Health, Wealth, and Power in an African Diaspora Church in Canada

T. Aechtner

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137485489
• eBook ISBN: 9781137485496
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations
• Index: Social Sciences

This book investigates an African diaspora Christian community in Calgary, Alberta, and explores the ways in which the church's beliefs and practices impact the lives of its migrant congregation. In particular, it reveals the church's pronounced concern with the utility of the Prosperity Gospel and Holy Spirit Power.

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Now We Are Coming: Global Pentecostalism and the New African Diaspora

Abstract: Since 1970 the number of African immigrants entering Canada on a yearly basis has increased dramatically. These migrants are part of what has been described as the new African diaspora. Often settling in metropolitan centers, such as Calgary, Alberta, this new diaspora has steadily become a conspicuous and important element of Canada’s societal landscape. At the same time, Pentecostal Christianity has experienced an explosion of growth throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In association with this growth, members of the diaspora have readily established African Pentecostal churches abroad, such as Calgary’s All Peoples Cross Community. This chapter considers the nuances of the term diaspora, and introduces how APCC’s congregants claim that Pentecostalism performs crucial functions for members of an immigrant community.

Aechtner, Thomas. Health, Wealth, and Power in an African Diaspora Church in Canada. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137485496.0004.

On a frigid morning in Calgary, Alberta, Pastor Kwame Ogye of All Peoples Cross Community (APCC) sits in the church’s small office.¹ Somewhat breathless from having recently finished leading an impassioned prayer service, he wipes his brow and begins to discuss the manifold role that APCC plays within the local African diaspora. At one point in his account the pastor pauses, leans forward, and then emphasizes that along with the church’s many ambitions, one of the community’s primary goals is to reform Canadian society. APCC, he insists, is actually a missionary base that allows African immigrants to help bring Christianity back to Canada; a prodigal nation that has forsaken the God of the Bible. Intently, he asserts that while countries such as Canada once cherished Christianity, and were its emissaries to non-Western peoples, the reverse is now the case. “You whites brought the Gospel to us, we embraced it, and now we are coming,” he maintains, pointing a finger across his desk. “The seed that they planted in Africa germinated, and we want to bring that seed back to its roots.” This returning seed is a distinctly African form of Pentecostalism that is traversing the globe by way of today’s many Christian African migrants.

APCC represents the steadfast escalation of global Pentecostalism, as well as the worldwide proliferation of what have been described as African International Churches.² These burgeoning communities continue to be founded by African migrants throughout the world, and as Pastor Ogye’s comments reveal, their objectives frequently include attempting to spiritually regenerate the non-African countries in which they have been initiated. Although the redemptive mission of such communities may appear overly ambitious, these churches embody important shifts in global Christianity. Such communities also play protean roles in shaping the evolving identities of their congregations, and provide church members with religious apparatus to assist navigating life in a foreign land. Through the anthropological analysis of APCC this book provides an important perspective on one such church in Canada, and details how the institution’s beliefs and practices influence the lives of its parishioners; the “invisible sojourners” of Africa’s global diaspora.³

Immigration from Africa to Canada has resulted in often highly trained African professionals and skilled workers settling throughout the nation’s provinces and territories. Though this segment of Canada’s multivariate population represents an important assemblage of the nation’s recent migrants, it has remained remarkably unexamined. As Wisdom Tettey has observed, “Unlike Asian or Caribbean immigrants in Canada about whom there is quite an appreciable amount of literature, continental Africans have generally not been the specific focus of many research endeavors.”⁴ Additionally, Kwasi Kwakye-Nuako has claimed “we know very little about the religious aspects of the recent African diaspora in Canada and the U.S.”⁵ This is somewhat surprising, considering the upsurge of African migration to both countries, occurring since the 1960s as a result of liberalized changes to North American immigration policies.⁶ In fact, as Statistics Canada detailed in 2008, “The relative weight of immigrants from African countries more than tripled between the early 1960s and the early 2000s,” and between “2001 and 2006, they accounted for 10.5% of new immigrants, compared to 3.0% forty years earlier.”⁷ A more recent Government report further highlights this continued increase, noting, “Between 2006 and 2011, about 145,700 immigrants arrived from Africa, 12.5% of the newcomers who arrived during that period,” which was “up from 10.3% among those who arrived during the previous five-year period.” This continued increase of African immigration is accentuated when such statistics are compared with figures from previous years, which reveal that “individuals born in Africa accounted for 1.9% of immigrants who arrived in Canada prior to 1971 and 7.3% during the 1990s.”⁸ As Samuel A. Laryea and John E. Hayfron affirm: “Prior to 1961, the number of Africans immigrating to Canada was a mere trickle, under 5,000 per year. After 1970, however, the number of African immigrants arriving in Canada each year increased dramatically.”⁹

It is also apparent that a substantial majority of foreign-born residents, including African immigrants arriving in Canada, live in Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, and Alberta. As a government report indicates, between 2006 and 2011 nine out of every ten newcomers, and 94.8 percent of the nation’s foreign-born individuals, were living in one of these four provinces. In particular, migrants were most likely to settle within provincial metropolitan centers, such as Calgary, the most populace city in Alberta. During this period the city boasted the fourth highest number of immigrants when compared to all other Canadian cities, and this migrant constituent has included Calgary’s proliferating African-born population. Even so, academic research of African migrants in Canada’s Western provinces is conspicuously sparse, with almost no work dedicated to studying Calgary’s expanding African diaspora communities.¹⁰

With its marked population increases, this segment of the nation’s inhabitants has steadily become a conspicuous element of Canada’s societal landscape. As a result, it is becoming ever more vital that “the rest of society understands their history in this country, the social constructions that have shaped that history, and the specific features that characterize the African-Canadian community.”¹¹ One such inescapable key feature includes religion, which throughout the African diaspora has been found to provide a vital sense of self-identity, conveyed through a sanctuary of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic unity.¹² As Africans in Alberta have themselves indicated, churches represent an important factor for the social integration of immigrants arriving to the country.¹³ To be sure, the influences of African diaspora religious organizations are not limited simply to meeting incorporeal religious needs within the confines of church, mosque, or synagogue walls. Instead such communities provide practical assistance for migrants in a foreign land; helping members of the diaspora to negotiate evolving identities, and answer practical questions about how to live in a country and culture so far from the African continent.

Nevertheless, Afe Adogame has noted, “A survey of the extensive African diasporic and migration literature reveals a lack of theoretical and methodological reflection on the role of religion in the context of contemporary diaspora and migration studies.”¹⁴ This, despite the fact that African diaspora churches “facilitate the integration process of new immigrants into the host society and serve as both security and a bastion for cultural, ethnic, and religious identity.”¹⁵ Moreover, as African immigrants establish faith communities and attempt to enthusiastically shape Canada’s religious milieu, the need for supplementary analyses of diaspora religion becomes ever more imperative. In the case of APCC, this involves examining the role of Pentecostal Christianity in the lives of the church’s leadership and laity.

A fact of our time: the global Pentecostal explosion

Africans and African migrants in Canada exhibit a commitment to a diversity of religions, ranging from Protestant, Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christianities, a myriad of Traditional African Religions, to Baha’i, Judaism, Islam, and Rastafarianism. These varied faiths frequently permeate the lives of those in the diaspora, reflecting the varied ethnicities and nationalities of migrants, as well as John Mbiti’s oft-cited observation that Africans are “notoriously religious.”¹⁶ Thus, a Statistics Canada document correspondingly indicates that “relatively few Africans report that they have no religious affiliation,” further highlighting, “The largest religious group in the African community in Canada is P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Now We Are Coming: Global Pentecostalism and the New African Diaspora
• 2  Beliefs and Practices: The Prosperity Gospel and Holy Spirit Power
• 3  One in Worship: Recapitulation, Transnational Identities, and Christian Pan-Africanism
• 4  Not Even a Single Enemy: Homeland, Mission, and Responses to Racism
• 5  The Spirits Utility: Expressed Functionalism and APCCs Future
• References
• Index