Worship Weblog
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
A Brazilian Church Finds Success in Africa
Paul Freston writes in the current issue of the Journal of Religion in Africa:
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), with its more than 400 congregations in southern Africa, is the first major example in the region of a new phenomenon: a successful church which is of neither First World nor African origin, but is part of the growing transnationalization of Third World evangelical religion. Although other churches of Asian or Latin American origin have arrived in southern Africa (above all, Brazilian groups in the Lusophone countries), none can rival the UCKG in its numerical growth and impact on public awareness. Indeed, it is possible that no Christian denomination founded in the Third World has ever been exported so successfully and rapidly; only 27 years after its establishment in 1977, it has over a thousand churches in some 80 countries around the world, outside its native Brazil. The UCKG in southern Africa represents, therefore, one of the most striking cases of trans-continental Christian missionizing within the Third World.
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