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Pulling down strongholds: evangelism, principalities and powers and the African Pentecostal imagination.

Article Excerpt
Themes relating to overcoming, conquering, dominating, or defeating evil powers and breaking through debilitating conditions that afflict people, as seen in the ministries of Jesus Christ and of the apostles in Acts, are familiar to Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity. In fact, Pentecostals differ from other Christian traditions not simply because they believe in "speaking in tongues" but also because they emphasize the grace of the Holy Spirit in helping the believer overcome the debilitating influences of evil. Evangelism in the Pentecostal tradition, as the late founder of the Vineyard Ministries, John Wimber, usually put it, is about power encounters. The Bible is the primary source of Pentecostal theology and we may profitably begin from there. In that vein, two particular texts familiar to Pentecostal/Charismatic discourse stimulate my thinking as I reflect on the relationship between evangelism and power encounters in African Pentecostal discourse and practice.

The first has to do with Philip's ministry in Samaria that followed the persecution of the apostles in Jerusalem:

Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went. Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Christ there. When the crowds heard Philip and saw the miraculous signs he did, they all paid close attention to what he said. With shrieks, evil spirits came out of many, and many paralytics and cripples were healed. So there was great joy in that city (Acts 8:4-8).

The second text relates to how the same miracles of healing, exorcism and deliverance associated with the apostolic ministry accompanied the ministry of Paul.

God did extraordinary miracles through Paul so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and evil spirits left them (Acts 19:11-12).

In these two passages, we find that the preaching of the word of God and the ministry of "signs and wonders" were inseparable in the Acts of the Apostles and, as Pentecostals often like to point out, also in the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ. Obstacles that prevent people from realizing abundance of life in ,Jesus Christ, including sin, spiritual and physical afflictions, and other such negative influences, are in Pentecostal hermeneutics cast as "strongholds". Such strongholds must be pulled down by the authority of the risen Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit as a validation of the gospel and not as an appendix to Christian ministry. This is one way in which Pentecostal/charismatic Christians understand the words of Jesus, "You shall receive power when the Holy Ghost has come upon you" (Acts 1:8). I use the conjoined expression 'Pentecostal/charismatic' to refer to all Christians, churches and movements that believe in and value, affirm and consciously seek to work within the presence of the Holy Spirit as part of normal Christian experience. For such people and movements the power of the Holy Spirit includes his ability to grant Christians who have experienced him the authority that Christ promised they would have to witness in his name. That authority includes the power over evil spirits and demons.

Belief, experience and the Holy Spirit

The authority of the believer is itself founded on passages such as Mark 9:14-18, which some scholars have argued was not originally part of the original biblical corpus. Pentecostals will have none of that historical-critical approach to the text. The Bible for them is the authoritative word of God, and what it promises the believer must be appropriated for the expansion of God's kingdom. Thus, Pentecostals preach, speak, teach, sing about and practice these interventionist theologies, as I call them, in ways and to degrees that one cannot find in other streams of Christianity. "I/we believe in the Holy Spirit" is an aspect of the Christian creed that every Christian and church may be willing to affirm. However, for us as Pentecostal/charismatic Christians, belief and experience are always expected to move in tandem if the power of God is to be seen in evangelism. Pentecostalism is about the experience of the power of the Holy Spirit, and it is the Spirit who enables healing and the casting out of evil spirits to take place in the context of evangelism.

Christians in Africa have found the categories of power, dominion and alleviation of suffering by the power of the Spirit relevant in the general struggle with fears and insecurities within a universe in which supernatural evil is considered hyperactive. (1) Thus, classical Pentecostal spirituality, including its contemporary neo-Pentecostal or charismatic forms, is popular in Africa because its interpretation of and responses to evil are continuous with traditional religious ideas in which evil is believed to be mystically caused. In this worldview, belief and experience always belong together. For example, in her work Translating the Devil, which is based on ethnographic data concerning the Peki-Ewe of Ghana, Birgit Meyer notes how the inability of historic mission churches to take the experience of the Holy Spirit...

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