Chammah J. Kaunda

Yonsei University · Global Institute of Theology/The College of Theology/ United Graduate School of Theology

Ever since the Declaration of Zambia as a Christian nation in 1991, the Bible has become foundational in the public of life, and often cited in public debates. This article employs symbolic power as an analytical tool to examine Sumaili’s state theology of the Bible which politicized and reduced the Bible in the public into a state apparatus for de...

The chapter seeks to deepen Christian understandings of the meaning of suffering, humanity, and creation, as well as the suffering God in light of the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. It expands our understanding of what it means to be human in the context of suffering, the place of or justifications of God in suffering, the human place in crea...

Spiral mobility or flow is a good metaphor for contemporary global experience. Today’s life is precariously shaped by incessant cyclical movement from apocalypse to ‘post-apocalypse’ and from one post-apocalypse to another. There is no indication of what may be expected of the future. The future is in chaos. It appears that we are living through ch...

This article argues that poetic inquiry is a valuable method for unmasking the interior religious experiences of African closeted queer clergy. It demonstrates how poetic inquiry could function as analytic tool for the decolonisation, reclamation, reinsertion and reconstitution of the closeted queer cleric’s belonging in African religio-cultural sp...

This article is written in honor of Tongshik Ryu (Tong‐sik Yu), a thinker who has greatly contributed and influenced the shaping of Korean indigenous theology. It takes an appreciative historical reconstruction of his Korean cultural theology of P'ungryudo. It argues that to fully appreciate and understand Ryu, we must give attention to his persona...

This study investigates the role of Black Charismatic Church Ministries (BCCMs) in promoting communal support for raising children in semi-urban areas in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. The findings show that BCCMs have taken advantage of the socio-material and spiritual vacuum created by social challenges, such as apartheid, HIV/Aids, u...

This article argues that in the ongoing effort to promote ubuntu spirit as an instrument for decolonization, the church in Zambia can learn lessons from how Rev Pai Min-soo deployed the indigenous model of samae spirit to construct adult Christian education for Korean rural development. The samae spirit is utilized to underline the necessity for th...

Since the dawn of colonialism in Southern Africa, the province of the Eastern Cape emerged as the cradle of African resistance against colonial oppression. A closer look at the province reveals opportunities for progress and ultimate resurgence of economic and social development, yet conflated by a myriad of challenges. This book brings together di...

This article explores the nexus of themes of sexual desire, gender and prayer in the Bemba mythology of creation. Approached from Sarah Coakley’s theology of participation in the divine desire, the article utilizes email technique to collect data from African scholars both women and men with an intention to find out their perspectives on the nexus...

This study investigates the role of Black Charismatic Church Ministries (BCCMs) in promoting communal support for raising children in semi-urban areas in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. The findings show that BCCMs have taken advantage of the socio-material and spiritual vacuum created by social challenges, such as apartheid, HIV/Aids, u...

Drawing from John Hick’s soteriological criterion of religious pluralism (in his notion of saintliness and morality), this essay questions the validity of the Christian putative, normative status to establish Christian-like features for other religions to be considered a “world religion”. This essay claims that with a modern understanding of the gl...

This article argues that if the African church is to make a meaningful contribution to human survival, livelihood, and dignity in post‐Covid‐19, it must reclaim and reconstitute the Christ of the marginalized and excluded who joins them in their suffering, struggles, and hopes for a liberated and emancipated post‐Covid‐19 Africa. This requires a pa...

This article probes the prospects of personhood in strong artificial intelligence (Strong AI) from a Bemba theo-cosmological perspective. Employing an interdisciplinary perspective, it argues that the Bemba concept of spirit name ( ishina lya mupashi) can make a constructive contribution to a theo-cosmology of the possibility of the personhood of s...

This article argues that African Neo-Pentecostalism has adopted indigenous notions of sacred authority through the paradigm of modernisation. Employing Rev. Timothy Omotoso's case study on sexualisation and gendered exploitation of women and girls in South Africa, the article illustrates that the impact of modernisation is more evident in the indiv...

This paper analyses the perceptions of public health practitioners and a Pentecostal-Charismatic community of faith-based healing in the Eastern Cape. Data was collected through qualitative techniques, which included observations, questionnaires and in-depth interviews. The qualitative data were analyzed using an interpretive approach. The findings...

This paper analyses the perceptions of public health practitioners and a Pentecostal-Charismatic community of faith-based healing in Eastern Cape. Data was collected through qualitative techniques, which included observations, questionnaires and in-depth interviews. The qualitative data were analyzed using an interpretive approach. The findings dem...

In 2022, the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches is to take place in Karlsruhe, Germany, at a time when nations are searching for the strength to rise out of the ashes of COVID‐19. The assembly theme, “Christ’s love moves the world to reconciliation and unity,” reflects God’s vision for creation. The focus on Christ’s love and its inhere...

This article demonstrates how missional churches have emphasized accompaniment as missiological foundation in the COVID‐19 pandemic season. Employing ethnographical method, interviews, and virtual church visits as the primary approach, the paper explores how NextGen Church as the embodiment of Christ’s love has moved communities to solidarity and u...

This paper engages with the narrative of the Good Samaritan from a Naga perspective in the context of COVID‐19. It demonstrates how Naga Indigenous hospitality, as opposed to contemporary Christianized hospitality in Nagaland, has an affinity with the teaching of Jesus in the narrative. The pertinent question it raises is what the Good Samaritan ho...

Nyambura Jane Njoroge is one of the most courageous, impeccable and emancipatory African theological voices who have engaged in the unceasing search for transforming theological education in Africa. This article takes an appreciative inquiry in engaging Njoroge as a lens to conceptualize what is seen as her main concern in ecumenical theological ed...

The study engages Alain Badiou’s philosophical concept of ‘immanent exception’ to establish the special potential embedded in African Christianity for engendering human universal (Umuntu). It argues that African Christian experiences inform their interpretations of Jesus Christ as the answer to all human existential concerns. This approach forces t...

Religious texts are important for believers and this is true of the Christian faith where the Bible is taken as an inspired and holy word of God. The challenge for biblical scholars, theologians, environmentalists, ecologists and biblical readers would be the use of morally challenging biblical examples in the proclamation of the kingdom. Texts tha...

Introduction There is an increasing conviction among some African states that neo-Pentecostalism cannot guarantee justice and human rights, which are prerequisite for the creation of just social order. The report by the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities (CRL Rights Commission...

The study interrogates the concept of “cleaning the nation spiritually” as a catchy phrase in the Ministry of National Guidance and Religious Affairs’ (MNGRA) search for national moral order in Zambia. This study focuses specifically on MNGRA responses on sexual and gender minorities, sex toys and South African panty-less dancer, Zodwa Wabantu, to...

The introduction gives theoretical and methodological orientations and thematic concerns of the book. It delineates key concepts and delimits the application of the notion of African Pentecostalism as inclusive of all movements that had taken a pneumatological framework as foundation for interacting and understanding human reality within particular...

This study explores the ways in which the born-again traditional leaders in Zambia are redefining neo-Pentecostal interaction with nonhuman creation. It demonstrates their attempts to rapture new religious imaginations in interstitial spaces between neo-Pentecostalism and Africa’s old spiritual systems. Since eco-spirituality is foundational to mos...

This article interrogates the challenge artificial general intelligence (AGI) poses to religion and human societies, in general. More specifically, it seeks to respond to “Singularity”—when machines reach a level of intelligence that would put into question the privileged position humanity enjoys as imago Dei . Employing the Bemba notion of mystico...

This article argues that libation, often associated with the ancestors, artefacts, images and pre-Christian religious devotions, constitutes sources for articulating authentic African cultural history of Obang community in the Northwest Region of Cameroon. It highlights that among traditional memory carriers, the ritual of libation remains trust wo...

This book examines the complex and multifaceted nature of African Pentecostal engagements with genders and sexualities. In the last three decades, African Pentecostalism has emerged as one the most visible and profound aspects of religious change on the continent, and is a social force that straddles cultural, economic, and political spheres. Its c...

This article engages the Emmaus narrative from a missiological hope perspective. It argues that the story conceals critical resources for constructing a critical missiological hope in the African context of neo-colonialism which can empower African Christians to actively participate in God’s mission of struggle for liberation and a search to actual...

This article engages the Emmaus narrative from a missiological hope perspective. It argues that the story conceals critical resources for constructing a critical missiological hope in the African context of neo-colonialism which can empower African Christians to actively participate in God’s mission of struggle for liberation and a search to actual...

Sexual agreements between same-sex practising men facilitate communication about health promotion activities, including HIV prevention. In African contexts, male couples negotiate their sexual agreements in relation to rigid cultural prescriptions about male power and privilege, intense hostility towards same-sex sexualities and persistent heteroge...

In African spirituality, ancestor engagement with the community is always mediated through material objects. This article argues that materiality gives meaning and validity to the ancestral system. Ancestral objects are an embodiment of the ancestors or ancestral meaning-making, which links the visible community to the world of the spirits. However...

The challenge of climate change for the South Pacific Island of Kiribati demands a 21st‐century missional vision to help respond effectively to the hopes and fears of islanders. This article employs a “coconut theology” embedded within an Indigenous knowledge thought‐system and the daily cultural experiences of the Kiribati people. Using coconut th...

In the context of relational spirituality, the article explores the possibility of decolonising Christian eschatology from the perspective of Zambian Bemba future imaginaries. It argues that, in order to reorder the social relations of any former colonised groups, it is imperative to decolonise their epistemic vision of the future and align it with...

This article employs a public theology approach from the perspective of a decolonial theory. It analyses how the Declaration of Zambia as a Christian Nation functioned as a nationalist neo-colonial ideology during the presidential campaign of 2016. It did so in a way that was designed to legitimize President Edgar Chagwa Lungu’s political candidacy...

This article offers an African feminist re-inculturation critique of the Suum-ngi creation myth of the Kadung people within the Church of Christ in Nations (COCIN). The authors argue that COCIN seems to have uncritically inculturated a patriarchal reading of the Suum-ngi creation myth. This uncritical and unconscious inculturation of Suum-ngi has f...

This article engages with the question of land in South Africa based on the jubilee notion, from a decolonial theological perspective. It shifts the focus from debating the merits of ‘expropriation of land without compensation’ towards assessing the relations of power that determine and legitimate what constitutes the human relationship to the land...

This article engages through an interdisciplinary approach to re-envision Tangintebu Theological College’s (TTC) model of theological education in the context of climate change in Kiribati. It utilises the anthropological theory of symbolic interactionism within missiological, cultural and, theological studies of climate change. It argues for the c...

Situated within relational spirituality, the article suggests a possibility of decolonizing the eschatological future from a Bemba futuristic perspective. It argues that in order to reorder social relations for life-giving of any former colonized group, their vision of the future must be decolonized and brought into dialogue with the missio Christi...

This article advances a decolonial ideological critique of religion as a state ideological apparatus for advancing political authority and control of strategic resources in Black Panther movie. It argues that the kind of religious matrix which informs Wakanda begs critical interrogation as to how the fictitious nation portrays the role of African r...

This article argues that while the National Day of Prayer in Zambia has its inception in political context, it has obligated the institutional churches to break out of their religiously fixed spaces, forcing them to suspend their official doctrinal positions for that specific day, and embrace each other in enacting what could be classified as “publ...

The subject of race and identity is a burning issue which continues to occupy the attention not only of South Africans but also the wider residents of the continent of Africa and those who are Africans in the Diaspora. The outburst of xenophobic attacks against foreigners mostly of Black African origins in some communities of Kwa-Zulu Natal and are...

This article postulates that the way African Pentecostal women politicians utilize the religious discourse of wifely submission in exercising religio‐political power reinforces populism and perpetuates patriarchy‐informed politics in Zambia. It will demonstrate that their religio‐political engagement is based on ideological allegiance to institutio...

This article investigates how the declaration of Zambia as a Christian nation (hereafter the Declaration), presidential photography and social media intersected during Edgar Lungu's political campaign in the general election of 2016. It is framed within a missio-political theory to analyse qualitative material collected from January 2016 to Februar...

The article argues for a theology of decolonial reconstruction to aid the Ministry of National Guidance and Religious Affairs (MNGRA) in its search for a new political vision for Zambian society. The MNGRA was established in 2017 by President Edgar Chagwa Lungu to strengthen the Declaration of Zambia as a Christian nation. The second republican Pre...

The ongoing quest towards the realization of reconciliation and conflict resolution in the context of contentious religious pluralism in contemporary Africa demands a pluriverse perspective which give preferential option to indigenous epistemology, which is oftentimes, undermined and termed as mere myth. The pluriverse argues that contemporary real...

The study draws on ontocracy political theory to investigate Zambian Pentecostal interpretations of politics as a sacred realm of contestations between forces of good and evil. It argues that Zambian Pentecostal theology of nationality is a continuation of traditional African religio-cultural ethnonational heritage. It demonstrates how Zambian Pent...

This article calls for rethinking of discipleship within missio Spiritus for political formation necessary for the viable functioning of Zambian Pentecostalism in the neo- colonial context. It argues that the theme for the 2018 World Mission Conference in Arusha, Tanzania, “Moving in the Spirit: Called to Transforming Discipleship,” calls for pneum...

This article uses decolonial to critique the discourse of ‘subaltern whiteness’ by questioning some Afrikaner scholars’ morality of regarding ‘white Afrikaners as subaltern’. Subaltern designates submerged, subordinated, exploited or suppressed – those whose voices have been historically muted, their humanity stripped by those with sociopolitical a...

This study analyzes how Zambian Pentecostals understand the meaning of the Declaration (i.e., a 1991 statement by President Chiluba that Zambia is a Christian nation) in relation to politics. Employing empirical missiological approach, the study demonstrates that Pentecostals hold to two diverging political perspectives—transforming politics from w...

This article argues that the Emmaus narrative in Luke 24:13-40 illustrates a messianic paradigmatic missiological approach to costly discipleship making. The central motif in this approach is critical emancipatory conversation, which is not merely the means to data gathering but an end in itself. Using Luke's story as a paradigmatic approach to mis...

In this article, I demonstrate how Capital Christian Ministries International has been conceptualised as ecclesiastical spaces for de-gendering. I have utilised symbolic imagination within the Ndembu cultural liminality as theoretical framework in theological studies. I have argued that the initiates in the liminal spaces subverted social normative...

The article defines symbolic inversion as transgressive behaviour which most traditional Zambian societies reenacted in the ritual context as a dynamic cultural form. It argues for critical reclamation and reconstitution of symbolic resistance dimension of Ndembu ritual (people of North-west Zambia) to construct transformative Holy Communion missio...

This article argues that the current economic and political underdevelopment in the majority of African countries is a symptom of a profound metaphysical and intellectual crisis in the African person’s imagination and consciousness, a consequence of conceptual alienation wrought about mind colonialism. The process of decolonisation did not end with...

Abstract Missiological Spirit as multidisciplinary approach gives particular attention to how interaction with anthropology, sociology, theology and ritual studies can transform the Church in South Africa through reconceptualising some of the key Christian doctrines in the light of liminality theory. Through the case study of 2015 xenophobic atta...

The struggles for environmental and gender justice have challenged how theology is done in Africa. This article framed within the context of continuous search for life-giving African Christianity, argues that a radical relational solidarity that existed between African humanity and environment in some Zambian traditional societies was grounded on e...

This article refers to the Global Survey on Theological Education, conducted between 2011 and 2013, to provide sub-Saharan African critical reflection on the future of theological education in the continent. It considers the many contextual factors and shifting world views shaping Africa today, including the demographic shift of the heartlands of C...

This article investigates how George C Oosthuizen dealt with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the African Instituted Churches (AICs). It argues that although Oosthuizen analysed the prominent role of the Holy Spirit in the AICs, his perspective was influenced by the missiological currents of the his time in which issues of gender justice were not...

This article engages with the notion of Ndembu traditional eco-masculinities which was conceptualised in a framework of sacrifice as ground for manliness. I utilised this view as hermeneutical point of departure for reconceptualising African Christian masculinities that are ecologically sensitive. Framed within theodecolonial imagination, the artic...

This article is framed with the World Council of Churches' (WCC) mission statement Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes, which seems to be reviving academic interests in missio-formation as an interdisciplinary field study. The mission statement, which is framed in a postcolonial missional discourse, seems to show in...

In this article, I argue that the church as Christ's symbolic presence in the world is a Missiological expression of God loving non-violent involvement and witnessing presence in the world permeated with violence. Through two case studies that exemplify the relationship between public speech and public violence - the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 2...