CCCW-DivFac World Christianity Seminar, Tuesday 10 November 2026, 4 pm: Beyond Reverse Mission: Intra-African Pentecostalism, Power and the Changing Geography of World Christianity, by Dr Amos Chewachong.
Tuesday 10 November 2026, 4.00-5:30pm GMT
Lightfoot Room, Faculty of Divinity, 25 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP & Online. The speaker will join in-person.
Abstract: Scholarship on World Christianity has devoted considerable attention to “reverse mission”— the movement of missionaries and churches from Africa and the wider Global South to Europe and North America. Far less attention has been given to Christian missionary movements within Africa itself. Drawing on Intra-African Pentecostalism and the Dynamics of Power: The Nigerian Winners’ Chapel in Cameroon (2024), this paper examines Winners’ Chapel’s expansion from Nigeria into Cameroon as a lens for exploring the changing geography and politics of Christian mission. Based on qualitative research among Nigerian missionaries, Cameroonian pastors and congregants, the paper explores how charismatic authority, media, transnational networks, institutional structures and prosperity theology produce and sustain religious power across borders. Particular attention is given to power struggles arising from Nigerian leadership and to complaints by Cameroonian pastors that they have become “foreigners in their own country.” These tensions raise questions about whether intra-African mission can generate new forms of religious imperialism alongside local negotiation, resistance and agency. Described as “reverse mission in reverse,” this phenomenon complicates conventional North–South and South–North models of mission, revealing an African Christian landscape in which new centres and peripheries of religious power are continually being created and contested.
Rev. Dr Amos Bongadu Chewachong is a Cameroonian scholar and ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon (PCC), currently serving as a minister in the Church of Scotland. He holds a PhD in World Christianity from the University of Edinburgh. He is a Visiting Lecturer at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Kumba, and a former Honorary Lecturer in World Christianity at the University of St Andrews. In 2023, he officiated at the National Service of Thanksgiving and Dedication for Their Majesties the King and Queen during the Presentation of the Royal Honours of Scotland. His most recent presentation, “Digital Christianity and the Collapse of Pulpit Monopoly,” was delivered in June this year at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Kumba, Cameroon.
