Nigeria – Politics, Religion, Pentecostal-Charismatic Power and Challenges
Nigeria presents an enthralling case study for understanding developing architypes in interreligious encounters in Africa. The global community needs a cultural understanding and sensitivity for productive engagement with the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world. The Nigeria religious exigencies provide a requisite intelligence into the challenges facing a global community seeking to foster peace. Without a domain of tolerance, love, equity and justice, Nigeria will continually be immured by pessimism, parochialism, cynicism and mutual suspicion. Despite being the largest economy in Africa and the most populous Black country, Nigeria demonstrates incessantly an uncommon fault-line between Christianity and Islam.
The significance of this goes beyond the borders of Nigeria but has become a global showcase anywhere the two religions exist contemporaneously. Nigeria is the nexus between west and central Africa. Rooted in the dusty Sahel of the north, the savannah plains, the rich rainforests of the Atlantic coast, the rocky hills of the West, and the oil-filled swamps of the Delta. Nigeria is the beauty, sound, vision, passion and the soul of the African continent.
In Nigeria, the Nigeria Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement possesses a distinctive flair that demands a holistic understanding of the movement’s historical, cultural, fundamental and religious dimensions in a multifarious religious landscape. The disquisition of the movement’s political cognizance, identity, power, authority, theology, popular culture, ethics and missiological impact in northern Nigeria presents a fine embroidery of their trials, frustrations and challenges, but inveterate in faith, hope and love that opens up innovative panoramas of peaceful dialogical prospects and coexistence between Christians and Muslims in northern Nigeria.
In Nigeria - Politics, Religion, Pentecostal-Charismatic Power and Challenges, Akintayo Emmanuel reconnoiters the complex missiological hindrances challenging the Nigerian Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement. Their contextual missional landslide disheveled with complicated paradoxes in the way the Christian majority have responded to Muslims in northern Nigeria is anatomized. The Nigerian Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement’s puissance to solve some of Nigeria political, ideological, cultural and spiritual dimensions of crisis and sectarian violence is achievable if the movement can mitigate her missiological hindrances.
The responses of Nigerian Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement to Nigeria’s socio-political and ethno-religious complexities can construct a great future for the soul of Nigeria. They do not only have the capacity to provide the Christian alternatives to Nigeria’s peculiarities, they can also stimulate Nigeria’s deification among other nations by continuing to disentangle from unscrupulousness and atrociousness embedded within—a reproach and opprobrium to any people.