Salvation in African Pentecostalism

This chapter discusses this African pneumatic broadening of salvation using three prisms: first, it offers a brief overview of the theologies that supported Protestant mission in order to identify the minimalistic and reductionist understanding of salvation that was handed down to and is still present among western founded missionary churches in Africa. Second, it probes the continuity, discontinuity and disruption arguments that were suggested by early African theology protagonists to explain Christianity’s relation to the African primal worldview so that the salvation it offers reflects African Christianity’s communal biblical worldview. And third, it explores how Africa’s newer Pentecostalism has swiftly broadened conceptions of salvation in ways that enhance the African Christian aspiration for a soteria of participation in the church, the physical community of the Kingdom of God on earth, a restoration of the vitality of health, healing and wholeness and an experience of the abundant and prosperous life. The chapter contends that African Pentecostalism has moved the salvation debate from Protestant minimalistic propositional reduction to an African pneumatic broadening which embraces all of life.