he is said to have had the religious experience of being sanctified. In the decade before the revival, Seymour underwent a soul-searching, decade-long quest within the holiness movement. It was also his time of ascetic self-fashioning.

Seymour’s quest took him across the holiness movement, in meetings with fellow Christians and their leaders, irrespective of race and culture, in towns and rural communities. Many churches, many teachings and doctrines, if in the same broad movement: navigating within and past them was formative for the making of the revival pastor as an ecumenical, non-sectarian leader in a metropolitan centre. He became caught up, in our view of Warner’s terms, in the kind of counterpublic that

against the background of the public sphere, enables a horizon of opinion and exchange, its exchanges remain distinct from authority and can have a critical relation to power, its extent is in principle indefinite, because it is not based on a precise demographic but mediated by print, theatre, diffuse networks of talk, commerce and the like.⁴⁵

Seymour became aware of the proliferation of non-denominational missions and ministries, new evangelical circuits and radical networks of preachers, and he encountered the avalanche of printed polemics in their widely read tracts, newspapers, and other testimonial works. Eventually, as part of that avalanche, the periodical named after the Mission, The Apostolic Faith, became the organ for spreading the fabulous reputation, miraculous testimonies, and apocalyptic tidings of the revival around the world. Creating an essential narrative of charismatic renewal was largely an accomplishment of others rather than Seymour himself. Indeed, he was dependent on the narrators, so much so that, when some of them abandoned him, the global reach of his Mission contracted drastically on the way to the end of the Azusa Street revival.

During his quest, Seymour cultivated at least two things. First, he disciplined himself in praying five hours every day, a habit that became exemplary in calling up the intense dedication to prayer in the revival. For Seymour, prayer did not remain a solitary practice but one of fellowship, an experience to be shared with one and all. The Apostolic Faith Mission became exceptional for holding prayer services open to everyone seven days a week, continuous for the glory of God; and, leading by example, Seymour himself dramatically increased his own praying.

Second, Seymour held fast to this conviction: every Christian, being empowered by God, is a vessel for what theologians call ‘special revelations’, the divine communications in the present which reach beyond those in the Bible. Anyone can have ‘special revelations’ – a principle of great importance for dispersed charisma and the inclusiveness of grassroots ecumenism. This strong conviction in principle and its highly personal significance for Seymour was probably rooted in experiences of his African American childhood in Louisiana. There African American Catholics included in their popular religion much that went back to a spirituality of slave times.

Such rootedness – cultural continuity sustained with committed awareness – was an essential aspect of the motivating role that the African American pastor had to play in the grassroots ecumenism of the revival, especially at its outset. He belonged to the people who first flocked around him, not merely in his identity, being, like them, an African American of the working class, but also in his cultural and spiritual identification – he was, remarks Robeck, ‘always comfortable with worship in the African American religious tradition’,⁴⁶ and his preaching kept to a familiar African American ‘call and response form’.

Said to be meek and modest, a man of humility, having ‘a helpless dependence on God’, Seymour in his revival leadership appeared open and egalitarian. It was as if he deliberately gave himself not to pastoral dominance but primarily to conciliation and submission, and, as a former waiter, to an African American persona in being the servant of his master, Jesus. Privileging spontaneity in religious experience, he opened his Mission’s altar ecumenically and freely so that ‘anyone able to lead a prayer, give a personal testimony, sing a song, manifest some charisma, or exhort the saints was allowed to do so’.⁴⁷ None of the other revival churches near Seymour’s Apostolic Faith Mission tolerated such freedom, such inclusive grassroots ecumenism.

The institutional project – building any church as a hierarchical organisation under his leadership – was, for Pastor Seymour, hardly upheld as an intended aim for the revival. His main efforts were very deliberately ecumenical and egalitarian, aimed towards restoration of the one body of the Apostles. This levelling disposition denied the assertion of primacy by any of the churches, including his own Mission.

Almost from the outset, however, the Apostolic Faith Mission itself had to deal with threats to equality and ecumenism, with internal division and divisiveness, even when it came to speaking with tongues. For Charles Parham, the Mission’s Kansas-based founder and Pastor Seymour’s former mentor, Yiddish was his Gift of the Spirit, marking him out as the eminent missionary to the Jews in Jerusalem. For Pastor Seymour, many of his flock and eventually most Pentecostals, speaking in tongues with the Gift of the Spirit was communication with heaven and not in any foreign or other human language. Even further, Parham and Seymour fell out, irreconcilably, over equality, integrated fellowship and ecumenism in the broadest sense. Parham more than merely went along with the racism of his time in Jim Crow Kansas; he advocated a chauvinist British Israelite doctrine, elevating whites as God’s superior, chosen people; he was appalled by the ecstatic worship of blacks and whites, swooning in each other’s arms, slain to the ground together in Azusa Street. When Parham publicly condemned the enthusiasm and tried, in November 2006, to take direct control of the Los Angeles Mission, Seymour dismissed him.

If we ask about the limits to ecumenism, Christian unity and inclusive dialogue in the face of differences in class and culture, and if we pursue also the counterpublic questions of opposition to established Christian public culture, then part of the answer is surprising. The unexpected evidence reveals public and counterpublic divisions and conflict among African Americans themselves during the revival. In the Los Angeles of that time, a good number of African Americans were prosperous, professional and in the solid middle class. They played down a cultural heritage from slavery of past folk religion. Their preference was overwhelmingly for integrated branches of mainline churches or their own counterparts of mainline churches for whites. They put themselves forward as identified with an established Christian public culture, not in opposition to it.

Rather than being ecumenical in the revival, many middle-class African Americans and their churches disparaged what they saw as not truly Christian but unwelcome cult enthusiasm. The class division was all the sharper because it was also a division between newcomers and established urbanites. Many, if not most, of Los Angeles’ working-class African Americans came in a sudden influx as labourers imported by the railway at the very time of the revival. The middle-class African Americans had established themselves in the city over decades from late in the 19th century. Here difference in class, established urban life style, and culture drove pluralism at the expense of ecumenism.

Even the churches, embracing the revival, avoided a complete merger or end to their autonomy, doctrinal differences, choice teachings and special worship styles. Some perceived the revival within their own distinctive traditions of earlier revivals and religious awakenings. Still others claimed independent beginnings elsewhere than in Azusa Street. Perhaps, after all, it is fitting that 312 Azusa Street bears no landmark as the birth site of Pentecostalism. Instead, many births and re-births call for remembrance, perhaps even a cycle of revivals. For, as the historian Joe Creech argues in his revision of the celebrated Azusa Street story, ‘… pentecostalism arose from multiple pockets of revival that retained their preexisting institutional structures, theological tendencies, and social dynamics’.⁴⁸ Rapture but not rupture prevailed, as did not new fragmentation but the continuing proliferation of diversity within Pentecostalism and a precarious, unstable and, at times, subverted grassroots ecumenism. If, in the Azusa Street Mission itself, ecumenism survived briefly, its heyday hardly outlasted the end of the revival in 1907.

In retrospect, and looking towards continuing legacies or ongoing efforts at selective restoration, abstraction is tempting. What general lesson, seen in the abstract, appears most significant and illuminating? If no revival, at least in southern Africa, reaches the scale of the global mega-event, from it comes, nevertheless, the extensive and extending charismatic quest, the search for unmediated spiritual experience and ‘spiritual affinities’ with strangers,⁴⁹ and with that, and its accompanying vision of an indefinite world of chosen fellows, comes the problematic, sometimes disruptive force of dispersed charisma. Of course, it does not follow that all are included in the chosen, and for competition and conflict, the open question persists: who can be saved?

For our immediate purpose, perhaps the most general lesson is the understanding of grassroots ecumenism as a process involving reprise, recirculation between Africa and its diaspora, and ecumenical and anti-ecumenical dialectics.

Grassroots Ecumenism and Case Histories

A broad argument is advanced in the first half of this special issue, in the first article by Andrea Grant, in the second by Ramon Sarró, in the third by Annika Teppo and in the fourth by Ilana van Wyk. The argument is that grassroots ecumenism tends to change radically, and yet ambiguously, with far-reaching shifts in the political interventions made by the state. Andrea Grant discloses the ecumenical uncertainties in post-genocide Rwanda through a substantial analysis of struggles involving an autocratic state regime and between the new Pentecostal churches and the historically dominant Catholic Church. Her close observation of a public occasion, meant to be a showcase for thanksgiving and reconciliation in unity but inadvertently overcome by bitter controversy, tellingly grounds the broad argument in nuanced first-hand evidence.

Carrying our argument forward to post-war Angola, Ramon Sarró illuminates the formidable hurdles in the way of co-existence and the very possibilities for grassroots ecumenism, where the remembered burden of troubling and brutal wartime legacies, even from the ancient past, threatens to sink people in religious polemic. His fine case study provides the rare evidence for southern Africa of a problematic in-gathering of exiles from wartime sanctuary in a foreign city. They are the would-be home-comers having inherited citizenship who are actually cultural strangers, foreign in their language. They have to be accommodated, along with their imported and numerous, ever fragmenting churches; but, as Sarró shows, what is still very much in doubt is inclusion, whether the accommodation will bring the home-comers together with other Angolans in the same churches or in some everyday forms of religious fellowship. The state itself is intervening to regulate the proliferation of churches, by demanding unity in federations. Such top-down unity is contested and arouses suspicion that the institutional ecumenism is a mere trap: it is seen to be a political move for dominance by one church over others, perhaps to return to rejected colonial control, say by Catholics, or perhaps for new advantage in state or party politics; and by subverting grassroots ecumenism among tiny churches, it is counterproductive. The very upholding of Christian public culture is radically called into question. Some of the counterpublics that arise aggressively demand a public place for what Sarró calls anti-Christianity. The counterpublics’ claim that Christianity is alienating speaks to an impulse for restoration, getting back to oneself in a truly authentic way of belonging and revitalisation. According to Sarró, new churches multiply hugely, turn away from the white Jesus, devote themselves to a black as a martyr, mediator and prophet, truly theirs in a continuous tradition of their own.

For South Africa, and based on very long-term, frank, intimate research among Afrikaners, Annika Teppo offers a fresh perspective on powerfully felt moral and religious upheavals in their post-apartheid lives. There is a remarkable shift from anti-ecumenism to ecumenism. Teppo reveals that when the Afrikaners’ historically anti-ecumenical church ceased to be the state at prayer, so to speak, they found themselves no longer able to take many things for granted which, in their past, they understood, almost as an obsession and subject to much surveillance, to be ordentlikheid (being proper or decent). What is now emerging is a considerable variety of forms of grassroots ecumenism. Of those that Teppo documents, perhaps the most innovative are the Cape Town ecumenical walks, virtually pilgrimages, when South Africans, including Afrikaners, celebrate together in visiting all the local places of religion – churches, mosques and synagogues.⁵⁰ Very broadly, Teppo’s article traces the dynamic engagement of disparate publics and counterpublics in the reconstruction of Christian public culture in South Africa.

Ilana van Wyk concludes this half of our special issue with her insightful and challenging essay on one of the most controversial churches in South Africa, the Brazilian-derived Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG). Unmotivated by humanitarian interest in the public good and hardly given to charitable support for public welfare, this increasingly popular church faces exclusively in the very opposite direction, under post-apartheid conditions, to that of now more inclusive Afrikaner churches. Christian scholars might well argue that the teachings of the UCKG are quite extraordinary and stand in contradiction to orthodoxy on fellowship, kinship, solidarity, trust and unity within the Christian traditions in Africa and beyond. Two of South Africa’s major ecumenical bodies, the South African Council of Churches (SACC), and The Evangelical Alliance of South Africa (TEASA), got the South African Human Rights Commission to investigate the church but, under pressure from the UCKG’s lawyers, the Commission had to end its investigation and retract statements that it had made to the media about the church. Clearly, the UCKG struggled to protect its interests and public image, but van Wyk draws our attention also to the church’s deeply and aggressively anti-ecumenical theology with its apocalyptic vision. From the UCKG website she cites the warning of the coming of the anti-Christ that the head of the UCKG in Brazil, Bishop Macedo, gave to his congregants in South Africa against ecumenism: its supposed emphasis on ‘love and peace’ masked a dark ambition to establish a world order in which ‘one government led by the antichrist and assisted by his beast (the false prophet)’ held sway. To contextualise this anti-ecumenical appeal, van Wyk traces the responses to earlier intolerant battle cries of the head of another Brazilian Pentecostal church, Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD). These polemical attacks, which provoked violence against people of other faiths, especially Afro-Brazilians, were opposed by non-violent protests, when Afro-Brazilians were joined during grassroots ecumenical marches by Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Protestants, Buddhists and Baha’is.

What van Wyk makes plain is that the Pentecostalism imported from Brazil is extreme, devoted not to Christian peace, but to religious intolerance, opposition to reconciliation, and an unforgiving divisiveness – it is the extreme in which members are as strangers, the anonymous to each other and the would-be estranged from kin and friends. This extreme of Brazilian Pentecostalism is the same one that, following van Wyk, Linda van de Kamp now finds in Mozambique. In her acutely sensitive account of women becoming strangers in urban Pentecostalism, van de Kamp observes:

[c]onverts rarely participate in a community of engaged brothers and sisters with checks and balances where trust can be built. In contrast to Englund (2007) who concluded that Pentecostalism in Malawi was an important source for the development of civility and trust, Brazilian Pentcostalism in Mozambique (and the Universal Church in South Africa, van Wyk 2014) enhanced anonymity and distrust. Converts with problems are avoided by fellow converts. Little to no personal information is shared and Pentecostal[s] generally do not establish contact with others in church, in contrast to the AICs [African Independent Churches] and the Assemblies of God Churches I frequented.⁵¹

In a debate with mainstream academic literature, van Wyk questions whether the literature has focused adequately on the anti-ecumenical strand in South African Christianity, now promoted fiercely by the new Pentecostalism from Brazil, or whether it has sufficiently appreciated the enthusiasm with which many believers are embracing this strand’s tenets of spiritual war and its transactional approach to personal salvation and prosperity. But can we interpret their spiritual war as a fight to right a world of economic and social precarity, a fight by the unforgiving poor in their own self-interest and without misguided ‘empathy’ for others? This is a central challenge that van Wyk confronts in her article in this issue, which advances the critically engaged yet still truly empathetic account in her recent monograph on the UCKG.⁵² Part of her argument is that not all UCKG members could openly ‘fight’ this world. Instead, many resorted to a covert dual engagement. On the one hand, they did not break with local traditions held to be demonic by the church; on the other, they clandestinely attended the church. Van Wyk calls this tactic, somewhat loosely and ironically, a practical, make-do ‘ecumenism from below’, and she finds that for the believers themselves it was unsatisfactory – if they did retain important social ties, they knew that they were exposing themselves to enormous spiritual dangers. The make-do tactic actually hinders grassroots ecumenism; it obviates an ideology of a more inclusive ecumene or of an ekklesia; and van Wyk argues that it is an inadequate form of immediate social risk management.

In the second part of this special issue, and turning from the post-conflict societies in the first part, Joel Cabrita elucidates how such tensions operate over the longue durée and in relation to the intertwining of social movements, ethnic and cultural nationalism and Christian ecumenism. While focused primarily on Zionist churches – across the world from Zion City, USA, to their vastly multiplying numbers in southern Africa – and on Swazi – in their kingdom and diaspora, especially as workers in South African towns and cities – her history is broadly path-breaking. This is true not only because of its international scope, its reach from the South African Boer War through the colonial and post-independence periods (mainly the 1940s and 1970s), and its fine-grained portrayals of national and royal elites, charismatic clergy with worldwide visions and popular, locally engaged prophets. Most importantly, for our main questions, Cabrita navigates a clear course through ecumenical struggles linked to the contradictions of the Christians’ values: those that are anti-establishment and divisive, egalitarian and anti-hierarchical, on the one hand; and, on the other, those of rank and royalty and ethnic and religious unity. One ecumenical question became intensely and powerfully politicised in the nationalist and nation-building context. Was there to be one inclusive church for the one Swazi nation, a church under the king as its head, or was there to be unity in Christ, and on the way to God’s kingdom, to be realised in interdenominational collaboration irrespective of race or social class? And for the king himself, in seeking the one church in the service of his cultural nationalist aims, who were to be his allies, especially among the evangelicals and other Christians in different denominations? It might be an oversimplification to see this politicising of church unity simply in terms of a conflict between an institutional top-down ecumenism and a grassroots ecumenism but, as Cabrita shows, the very definition of religious unity was at issue in Swaziland’s struggles to bring together the nationalist and the ecumenical movements. If the nationalists directed their efforts primarily within southern African limits, it was the Zionists who advanced the broader cause, linking their grassroots ecumenism beyond local concerns to the growth of a worldwide popular movement.

If it is rare in a JSAS special issue to cover Swaziland in its political and popular religious transformations, the present coverage is all the more fruitful, because it advances an interdisciplinary dialogue between the social historian Joel Cabrita and the cultural and medical anthropologist Casey Golomski. They meet in reflections on kingship, nation-building, and projects of church or ecumenical unity, but they make their advance from their different vantage grounds: the historian’s more in the richness of the colonial and post-colonial archives on institutional ecumenism and elites; the anthropologist’s more in the highly significant nuances of present-day grassroots ecumenism very closely observed in everyday life. Like the historian Cabrita, Golomski regards the changing importance of national councils for shifts in the politics of the institutional ecumenism. His greater focus on the grassroots ecumenism enables him to clarify more of the diversity in Swaziland’s Christian publics. On this basis, he shows how the counterpublics that emerge diverge from and are even, at least at times, subversive of establishment objectives, such as the ethnic nationalism with an official religion and the unitary church project of the king and his elite circle. Golomski’s illuminating account of the considerable demanding work in making ecumenical occasions, exemplified by funerals, affords a fresh perspective on grassroots ecumenism as a popular accomplishment in co-ordinating the everyday activities of diverse Christian churches.

In the same vein, Richard Werbner carries forward to Botswana this substantial and theoretical interest in ecumenical funerals, which, he contends, are still relatively rare in Africa. Like Golomski, Werbner regards the grassroots ecumenism of funerals in the light of a broad shift. In Botswana, it is seen to be a shift from colonial religious intolerance under missionary regulation – the ‘one tribe, one church’ policy – to post-independence tolerance with increasing religious pluralism. Unlike Swaziland, Botswana has had no establishment campaigning for a state-sponsored church. With the post-colonial shift to religious tolerance in Botswana has come the heightening of a civic ethos, which, if sometimes under attack, is highly valued for decorum and formality on public occasions, including, very importantly, for the intensified sociality and conviviality of funerals. Shared, also at funerals, but even more profoundly valued by Christians, with fervour and moral passion, is their intent to co-operate for the sake of the dead, reaching towards salvation and redemption, and for the sake of the living, towards consolation. Fulfilment of this intention is often not easy, particularly in the presence of aggressively proselytising or dissenting churches. There is, however, a post-colonial accomplishment around funerals that is remarkable in its cultural and social elaboration: a meaningful space apart from any church now serves for vigils and other events; they follow a common repertoire of mourning practices, with a customary division of labour by gender; several hymn books of different churches are used; turn-taking by ministers and preachers is usual; finally, without any claim for state-sponsored religion or one church, public officials bridge the ecumenical and the civic in sermons closing the funerals. More broadly, Werbner argues, such funerals reveal the deep significance of grassroots ecumenism as a popular religious movement in everyday life.

Finally, complementary perspectives on Zambian ecumenism complete our special issue’s second half and its contrast to the ecumenical problems of post-conflict societies, which we discuss in the first half. Here the very notion of ecumenism as a movement in boundary-crossing is interrogated, from different perspectives, by the Dutch Reformed theologian and philosopher of religion Hermen Kroesbergen and the social and cultural anthropologist Thomas Kirsch. For the theologian Kroesbergen, one basic challenge arises in church–state relations. Hence his approach to the emergence of grassroots ecumenism is, first, to show it against and in tension with the changes in institutional ecumenism that come in tandem with political change in church–state relations. The old slogan, ‘one Zambia, one nation’ still resonates with the aspiration for ‘one church’. State-backed institutional ecumenism thrives in Zambia, is apparently championed by charismatics and Pentecostals in particular, and develops strongly under the impact of nationalism and state-sponsored campaigns for church unity, including the launch by the current President of a national House of Prayer and a National Day of Prayer as a public holiday – an earlier President, himself a Pentecostal, declared Zambia to be a Christian nation. Building on his analysis of these church–state relations, Kroesbergen turns to a second challenge from his perspective on grassroots ecumenism in relation to its institutional twin. He documents how a counter-tendency is gaining force. This counter-tendency conflicts with ecumenism based on church unity, and it is driven in good measure by newly multiplying ‘Ministries International’. It radically calls into question, argues Kroesbergen, long-standing assumptions about what ecumenism is taken to be. This is because, unlike a church with a well-defined congregation, most Ministries International are remarkably fluid, fashionably waxing and waning, often in ephemeral followings, according to personal tastes for a ministry style, and having ‘clients’ rather than members. As if shopping around in a religious market, suggests Kroesbergen, the clients come seeking services for well-being and prosperity, and go as individuals at will, attracted by the most popular and dominant pastors with the best charismatic reputations for spiritual power. In so far as we can still speak of grassroots ecumenism in this context – and the change is radical, Kroensbergen concludes – it is the grassroots ecumenism of increased personal choice, spiritual voluntarism, and not exclusive membership but multiple devotions – congregants of mainline churches attend their own church on Sunday morning and visit ministries in the afternoon.

It is significant that an important area of agreement is basic in the raising of questions about the phenomenology of ecumenism by the theologian Hermen Kroesbergen and the anthropologist Thomas Kirsch. Kirsch puts this area very broadly. He sees the interest in terms of theoretical debate in anthropology about the fractal person, boundary-shifting and boundary-crossing. However, their agreement foregrounds both negotiation and selection according to the situation – that is, according to situationalism. Kirsch reminds us that earlier critiques undermine the assumption that social boundaries, such as between ethnic groups or churches, are commonly clear, definite and more or less fixed. While rejecting that assumption in his study of religion in the Gwembe valley of Zambia, Kirsch starts from a recognition of the objectives of ecumenism – co-operation with good will between people from different churches or having other religious differences – and then he goes on to explain how these objectives are met in practice. Given the flexibility in socio-religious boundaries, his analysis discloses the multifaceted ‘osmotic’ processes that take place across them. Accordingly, where Kroesbergen finds ‘multiple devotions’ to be problematic for a conventional notion of ecumenism, Kirsch illuminates the situational logic by which, in religious practice with others, people alternatively stress similarity to or difference from the others – it is boundary work, and not the boundaries as such, that Kirsch finds has to be brought into the focus of analysis, and then addressed in theory. Perhaps most importantly for grassroots ecumenism, the boundary work is of the kind by which people shift religious boundaries, temporarily, to make them more inclusive. Among Gwembe Tonga, Kirsch shows, inter-congregational meetings are frequently held at Easter or Pentecost, when the invited include members of very different but selected churches as well as members of other branches of the host church. Given the stress on inclusiveness in this situation, everyone present is treated equally; all are in spiritual co-operation; grassroots ecumenism prevails. The assumption that is anti-ecumenical or simply exclusive is that those persons or churches that are not invited are beyond the pale, not ‘true’ Christians.

Part of the need for the analytic approach that Kirsch advocates is due to the prevalence among Gwembe Tonga of highly plural religious careers, as Elizabeth Colson has also shown.⁵³ Like the other Zambians studied by Kroesbergen, many Gwembe Tonga keep changing their church affiliations repeatedly, if often temporarily; and there is a common pattern of maximising possibilities to keep church membership as a personal, voluntary option. Among the important outcomes for grassroots ecumenism are the growth of Christian networks in fellowship across churches, the elaboration over a lifetime of each person’s stock of variable religious knowledge, and the cultivation of self-making as a process of spiritual engagement in a whole series of churches and traditional rituals.

To extend his perspective further, Kirsch turns to the dynamics of institutional ecumenism, as it is seen in the case of the Spirit Apostolic Church. His argument covers the situational assertion of unity or, alternatively, disunity and divisiveness, when differences were accentuated or downplayed. In the presence of the laity or outsiders, church elders make much of mutual respect, unanimity and a willingness to co-operate; alternatively, when the church elders saw fit, and when alerted to deviant practices, they did not present the church as a unified whole but claimed that truth is to be found only at their headquarters, and distanced themselves from their branches. If, in their boundary work in inter-congregational occasions, they make categorical distinctions between ‘true Christians’ and ‘non-Christians’, they distinguish in their internal boundary work between ‘real Christians’ and ‘Christians’. By pursuing this situational labelling to the dynamics of an actual congregation, having more or less temporary members, including participants come simply for a healing service, Kirsch discloses ‘fractal recursion’, a continuity in the very logic by which inclusion and exclusion is dynamically constituted through the hierarchy and levels of a church. Kirsch’s account makes it clear that the religious lives of Gwembe Tonga have to be understood in relation to wide-ranging possibilities for personal selection among changing options within a complex religious field, including disparate religious communities, Christian and non-Christian, and church and spirit-type movements. Over a lifetime, a person plays many parts, sometimes in turn, sometimes almost simultaneously. Hence Kirsch takes care to widen the initial focus of his article from Christian boundary work and meta-coding. On this basis, he brings other ecumenical effects into perspective by disclosing how processes in certain spirit-type movements, which are not Christian, are generated within the same encompassing religious pluralism as are Christian churches and their dynamics of inclusion and exclusion.

Our essays on grassroots ecumenism reach a recognised frontier where there is a challenging agenda for even more broad research. It is now more than a decade since the landmark publication, Muslim–Christian Encounters in Africa, edited by Benjamin Soares.⁵⁴ Very recently, a special section of the journal Africa brings the broader research agenda up to date.⁵⁵ Reflecting there more recently in a substantial state-of-play review, Soares observes, ‘[a]mong historians, social scientists, and scholars of religion, there has been increased recognition of the importance of studying Islam and Christianity in Africa not separately but together, as lived religions in dynamic interaction over time’.⁵⁶ In agreement with that, while advocating a bolder comparative analysis, the special issue editors, Marloes Janson and Birgit Meyer, appreciate that the making of productive analytical perspectives on the dynamic interactions of Islam and Christianity in Africa is still in a very early stage.⁵⁷ Hence Janson and Meyer call for ‘an encompassing conceptual framework that is devoted to drawing out similarities, differences and entanglements’.⁵⁸ Arguably, in relation to our own regard for grassroots ecumenism, this call needs to put a further item on the research agenda, or at least shift the weight in debate from too much on mutual transformations, with ‘similarities, differences’, and too little on entanglements. Even further, if it is useful to start the conceptualisation of entanglements with Brian Larkin’s view of a range of ‘modes of borrowing, mutual confrontation or reciprocal exchange’,⁵⁹ then an important question still remains. How are we to open out a better perspective on what, under the gross rubrics of ‘interfaith dialogue’ and ‘interfaith relations’, has been poorly documented and little analysed for Christian–Muslim encounters in Africa?

Although the answer is well beyond our present scope, in this JSAS special issue, it is worth saying that the very question itself calls for even more rethinking of alternatives in religion. There is a familiar perception of a widespread shift in direction from openness to exclusion. Michael Lambek sees this in terms of an opposition between two religious logics, one of ‘both/and’, which accommodates and includes certain alternatives, and the other of ‘either/or’, which suppresses and excludes them.⁶⁰ ‘What appears to be happening in some parts of Africa’, remarks Lambek, ‘is a shift from accepting Christianity or Islam within an inclusive both/and universe to accepting them in an exclusive either/or paradigm’ (my emphasis).⁶¹ ‘Some parts of Africa’ – it is as if Lambek is challenging us to foreground more of the other parts, or even to reconsider the familiar appearance, perhaps to allow for reprise, for a turn away from either/or exclusion and towards another version of both/and inclusion. This is the challenge that takes us to an important frontier, where grassroots ecumenism is itself unbound and calls for a perspective on a shift to being both Christian and Muslim, to being not of one religion or another but of both.

Perhaps the most outstanding study that recently addresses this challenge is Marloes Janson’s account of the West African Chrislam movement.⁶² Its leaders call for ‘unity between Christians and Muslims’, while, at the same time, they vie in rivalry for followers, for their own separate centre (mosque/church). There is, of course, a special religious context in which Chrislam emerges. In Nigeria, Chrislam thrives only in the context of enduring, long-term and highly valued religious tolerance among Yoruba in south-western Nigeria, which John Peel’s monumental work so profoundly illuminates.⁶³ In accord with that, Janson argues that ‘Chrislam can be considered a Yoruba phenomenon: it is the shared ethnicity that makes the mixing between Islam and Christianity possible’.⁶⁴ Janson shows that the movement cannot be comprehended merely in familiar terms of interfaith dialogue or syncretism or the fusion of elements from two world religions, Christianity and Islam. Instead, as the movement’s self-designation, Chrislam, declares, with membership comes the insistence on a dual religious identity, being both a Christian and a Muslim.

It is, of course, hardly novel to speak of the religious pluralism that sometimes appears communal on public occasions for participation irrespective of religious difference, and which sometimes appears personal in that the same person undergoes conversion from one religion to another, sometimes in series, back and forth. But what now calls for more attention, extending beyond the frontiers of present research on grassroots ecumenism, is the entanglement that proceeds through a process of religious straddling; a process that is not either Christian or Muslim, but, in Lambek’s terms, a religious process of both/and.

Notes

¹ This special issue arises from a conference, ‘Ecumenical Predicaments and Religious Pluralism in Southern Africa’, convened by Richard Werbner and James Amanze at the National Productivity Centre in Gaborone, 8–11 March 2015. We wish to thank the University of Botswana’s Department of Theology and Religious Studies for hosting the conference, and the Journal of Southern African Studies for a grant in support. For a report on the conference, see C. Golomski, ‘Ecumenical Predicaments and Religious Pluralism in Southern Africa, March 8–11, 2015’, Anthropology News, 55 (2015), pp. 7–8.

² For the classic and highly influential conceptualisation of counterpublics, see N. Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992), pp. 109–42.

³ On moral passion, see F. Klaits, Death in a Church of Life (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010); R. Werbner, Holy Hustlers, Schism and Prophecy (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011).

⁴ For an illuminating account of such conflict and religious co-habitation or entente in Benin, see J. Noret, ‘Sur le dos morts? Organiser des funerailles Catholiques a Abomey (Benin)’, Terrain, 62 (2014), pp. 54–69.

⁵ J. Robbins, ‘The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (2004), pp. 117–43.

⁶ D. Maxwell, ‘Writing the History of African Christianity: Reflections of an Editor’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 36, 3–4 (2006), pp. 379–99. For his comments on elite leadership and interdenominational evangelical ministries, see D. Maxwell, ‘African Instituted Churches’, in J. Middleton and J. Miller (eds), New Encyclopedia of Africa (Detroit, Thomson/Gale, 2008), p. 396; on early ecumenism, see D. Maxwell ‘The Creation of Lubaland: Missionary Science and Christian Literacy in the Making of the Luba Katanga in Belgian Congo’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 10, 3 (2016), pp. 367–92.

⁷ J. Cabrita and D. Maxwell, ‘Introduction’, in J. Cabrita, D. Maxwell and E. Wild-Wood (eds), Relocating World Christianity: Interdisciplinary Studies in Universal and Local Expressions of the Christian Faith (Leiden, Brill, 2017), pp. 121–35.

⁸ The latest programmatic statement of this interest is the following: ‘[o]ur intention is that this Group will encourage the rigorous analysis necessary to establish the contours of this emerging field. A crucial first step involves systematic attention to common terminology (interfaith, interreligious, engaged pluralism, multifaith, multireligious) and the intersection of these terms with the disciplinary approaches that are increasingly using this language (interfaith just peacemaking, comparative theology, and scriptural reasoning). Similarly, we will encourage critical analysis of both national and international interfaith organisational models and other praxis-oriented responses to religious pluralism’, American Academy of Religion, available at https://papers2015.aarweb.org/content/interreligious-and-interfaith-studies-group, retrieved 23 December 2016. The long-term development of ecumenical dialogue among theologians and religious studies scholars, but including very few social scientists, from the mid 20th century onwards, is evident in a premier journal for this area of interest, the Journal of Ecumenical Studies.

⁹ J. Chinnici, ‘Ecumenism, Civil Rights, and the Second Vatican Council’, The US Catholic Historian, 30, 3 (2012), p. 21. The phrase Chinnici cites was apparently coined in 1964 by a Protestant leader in the World Council of Churches, Paul Mincar.

¹⁰ B. Jules-Rosette, ‘Grass-Roots Ecumenism: Religious and Social Co-operation in Two Urban African Churches’, African Social Research, 23 (1977), pp. 185–216.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid., p. 214.

¹³ Ibid., p. 211.

¹⁴ C. Robeck, ‘Pentecostal Ecumenism: Overcoming the Challenges – Reaping the Rewards’, Journal of Pentecostal Theological Association, 34, 2 (2014), pp 113–32; ibid., part 2, Journal of Pentecostal Theological Association, 35,1 (2015), pp. 5–17; D. Thompson, ‘Ecumenism’, in H. Mcleod (ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity: World Christianities, c. 1914–c.2000 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 50–70; R. Rouse and S. Neill (eds), A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1537–1945, 2nd edn (London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,1967); J. Briggs, M. Oduyoye and G. Tsitsis (eds), A History of the Ecumenical Movement vol. 3, 1968–2000 (Geneva, World Council of Churches, 2004).

¹⁵ James Amanze’s rich and insightful account of national ecumenism traces the impact of the Botswana Council of Churches; J. Amanze, Ecumenism in Botswana: The Story of the Botswana Christian Council, 1964–2004 (Gaborone, Pula Press, 2006). Revealing also, for South Africa and the study of ecumenical councils at a national level (the General Missionary Council, founded in 1904, and its successors, the Christian Council of South Africa, founded in 1936, and the South African Council of Churches, founded in 1968), is D. Thomas, Christ Divided: Liberalism, Ecumenism and Race in South Africa (Pretoria, Unisa Press, 2002). Thomas makes little attempt, admittedly, to delve into ‘the collective history of people at the grass-roots level’ (p. xvi).

¹⁶ For higher-order co-ordination, the Secretaries of Christian World Communions meet annually for four days, to hear reports, pray and address problems, from ‘the persecution of Christians, to Christian–Muslim relations’. Robeck, ‘Pentecostal Ecumenism’, p. 13.

¹⁷ A highly productive historian, leading theologian and Assemblies of God minister, Cecil M. Robeck, Jr, has been in the forefront of a long-term campaign to promote ecumenism as an historic contribution of the Pentecostal movement. According to a web page of the Fuller Theological Seminary, where he is a professor, ‘Robeck has also worked on ecumenical issues for nearly 30 years with the World Council of Churches, the Vatican, the World Alliance [now Communion] of Reformed Churches, and other groups. He serves as a Consultant to the Chairman of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelisation for long-term relations with the Vatican. For the past 13 years Robeck has served on the steering committee of the Global Christian Forum. He also participated with Pope John Paul II in worship events in Rome and Assisi. For 18 years he has met annually with the Secretaries of Christian World Communions’; see Robeck’s Fuller website entry, available at http://fuller.edu/Faculty/crobeck/, retrieved 22 December 2016.

¹⁸ C. Robeck, ‘Ecumenism’, in A. Anderson, M. Bergunder, A. Droogers, and C. van der Laan (eds), Studying Global Pentecostalism (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010), pp. 300–301; see also D. Thompson, ‘The Ecumenical Network, 1920–1948’, Studies in Church History: Subsidia, 14 (2012), pp. 248–9.

¹⁹ Among ecumenists, a well-recognised and perhaps ironic fact is that the modern ecumenists’ movement gained much impetus from 19th-century Christian youth and student movements, ‘lay movements’, some of whose leaders became founders of the World Council of Churches. See R. Rouse, ‘Other Aspects of the Ecumenical Movement’, in Rouse and Neil, A History, pp. 597– 612. Friendship among these leaders is perceived to have been highly important for early and even long-term networking in the establishment of global ecumenism.

²⁰ K. Daniel, O. Nicholas, M. Joseph and N. Napoo, ‘Historical Survey of the Concept of Ecumenical Movement its Model and Contemporary Problems’, International Journal of Applied Sociology, 2, 5 (2012), p. 51.

²¹ Pentecostal ecumenists who campaigned against this tendency had more success late in the 20th century. See Robeck, ‘Pentecostal Ecumenism’, pp. 125–8.

²² Robeck, ‘Ecumenism’, pp. 290–91.

²³ G. Duncan and A. Egan, ‘The Ecumenical Struggle in South Africa: The Role of the Ecumenical Movements and Organisations in Liberation Movements to 1965’, Ecclesiastical Law Journal, 17, 3 (2015), p. 269.

²⁴ Chinnici, ‘Ecumenism’, pp. 21–49.

²⁵ P. Crow, ‘North America’, in Briggs et al. (eds), A History, p. 628; see also M. Sawyer, ‘Black Ecumenical Movements: Proponents of Social Change’, Review of Religious Research, 30, 2 (1988), pp. 151–61.

²⁶ W.B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56, 1 (1956), pp. 167–98.

²⁷ See M. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, Zone Books, 2002).

²⁸ Ibid., p. 56.

²⁹ Ibid., pp. 74–6.

³⁰ For a development of Warner’s approach that turns it to religious cassettes and the ethical, pious listener in Egypt’s counterpublic, see C. Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York, Columbia University Press, 2006), especially the attention to the affective and expressive dimensions of ‘divine speech’ in Chapter 4.

³¹ See H. Englund (ed.), Christianity and Public Culture in Africa (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2011). Englund’s fieldwork on the everyday lives of Muslims and Pentecostals in Malawi leads him to insights into the ways that their peaceful co-existence counters their polarised discourses, despite ‘occasional outbursts of intolerance’; and he highlights ‘the impossibility of insulating oneself from contact and cooperation with people who do not share one’s religious identity’ (p. 175). Englund’s finding is that, in their churches, Pentecostals enthusiastically welcome Muslims ‘because their second birth in the Holy Spirit is seen to prove the strength of Pentecostal prayer’ (p. 175).

³² Even Cecil Robeck compartmentalises the big story of global ecumenism and councils in a history separate from the grassroots ecumenism about which he writes so insightfully in his account of the Azusa Street revival, C. Robeck, The Azusa Street Mission and Revival (Nashville, Thomas Nelson Inc., 2006).

³³ My usage of counterpublic, I stress, expands, or perhaps bends, Warner’s beyond a newly modern, even post-modern, type. As indicated earlier, he identifies a counterpublic, like the public it opposes, primarily by its participation through discourse, ‘at least in theory’. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, pp. 74–5.

³⁴ G. Espinosa, William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism: A Biography and Documentary History (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2014).

³⁵ D. Maxwell, African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (Oxford, James Currey, 2006), p. 20.

³⁶ By 1906, active within walking distance of Azusa Street were, among others who joined the revival, the First New Testament Church, the Eighth and Maple Mission, the Upper Room Mission, the People’s Church, the Nazarene Church, the Vernon Mission, and the Russian Molikan prayer meeting. Robeck, The Azusa Street Mission, p. 94.

³⁷ For a strong defence against critiques of that reputation, see Espinosa, William J. Seymour. For a critique and attempt to explain the early attractiveness that the story of a single origin had for Pentecostal historians, see A. Stewart, ‘From Monogenesis to Polygenesis in Pentecostal Origins: A Survey of the Evidence from the Azusa Street, Hebden, and Mukti Missions’, PentecoStudies, 13, 2 (2014), pp. 151–72.

³⁸ Maxwell, African Gifts of the Spirit, p. 35.

³⁹ Espinosa, William J. Seymour, p. 153.

⁴⁰ M. Janson and A. Akinleye, ‘The Spiritual Highway: Religious World Making in Megacity Lagos (Nigeria)’, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, 11, 4 (2015), pp. 550–62.

⁴¹ H. Cox, ‘Foreword’, in Espinosa, William J. Seymour, p. xvi.

⁴² Espinosa, William J. Seymour, p. 198.

⁴³ On Seymour’s newspaper, The Apostolic Faith, and the importance of other Pentecostal broadsheets in the making of global Pentecostalism, see Maxwell, African Gifts, pp. 28–30, 34–5.

⁴⁴ See the major accounts in F. Bartelman, Azusa Street (South Plainfield, Bridge Publishing Inc., 1980); Robeck, The Azusa Street Mission; Espinosa, William J. Seymour. My own account draws mainly on Robeck, secondarily on Espinosa.

⁴⁵ Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 56.

⁴⁶ Robeck, The Azusa Street Mission, p. 39.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 115.

⁴⁸ J. Creech, ‘Visions of Glory: The Place of the Azusa Street Revival in Pentecostal History’, Church History 65, 3 (1996), p. 406.

⁴⁹ D. Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford, Blackwell, 1993), p. 287.

⁵⁰ Teppo’s account takes us to the ecumenical frontier where religious border-crossing extends even beyond the places of world religions to centres of popular or ‘traditional’ religion, on which see D. Coplan, ‘Land for the Ancestors: Popular Religious Pilgrimage along the South Africa–Lesotho Border’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 29, 4 (2003), pp. 976–93; R. Werbner, ‘Safe Passage for Well-Being: Substances, Sacrifice and Oracle Supplicants’, Cambridge Anthropology, 29, 3 (2009), pp. 46–68.

⁵¹ L. van de Kamp, Violent Conversion: Brazilian Pentecostalism and Urban Women in Mozambique (Oxford, Berghahn, 2016), p. 182, citing H. Englund, ‘Pentecostalism Beyond Belief: Trust and Democracy in a Malawian Township’, Africa, 77, 4 (2007), pp. 477–99; and citing I. van Wyk, The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in South Africa: A Church of Strangers (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press for the International African Institute, London, 2014).

⁵² Van Wyk, The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.

⁵³ ‘Moving in and out of churches while conforming to some and continuing to propitiate ancestors and other spirits is fairly typical’, E. Colson, Tonga Religious Life in the Twentieth Century (Lusaka, Bookworld Publishers, 2006), p. 257.

⁵⁴ B. Soares, Muslim–Christian Encounters in Africa (Leiden, Brill, 2006).

⁵⁵ M. Janson and B. Meyer (eds), part issue: ‘Studying Islam and Christianity in Africa: Moving Beyond a Bifurcated Field’, Africa, 86, 4 (2016), pp. 615–97.

⁵⁶ B. Soares, ‘Reflections on Muslim–Christian Encounters in West Africa’, Africa, 86, 4 (2016), p. 673.

⁵⁷ M. Janson and B. Meyer, ‘Introduction: Towards a Framework for the Study of Christian–Muslim Encounters in Africa’, Africa, 86, 4 (2016), pp. 615–18.

⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 615.

⁵⁹ B. Larkin, ‘Entangled Religions: Response to J.D.Y. Peel’, Africa, 86, 4 (2016), p. 635.

⁶⁰ M. Lambek, ‘Provincializing God? Provocations from an Anthropology of Religion’, in H. de Vries (ed.), Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York, Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 120–38.

⁶¹ Ibid., p. 124.

⁶² M. Janson, ‘Unity Through Diversity: A Case Study of Chrislam in Lagos’, Africa, 86, 4 (2016), pp. 646–72.

⁶³ J.D.Y. Peel, Christianity, Islam, and Oriṣa Religion: Three Traditions in Comparison and Interaction (Oakland, University of California Press, 2016). See especially Chapter 9, ‘A Century of Interplay Between Islam and Christianity’.

⁶⁴ Janson, ‘Unity Through Diversity’, p. 652.