The West African Revival

Senghor’s Eucharist

Faith

Tabernacle Congregation

on the Guinea Coast, 1918–1929

STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY

Adam Mohr

In eleven short years, from 1918 to 1929, Faith Tabernacle Congregation, a small divine healing church in Philadelphia, spread over the Guinea Coast, garnering over 250 branches and nearly 11,000 members without ever sending missionaries from the United States. In The West African Revival, Adam Mohr compiles historical documents from Faith Tabernacle’s archive in Philadelphia as well as several other churches that branched from Faith Tabernacle in West Africa (mainly Ghana and Nigeria) and the United States such as the First-Century Gospel Church, the Apostolic Church, the Christ Apostolic Church, and the Church of Pentecost. Writing for an audience of scholars from the fields of African Christianity, Global Christianity, and African Studies, Mohr engages literature from the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919, African Traditional Religion (predominantly anti-witchcraft cults), the relationship of capitalism to Christianity, political and social conflict, and early Pentecostalism in West Africa.

“In a remarkably timely work, Adam Mohr recasts the early twentieth-century history of African religious revivals with a compelling narration of the Faith Tabernacle Congregation. “

BENJAMIN N. LAWRANCE, Professor of African History, University of Arizona

Negritude and African Political Theology

David Tonghou Ngong

ISBN 978-1-4813-1865-5 / $64.99 / Hardback / 244 pages / 6 x 9 / August 15, 2023

5 maps, 21 b&w photos

In his collection of poems Black Hosts, Leopold Senghor, a leading figure in the Negritude movement and the first president of Senegal, offers the suffering and death of Africans, rather than that of Christ, as a site for the healing of a fractured and antagonistic world. Drawing from literature, history, political science, anthropology, and theology, David Tonghou Ngong’s Senghor’s Eucharist investigates the possibilities and perils of Senghor’s offer. Ngong argues that, while Senghor might be accused of cheapening African suffering by offering an easy pardon to colonizers and others who have harmed Africans, his work should be situated within the Negritude movement and its intention to revalorize the lives of Africans in a world that often treats African lives as disposable. Indeed, by connecting the suffering of Africans to the central figure of the Christian faith, Jesus Christ, Senghor suggests that at the heart of Western Christianity lies a disturbing betrayal—the refusal of communion, to eat together, as dramatized in the Eucharist.

“David Ngong offers a nuanced appreciation and critique of Senegalese Catholic poet and statesman Leopold Senghor’s Eucharistic imagining of a world in which the suffering of Africa at the hands of the West can be reconciled and overcome. Ngong’s book is interdisciplinary, critical, profound, and inspiring.”

WILLIAM T. CAVANAUGH, Professor of Catholic Studies, DePaul University

ISBN 978-1-4813-1779-5 / $59.99 / Paperback / 176 pages / 6 x 9 / August 15, 2023

“The Kaleidoscopic City illuminates the colorfully intertwined histories of Hong Kong, modern China, and Pentecostalism in transnational spaces. Alex Mayfield’s impressive research and engaging narrative brings previously overlooked perspectives to the fore, enriching our understandings of Chinese Christianity’s local and global development—and the lives of women and men who played crucial roles in it. This book expands the field with its groundbreaking explorations of Pentecostal networks, communities, and experiences in conversation with twentieth century China.”

JOSEPH W. HO, Associate Professor of History, Albion College