Africanising the Four-self-leadership Formula in the Church of Christ in Zimbabwe

The Church of Christ in Zimbabwe (COCZ) has adopted Western philosophies of Euro-American cultures originating from the Victorian age during the Restoration Movement (RM) of the American Second Great Awakening (SGA). This exclusive, divisive and oppressive culture denied women, the poor, and the young, the opportunity to lead. The RM emphasised going back to the founding charism of the New Testament Church, with Christian unity and ecumenism as central elements. Its doctrines became rigid, denying female leadership, constitutions, central headquarters, and further ministerial formation as worldly. This study raises these aspects as indispensable to the contextualising, inculturating and incarnating framework of the gospel in an African context. This reflection takes account of the four-self-leadership formula, as inspired by Magwidi’s PhD study (2015–2021), as well as other sources like the minutes of church board meetings and contextual writings by COCZ’s local clergy. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews that were collated with written sources and heuristically interpreted by the African Cultural Hermeneutics Approach (ACHA) (Kanyoro 2002; 2001). A synthesis of missionary ideology with African narratives of the Christian faith (using ACHA) interpreted the data to understand the “how” of contextual, cultural and religious transformation in the COCZ. The study recommends new, inclusive and transformative modes of leadership empowerment for an authentic African Church.

The Men of the Fifties

This lecture looks at a second generation of exiles that left the South in the 1850s. Unlike the dissenters of the 1830s, who were influenced by the evangelical impulses of the Second Great Awakening, these exiles were motivated by sectional politics. Heightened tension over the expansion of slavery westward, the constitutionality of personal liberty laws, and the fate of fugitive slaves hardened divisions between the North and the South. Woodward argued in this lecture that abolitionism was no longer primarily a missionary movement to save the souls of slave owners from sin by bringing salvation through repentance. Hatred of the sin of slaveholding was transferred to hatred of the enslavers and their region. The dissenters of the Fifties exemplified this shift. Their outspoken condemnation of institutionalized slavery drew fire from their compatriots, forcing them to leave the region. With the notable exception of Moncure Daniel Conway, these dissenters typically came from more modest means rather than from the southern elite. These exiles included Hinton Rowan Helper, Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, Daniel Reaves Goodloe, and John Gregg Fee.

The Men of the Thirties

In this lecture Woodward charts the development of southern liberalism from the late Enlightenment to the early antebellum era when southern enslavers articulated a new defense of the institution of slavery as a positive good. Those who dissented fell under intense scrutiny, and no longer comfortable with the South’s ideological aggressiveness they left the region in exile. Woodward explains how these exiles were torn between their conscience and loyalty to families and region. The exiles of the thirties typically came from the most privileged class, from wealthy enslavers, cultured families of position and distinction. They were influenced by the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening, and especially drawn to abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld at Lane Theological Seminary. These exiled white southern abolitionists include James G. Birney; James A. Thome; and the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina.

American Evangelicalism in Black and White (1750–Present)

This chapter begins with an examination of the evangelical movement among African Americans, including the testimonies of ex-slaves and the spiritual autobiographies of George White and Jarena Lee. It then considers the role of conversion in the Second Great Awakening. Although there was no overarching unity to this awakening, the revival profoundly shaped an emerging generic Protestant evangelicalism. However, not all were pleased with this age of revivalism. John Williamson Nevin and Horace Bushnell, two products of the revival, eventually became its most vociferous critics and questioned the notion of instantaneous conversions. In the industrial age, Walter Rauschenbusch articulated a view of conversion as social reconstruction, and in the twentieth century, Billy Graham appeared as the charismatic champion of “born-again” religion. The chapter concludes with a discussion of young evangelicals who questioned the individualistic emphasis of evangelical conversion and of others who left the evangelical fold and converted to Catholicism or Orthodoxy.

“All the Baptists on the Continent”

Oliver Hart longed to see one more revival in his final years, but he died in 1795, just before the Second Great Awakening. The Baptist movement in America had been dramatically transformed during his lifetime, both in numbers and in cultural respectability. Twenty years after Hart’s death, “all the Baptists on the continent” would unite to support the foreign missionaries Ann and Adoniram Judson, thus birthing the first nationwide Baptist denomination and fulfilling a long-held desire of Hart’s. Fittingly, it was Hart’s successor at Charleston, Richard Furman, who would serve as the new denomination’s first president. Furman would also build on Hart’s lifework by overseeing the expansion of Baptist institutional life in the South during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Ultimately Hart’s dream of a united Baptist America was shattered over the issue of slavery, with the South’s Baptists clinging to his earlier position on slavery, and Northern Baptists following his later position. This chapter closes with a reflection on Hart’s enduring legacy as an early American Baptist and evangelical leader.

The Consequences of Liberty: Barton W. Stone's Democratized Rhetoric and Hermeneutics

The Cane Ridge Revival drew nearly twenty thousand participants, sparking the transformative Second Great Awakening. Barton Stone was the minister who organized and shared preaching responsibilities for the revival, and eventually, his disciples formed one of the largest American religious traditions, the Stone-Campbell Movement. In this paper, I examine portions of nine fictional dialogues published by Stone during the final year of his life, wherein he explicitly outlined the parameters of effective rhetoric or “useful preaching.” I argue that Stone developed a rhetorical theory that rebelled against authority by granting agency to the audience even in the processes of invention and interpretation, a theory that produced idiosyncratic theological convictions and a movement practically incapable of confessional unity.

Prophetic Authority

This book is about how Joseph Smith established religious authority and a long-lasting, complex priesthood structure. The thesis of this book builds on three scholars’ major ideas about religious authority and Mormonism in the antebellum United States. In an effort to move the conversation toward politics and its relationship to religion, Porterfield focused on the constraint of populism. Though it is true that Mormonism grew, as Hatch shows, from the populist appeal of a lay priesthood and communal living in early Mormonism, Flake demonstrates that the Mormon priesthood was hierarchical. Left just outside the focus of the work of Hatch, Porterfield, and Flake is the role of Joseph Smith defining Mormon authority—a role that has not been fully examined. Smith’s authority grew in opposition to the civic and political authority that evangelicals were garnering and as a countertrend to the populist religious movements of the Second Great Awakening. In fact, Smith’s prophetic voice and scripture formed a hierarchical priesthood structure that eventually empowered every male member of his church to become a prophet, priest, and king, although they answered to each leader above them within the same structure. Reinforced by that structure, Smith’s prophetic voice became the arbiter of authority. It had the ultimate power to create and guide, and it was used to form a strong lay priesthood order in a stable hierarchical democracy devoid of the kind of democratic political authority that evangelicals fostered.

“The Writing of the Fruit of Thy Loins”

Although it has frequently been acknowledged that first-person narration is a crucial component of The Book of Mormon’s structure, no critic has fully analyzed the nature of narrative voice in The Book of Mormon or placed its prophetic voice in historical context. This essay shows how the centrality of first-person prophet–narrators in The Book of Mormon fundamentally changed the standard narrative practice of scripture. The piece situates the text’s prophetic voice in the context of early nineteenth-century religious culture: a world of evangelical preachers, self-proclaimed prophets, historicist biblical scholars, literary Transcendentalism, and popular spiritualist mediumship—all of which produce texts that collapse narrative categories and transform the relationship between human and divine. In doing so, it moves beyond the commonplace that personal revelation is the primary distinction of LDS and Second Great Awakening–era scriptural and spiritual practice; instead, its key characteristic is the always-mediated nature of that revelation.

Presbyterians and Ethics

The history of ethics in the Presbyterian Church has been shaped by the theological commitments of Reformed theology, the church’s ecumenical and interreligious encounters, its interactions with the wider cultures in which it functions, and its global scope. Consequently, Presbyterian ethics have become increasingly diverse, culturally diffused, ecumenically directed, and frequently divisive. That said, its history can helpfully be divided into three lengthy periods. In the first (roughly from the church’s origins in 1559 to the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century), theology, ethics, and politics are so interwound that distinguishing one from the others is difficult. In the second (roughly from the Second Great Awakening to the end of World War II), moral concerns emerge as forces that drive the church’s theology and polity. And in the third (for which proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 might be a heuristically helpful starting point), ethics increasingly functions in ways that are only loosely tethered to either Reformed theology or polity. The strength of the church’s social witness, the consistency of its global engagements, and the failings of its internecine strife are all evident during its five-hundred-year history.

Alexander Crummell and the Anti-Slavery Dilemma of the Episcopal Church

Alexander Crummell's application to enter the General Theological Seminary in 1839 was problematic for the Episcopal Church. Admitting the African American abolitionist would have exacerbated divisions over slavery within a denomination still recovering from the American Revolution and the Second Great Awakening. The Church's increasing financial dependence on its upper-class members was a further complication. In Northern states the social elite supported anti-abolitionist violence, whilst in the South support for the Church came predominantly from slaveholders, who opposed any form of abolitionism. In order to safeguard the Episcopal Church's future, the denomination had to reject Crummell's application.