Conversion Experience of Akan Christian Royals in Ghana

The study is an examination of the conversion challenges confronting Akan Christian Royals in Ghana. The Western missionaries and missionary established churches demand that as part of their conversion requirements, Akan Royals must reject and disassociate themselves from the Black Stool, ancestors and all ancestral related activities. The Royals who claim that their families have become Christian royal families insist that authority symbols like the Black Stools and ancestral ceremonies like the Adae do not take the place of the sovereignty of God and the Lordship of Christ in their belief system. Moreover, participation in Palace services prepares them for traditional leadership and does not take them away from their faith in Christ. The traditional leadership institutions and the Royals that welcomed the Western missionaries, provided them with hospitality, security and resources for the missionary work have come to be considered as unchristian and an anathema to the Christian faith. The position of the church has created tensions within Akan Christian Royal and put the genuineness of their conversion in doubt. The study which is qualitative in nature uses both primary and secondary methods in its information gathering. Its findings provide responses to some contemporary tensions in gospel and culture studies in African Christianity. Keywords: Akan Royals, Christian Conversion, Cultural Identity, Black Stool, Authority Symbols

Slavery and Freedom in Christianity

This chapter discusses the use of freedom and slavery in the writings of Paul. Dale Martin starts by outlining what we can say, from the perspective of a critical historian, about the life of Paul. The discussion covers his education, background, and conversion experience. The core of the chapter is about Paul’s use of the language of slavery and freedom. Martin argues that Paul is incorporating into his religious vision many common tropes developed in the Greek democracies. These tropes he would have picked up through his rhetorical education in Greek and used in his letter writing to his churches. The chapter closes by looking at Paul’s vision of freedom, which Martin argues is quite different from a modern individualist, conception of freedom as absolute nonconstraint. Freedom for Paul only exists within a closed system, constrained by the being of god.

This Strange Creature: Plato and Conversion Experiences

In Plato’s corpus, the Greek word ἐξαίφνης appears precisely thirty-six times. Translated generally as “all of a sudden” or “the instant” in his Parmenides, ἐξαίφνης emerges in some of the most significant passages of Plato’s dialogues. Put simply, ἐξαίφνης connotes illumination of the highest realities and philosophical conversion experience. In addition to providing a review of Plato’s conception and use of ἐξαίφνης in Parmenides, Republic, Symposium, and the Seventh Letter, our paper brings an ancillary link to light. Namely, the appearance of ἐξαίφνης as a mark for conversion experiences in the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles and Plotinus’s Enneads. We reveal how the same pattern and employment of ἐξαίφνης established by Plato emerge in both Acts and the Enneads. This pattern suggests a prolonged period of thinking and training, followed by a flash of understanding. Thus ἐξαίφνης, as evidenced by our survey of its strange instantiation in Plato’s dialogues and then subsequently in Acts and the Enneads, becomes a sign for enlightenment, assimilation with the divine, and conversion experience.

Beyond the Threshold – Autobiography, Dialogic Interaction, and Conversion in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s and W. Abdullah Quilliam’s Poetry

The intertwinement of poetic life writing and theological reflections has a long-standing history in British literature. This paper shows how two Victorian poets – Gerard Manley Hopkins and W. Abdullah Quilliam – use dialogic strategies to establish an autobiographic voice, which becomes an essential poetic means of the text. Through the representation of dialogic encounters, the poems establish an autobiographic mode of speaking, which is used to articulate individual conversion experiences and to negotiate conversion as an encounter with God. Based on the works of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, I will show how a dynamic understanding of text and conversion experience is essential to a reading that seeks to explore the poetic construction of Hopkins’s as well as Quilliam’s works. The representation of the dynamic encounter of the self and the Divine in the contact zone of the text provides a frame in which the authors locate themselves with regard to the religious majority of Victorian Britain. The texts link the spiritual journey of conversion to the self as being caught in the world, responding to God’s call as an answer to the world’s condition.

Sectarian Mysticism and Spiritual Power

This chapter explores the religious culture of Puritanism. Beginning with the amorphous, pluralistic character of early English dissenters, the chapter discusses the problem of establishing orthodoxy in Massachusetts, particularly the issues central to the Hutchinsonian crisis: sanctification as evidence of election, the conversion experience as evidence, and preparationism. From here the chapter considers the gendering of Puritan religiosity through the privileging of formal education and the rationalist preparation for grace and examines the construction of female spirituality as grounded in biology. The perceptions of woman as weak and woman as evil are developed in great detail. The chapter then places Puritan theologians’ understanding of women within a reconsideration of Puritans’ construction of sin, salvation, and election. It returns to conversion as a mystical experience available to all regardless of rank or gender, thus fostering a radical egalitarianism.

Hauntings

In 1840, the Kelsos moved to land in Missouri recently vacated by Mormons driven away after Missouri’s Mormon War. Neighbors still told ghost stories about a murdered Mormon buried in the nearby woods. But Kelso was haunted by other things. He was a strong, hard-working teenager, ashamed of his ragged clothes and dirty bare feet. Lovesick over the minister’s pretty daughter, he was also soul-sick: after experiencing a powerful conversion experience, he joined the Methodist Church, but when the feelings of God’s love faded, he worried he was doomed to hell. Pushed to the brink of suicide, he recovered to become a successful schoolteacher and Methodist exhorter.

Becoming an Agent of Change

Social movements are often regarded as the seedbeds of widescale organizational change in western economies. However, we know less about why and how actors take on the insurgent identities that motivate and enable them to play dramatic roles in the movements that facilitate such change. One argument is that actors become agents of change through some kind of common conversion experience. But such an explanation struggles to address the character and nature of the motive forces that embolden and stabilize oppositional insurgent identities that then reshape incumbent interests, systems and structures. Drawing on aspects of narrative and psychoanalytic traditions, which have both made compelling contributions to the European study of organizational change, our chapter suggests a pattern of unconscious drives, traumatic experiences and socialized narratives that aid the formation of insurgent organizational change agents.

Bishop Albert Bereczky (1893-1966) and the Revival Movement: Albert Bereczky’s Conversion

This original research paper discusses Bishop Albert Bereczky’s (1893-1966) first contacts with revivalism, especially his spiritual conversion experience during his adolescent years. Albert Bereczky, Bishop of the Danubian Church District from 1948 to 1958, was one of the most significant, and yet controversial persons of the Reformed Church in Hungary during the 20th Century. From a popular preacher of the Revival Movement of the 1920s, church planter of the 1930s, rescuer of Jews during the War, he became the tool of state interest of the Communist regime in the 1950s. This paper sorts out the origins of his turn to the revival movement, like his troubled childhood, the emotional and financial insecurity of an illegitimate child, his troubled relationship with his biological father, the positive example of his stepfather, and his deviant adolescence behavior. By showing examples of his personal accounts the paper discusses whether Bereczky went through a ‘sudden’ or a ‘gradual’ conversion experience.

Richard Allen and the Sacred Music of Black Americans, 1740–1850

This chapter’s central claim is that the notion of freedom, in the context of theology, music, and modernity (1740–1850), is incomplete if it does not address the sacred music of the enslaved people of North America during this period—a population for whom theology, music, and freedom were of enormous personal and social consequence. The central figure in this regard is Richard Allen (1760–1831), who in 1816 founded the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the first independent black religious denomination in the United States. Allen was born enslaved, in Philadelphia or Delaware, but was able to purchase his freedom in 1783. He had already had a conversion experience in 1777, and once he gained his freedom, he became an itinerant preacher, ultimately settling in Philadelphia, where he preached at St George’s Methodist Church and a variety of venues in the city. In 1794 he led a walkout of black members at St George’s, in protest of racism; and over the course of a number of years he founded Mother Bethel, which would become the original church of the AME. This chapter situates Allen in the development of black sacred music in the US: first, as the publisher of hymnals for his church (two in 1801, and another in 1818); and second, as an important arbitrator between the traditions and performance styles of Protestant hymnody as inherited in the British colonies, and an evolving oral tradition and performance style of black sacred music.