African Charismatic Movements and Pentecostalism – The Inevitable Architects That Must Be Included in a New Global Faith
Before African Pentecostalism faced external accusations of fanaticism, a deeper wound had already formed: the internalization of marginalization. Colonial mission Christianity imported not only the gospel but a hierarchy of souls. It taught, often subtly, that African ways of praying, dancing, dreaming, and encountering the Spirit were primitive or demonic. Over generations, this seeped into the psyche of the converted, creating a people who hungered for their mystical inheritance even while learning to police and despise it.
This tension sits at the heart of the African Pentecostal/Charismatic experience. The same spirituality that promises liberation has sometimes carried self-hatred. Believers were taught that ancestral spirits are demons, drumming is devilish, and deliverance from “African traditions” marks true salvation. This leaves many in an impossible position: yearning for the familiar while treating it as forbidden.
Yet in the dust of poverty, political instability, and exclusion, this mysticism has become the adaptive science and technology of the vulnerable. Loud worship, prophetic utterances, ecstatic prayer, and deliverance services function as communal vents, releasing suppressed grief, rage, and despair into the presence of a God who acts powerfully and immediately. These are not mere emotional excess but spiritual technologies that help traumatized communities survive and find meaning where systemic solutions have failed.
As explored earlier in “Reclaiming the Familiar: Reframing Pentecostal Praxis for Liberating Peacebuilding,” the invitation is to reclaim indigenous spiritual resonances and reframe doctrines like spiritual warfare and deliverance through the lens of shalom. This means moving beyond externalizing problems toward embodied peacebuilding in covenant communities, starting precisely where Pentecostals already stand.
Any honest reframing must also confront the dark sides of Pentecostalism, both in Africa and the West. Scholars like Emmanuel Katongole author of Sacrifice of Africa, 
among other books, have illuminated how Christianity in Africa can mirror and perpetuate cycles of violence, tribalism, exclusion, and unaddressed trauma rather than interrupting them. Mysticism flourishes especially among the marginalized, often unchecked. When ignored or downplayed, its cement hardens. Spiritual warfare language and exorcism practices, while powerful, can sometimes serve as a mask for real social, economic, and psychological issues that demand concrete address; poverty, ethnic division, gender-based harm, and political complicity.
Pentecostals have walked this road for decades. Abrupt deconstruction risks the collapse of faith for many. Therefore, renewal must begin with what is already familiar: the language of the Spirit, power encounters, deliverance, and warfare against principalities. A peacebuilding orientation does not dismiss these but deepens and redirects them. It patiently invites Pentecostals to name xenophobia as a spirit to be exorcised, homophobia as a stronghold that binds communities, nepotism and ethnic prejudice as principalities that divide the body of Christ, and internalized colonial shame as a curse that requires collective deliverance.
This approach honors the experiential core of Pentecostal faith while confronting how unhealed internal wounds seek external targets. The same framework that binds the brokenhearted has at times scapegoated the visible vulnerable, the immigrant, the sexual minority, the “other” tribe, rather than confronting systems of extraction and the lingering effects of colonial trauma. When structural poverty feels like a curse, it becomes easier to resent competitors for scarce resources than to pursue systemic justice. A liberating praxis must preach deliverance not only from poverty but from the need for scapegoats.
How do we move toward a Mysticism of Inclusion and Justice?
Authentic Pentecostal praxis for Africa and the global church requires prophetic repentance from internalized marginalization. In covenant small groups, where theology is hammered out in the dust of daily life, this lesson must be central: the marginalized cannot afford to become marginalizers. Mysticism without justice slides into escapism; power encounters without love become domination. By reframing spiritual warfare to target these very strongholds of exclusion, Pentecostalism can reclaim its fire for the one new humanity of Ephesians 2.
This integration enriches conversations like the recent Post-Evangelical Collective (PEC) gathering in Boston. With Charismatic and Pentecostal expressions comprising roughly 80% of African evangelicals, these movements are not peripheral, they are the inevitable architects of any credible global renewal. Africa must sit at the center, not as a mission field or case study, but as co-creator. Its emphasis on the immediate power of the Spirit, holistic engagement with body, soul, community, and cosmos, and resilience amid vulnerability offers a vital corrective to disembodied Western theologies.
African Charismatic mysticism is not backward fanaticism. It is a contextual technology of resilience, prophetic imagination, communal healing, and hope against despair. When its fire turns toward inclusion; dancing not over enemies but with strangers, the sexually diverse, foreigners, and every wounded soul, it fully reclaims the familiar.
The familiar is not a weapon. It is a womb. From that womb, a different Africa and a different global Christianity can be born: one grounded in shalom, where spiritual warfare liberates rather than divides, and where the Spirit empowers justice, reconciliation, and the flourishing of all.
As a Baptist pastor and seminary graduate outside the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement, I write with deep respect. For too long, Baptists and Charismatics have viewed each other with suspicion. Yet the African Pentecostal witness is the dominant expression of Christianity on the continent and an essential gift to the global church. In this moment of post-evangelical discernment, let us move beyond old tribalisms into covenant partnership. Shalom demands that Africa and its vibrant Charismatic heart, helps build the house we all long to inhabit.
Read more about the author: Philip Kakungulu
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