AFRICAN JOURNAL OF CONTEXTUAL THEOLOGY

The spiritual universe is deeply interwoven in the everyday life of the African people, with the ancestor cult as a centre of their religion. It has considerably shaped the Gospel as the West spread it, producing a contextual Christianity. The tension between the sending and receiving contexts catalyzed the emergence of pneumatic expressions of Christianity in search of answers to the religious aspirations of the people. Interaction between Western Christianity and its concept of evil spirits impinged on the ancestral scheme of African Traditional Religion. This saw a metamorphosis of the living dead into demonic spirits. Consequently, pneumatic Christianity has been characterized by a ministry of exorcism in answering the new questions that the connection of Christians to ancestors raises. Against this backdrop, this study implores interviews of practicing Pentecostals selected by maximum variation sampling from a major Pentecostal church in Ghana to analyze how the Pentecostal faith with its emphasis on the reality of the power in the name of Jesus and the activities of the Holy Spirit negotiates the belief in ancestors seeking deliverance from the ills of this life. It recommends that Jesus Christ be given a niche in the spiritual universe of Africa to shape the ministry of exorcism in Pentecostalism.

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